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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 852 ***
+
+
+
+
+DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
+
+by John Dewey
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: I have tried to make this the most accurate text
+possible but I am sure that there are still mistakes. Please feel free
+to email me any errors or mistakes that you find. Citing the Chapter
+and paragraph. Haradda@aol.com and davidr@inconnect.com are my email
+addresses for now. David Reed
+
+I would like to dedicate this etext to my mother who was a elementary
+school teacher for more years than I can remember. Thanks.
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+     Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
+     Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
+     Chapter Three: Education as Direction
+     Chapter Four: Education as Growth
+     Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
+     Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
+     Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
+     Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
+     Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
+     Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
+     Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
+     Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
+     Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
+     Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
+     Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
+     Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
+     Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
+     Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
+     Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
+     Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
+     Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and
+             Humanism
+     Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
+     Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
+     Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
+     Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
+     Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals
+
+
+
+
+Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
+
+1. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between
+living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by
+renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than
+the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise,
+it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react
+in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so
+as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action.
+While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none
+the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its
+own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into
+smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its
+identity as a living thing.
+
+As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its
+own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To
+say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own
+conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus
+turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by
+the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this
+sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates
+and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would
+otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon
+the environment.
+
+In all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up indefinitely.
+After a while they succumb; they die. The creature is not equal to the
+task of indefinite self-renewal. But continuity of the life process
+is not dependent upon the prolongation of the existence of any one
+individual. Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous
+sequence. And though, as the geological record shows, not merely
+individuals but also species die out, the life process continues in
+increasingly complex forms. As some species die out, forms better
+adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain
+come into being. Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the
+environment to the needs of living organisms.
+
+We have been speaking of life in its lowest terms--as a physical thing.
+But we use the word "Life" to denote the whole range of experience,
+individual and racial. When we see a book called the Life of Lincoln
+we do not expect to find within its covers a treatise on physiology.
+We look for an account of social antecedents; a description of early
+surroundings, of the conditions and occupation of the family; of the
+chief episodes in the development of character; of signal struggles and
+achievements; of the individual's hopes, tastes, joys and sufferings. In
+precisely similar fashion we speak of the life of a savage tribe, of
+the Athenian people, of the American nation. "Life" covers customs,
+institutions, beliefs, victories and defeats, recreations and
+occupations.
+
+We employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense. And to it,
+as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the principle
+of continuity through renewal applies. With the renewal of physical
+existence goes, in the case of human beings, the recreation of beliefs,
+ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. The continuity of any
+experience, through renewing of the social group, is a literal fact.
+Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity
+of life. Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a
+modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without
+language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each
+unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time
+passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.
+
+The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of
+the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of
+education. On one hand, there is the contrast between the immaturity of
+the new-born members of the group--its future sole representatives--and
+the maturity of the adult members who possess the knowledge and customs
+of the group. On the other hand, there is the necessity that these
+immature members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers,
+but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information,
+skill, and practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will
+cease its characteristic life. Even in a savage tribe, the achievements
+of adults are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of
+if left to themselves. With the growth of civilization, the gap between
+the original capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of
+the elders increases. Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare
+necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of
+the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are
+required. Beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent
+to, the aims and habits of the social group have to be rendered
+cognizant of them and actively interested. Education, and education
+alone, spans the gap.
+
+Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as
+biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of
+habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.
+Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards,
+opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group
+life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive.
+If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they
+might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed
+by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of
+necessity.
+
+If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is
+obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of
+each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took
+them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some
+are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and
+practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal
+is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and
+thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse
+into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the human young are so
+immature that if they were left to themselves without the guidance
+and succor of others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities
+necessary for physical existence. The young of human beings compare
+so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower
+animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to
+be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with
+respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral
+achievements of humanity!
+
+2. Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of
+teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we
+may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. But justification is found
+in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an
+unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are, indeed,
+one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions
+of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other
+agencies, a relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the
+necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we
+make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true context.
+
+Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication,
+but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.
+There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community,
+and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which
+they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to
+possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to
+form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a
+common understanding--like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such
+things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks;
+they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into
+physical pieces. The communication which insures participation in a
+common understanding is one which secures similar emotional and
+intellectual dispositions--like ways of responding to expectations and
+requirements.
+
+Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any
+more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet
+or miles removed from others. A book or a letter may institute a more
+intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles
+from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.
+Individuals do not even compose a social group because they all work
+for a common end. The parts of a machine work with a maximum of
+cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community.
+If, however, they were all cognizant of the common end and all
+interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity in
+view of it, then they would form a community. But this would involve
+communication. Each would have to know what the other was about and
+would have to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own
+purpose and progress. Consensus demands communication.
+
+We are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most social
+group there are many relations which are not as yet social. A large
+number of human relationships in any social group are still upon the
+machine-like plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired
+results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition
+and consent of those used. Such uses express physical superiority, or
+superiority of position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools,
+mechanical or fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and child,
+teacher and pupil, employer and employee, governor and governed, remain
+upon this level, they form no true social group, no matter how closely
+their respective activities touch one another. Giving and taking of
+orders modifies action and results, but does not of itself effect a
+sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.
+
+Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
+communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be
+a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed
+experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so
+far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one
+who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating,
+with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it
+be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward
+your experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and
+ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated in order to be
+communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as
+another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with
+the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can
+appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch
+phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's
+experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.
+All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that
+any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared,
+is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast
+in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.
+
+In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and
+learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together
+educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and
+enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and
+vividness of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone
+mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion
+to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. The
+inequality of achievement between the mature and the immature not only
+necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching
+gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form
+which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.
+
+3. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a marked
+difference between the education which every one gets from living
+with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to
+subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young. In the former case
+the education is incidental; it is natural and important, but it is not
+the express reason of the association. While it may be said, without
+exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution,
+economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in
+enlarging and improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of
+its original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.
+Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to secure the
+favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; family
+life in the desire to gratify appetites and secure family perpetuity;
+systematic labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others,
+etc. Only gradually was the by-product of the institution, its effect
+upon the quality and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more
+gradually still was this effect considered as a directive factor in the
+conduct of the institution. Even today, in our industrial life, apart
+from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and
+emotional reaction of the forms of human association under which the
+world's work is carried on receives little attention as compared with
+physical output.
+
+But in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as an
+immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy to ignore in
+our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition,
+or to subordinate that educative effect to some external and tangible
+result, it is not so easy as in dealing with adults. The need of
+training is too evident; the pressure to accomplish a change in their
+attitude and habits is too urgent to leave these consequences wholly
+out of account. Since our chief business with them is to enable them to
+share in a common life we cannot help considering whether or no we are
+forming the powers which will secure this ability. If humanity has made
+some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution
+is its distinctively human effect--its effect upon conscious
+experience--we may well believe that this lesson has been learned
+largely through dealings with the young.
+
+We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational
+process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of
+education--that of direct tuition or schooling. In undeveloped social
+groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups
+mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the
+same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They
+have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in
+connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted
+into full social membership. For the most part, they depend upon
+children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional
+set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing. In
+part, this sharing is direct, taking part in the occupations of adults
+and thus serving an apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the
+dramatic plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups
+and thus learn to know what they are like. To savages it would seem
+preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on
+in order that one might learn.
+
+But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the
+young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in
+the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the
+case of the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so
+remote in space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less
+adequate to reproduce its spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult
+activities thus depends upon a prior training given with this end in
+view. Intentional agencies--schools--and explicit material--studies--are
+devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special
+group of persons.
+
+Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the
+resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way to
+a kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if they
+were left to pick up their training in informal association with others,
+since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered.
+
+But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from
+indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether
+directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital. These
+qualities compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of available
+opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes
+remote and dead--abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of
+depreciation. What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies
+is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it
+exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within
+urgent daily interests.
+
+But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in
+symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. Such
+material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the ordinary
+standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this measure is
+connection with practical concerns. Such material exists in a world by
+itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression.
+There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction
+will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the
+subject matter of life-experience. The permanent social interests are
+likely to be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over
+into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters
+of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous
+in schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion
+which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human
+association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with
+imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning
+through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy.
+
+Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
+education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between
+the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional,
+modes of education. When the acquiring of information and of technical
+intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social
+disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while
+schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in learning--that is,
+egoistic specialists. To avoid a split between what men consciously
+know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of
+learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it
+in the formation of their characters by intercourse with others,
+becomes an increasingly delicate task with every development of special
+schooling.
+
+Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being.
+Since this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life
+is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to
+physiological life, education is to social life. This education consists
+primarily in transmission through communication. Communication is a
+process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It
+modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it. That
+the ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in
+the contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality
+of experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the
+immature. That is to say, while every social arrangement is educative
+in effect, the educative effect first becomes an important part of the
+purpose of the association in connection with the association of the
+older with the younger. As societies become more complex in structure
+and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning
+increases. As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the
+danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in
+more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was
+never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth
+in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.
+
+Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
+
+1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a community
+or social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and
+that this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the
+immature members of the group. By various agencies, unintentional and
+designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings
+into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus
+a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. All of these words
+mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth. We also
+speak of rearing, raising, bringing up--words which express the
+difference of level which education aims to cover. Etymologically, the
+word education means just a process of leading or bringing up. When
+we have the outcome of the process in mind, we speak of education as
+shaping, forming, molding activity--that is, a shaping into the standard
+form of social activity. In this chapter we are concerned with the
+general features of the way in which a social group brings up its
+immature members into its own social form.
+
+Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience
+till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the
+social group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical forming.
+Things can be physically transported in space; they may be bodily
+conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically extracted and
+inserted. How then are they communicated? Given the impossibility of
+direct contagion or literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the
+method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or
+the older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves. The
+answer, in general formulation, is: By means of the action of the
+environment in calling out certain responses. The required beliefs
+cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on. But
+the particular medium in which an individual exists leads him to see and
+feel one thing rather than another; it leads him to have certain plans
+in order that he may act successfully with others; it strengthens some
+beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval of
+others. Thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior,
+a certain disposition of action. The words "environment," "medium"
+denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual.
+They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own
+active tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course, continuous with
+its surroundings; but the environing circumstances do not, save
+metaphorically, constitute an environment. For the inorganic being is
+not concerned in the influences which affect it. On the other hand,
+some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature,
+especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly
+than some of the things close to him. The things with which a man varies
+are his genuine environment. Thus the activities of the astronomer vary
+with the stars at which he gazes or about which he calculates. Of
+his immediate surroundings, his telescope is most intimately his
+environment. The environment of an antiquarian, as an antiquarian,
+consists of the remote epoch of human life with which he is concerned,
+and the relics, inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes connections
+with that period.
+
+In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or
+hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living
+being. Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the
+fish's activities--to its life. The north pole is a significant element
+in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in
+reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what
+they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive
+existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting,
+environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a
+sustaining or frustrating condition.
+
+2. The Social Environment. A being whose activities are associated with
+others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend
+upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.
+A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities
+without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the
+indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he
+moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as well try to imagine a
+business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to
+conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms
+of his isolated actions. The manufacturer moreover is as truly socially
+guided in his activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his
+own counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling
+his finished goods. Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in
+association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the
+most overt cooperative or hostile act.
+
+What we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium
+nurtures its immature members. There is no great difficulty in seeing
+how it shapes the external habits of action. Even dogs and horses have
+their actions modified by association with human beings; they form
+different habits because human beings are concerned with what they do.
+Human beings control animals by controlling the natural stimuli which
+influence them; by creating a certain environment in other words. Food,
+bits and bridles, noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in
+which the natural or instinctive responses of horses occur. By operating
+steadily to call out certain acts, habits are formed which function with
+the same uniformity as the original stimuli. If a rat is put in a
+maze and finds food only by making a given number of turns in a given
+sequence, his activity is gradually modified till he habitually takes
+that course rather than another when he is hungry.
+
+Human actions are modified in a like fashion. A burnt child dreads the
+fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every time a child touched
+a certain toy he got burned, the child would learn to avoid that toy
+as automatically as he avoids touching fire. So far, however, we are
+dealing with what may be called training in distinction from educative
+teaching. The changes considered are in outer action rather than in
+mental and emotional dispositions of behavior. The distinction is not,
+however, a sharp one. The child might conceivably generate in time a
+violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class
+of toys resembling it. The aversion might even persist after he had
+forgotten about the original burns; later on he might even invent some
+reason to account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases,
+altering the external habit of action by changing the environment to
+affect the stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition
+concerned in the action. Yet this does not always happen; a person
+trained to dodge a threatening blow, dodges automatically with
+no corresponding thought or emotion. We have to find, then, some
+differentia of training from education.
+
+A clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really share in
+the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the horse
+to secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous
+to the horse to perform the act--he gets food, etc. But the horse,
+presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains interested in
+food, not in the service he is rendering. He is not a partner in a
+shared activity. Were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging
+in the conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment
+which others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.
+
+Now in many cases--too many cases--the activity of the immature human
+being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is
+trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His
+instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure.
+But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in
+a way agreeable to others. In other cases, he really shares or
+participates in the common activity. In this case, his original impulse
+is modified. He not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of
+others, but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused
+in him that animate the others. A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The
+successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets
+store, are connected with fighting and victory. The presence of this
+medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then
+in fact when he is strong enough. As he fights he wins approval and
+advancement; as he refrains, he is disliked, ridiculed, shut out
+from favorable recognition. It is not surprising that his original
+belligerent tendencies and emotions are strengthened at the expense of
+others, and that his ideas turn to things connected with war. Only in
+this way can he become fully a recognized member of his group. Thus his
+mental habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his group.
+
+If we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we shall
+perceive that the social medium neither implants certain desires and
+ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular
+habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow.
+Setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways
+of acting is the first step. Making the individual a sharer or partner
+in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success,
+its failure as his failure, is the completing step. As soon as he is
+possessed by the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to
+recognize the special ends at which it aims and the means employed to
+secure success. His beliefs and ideas, in other words, will take a form
+similar to those of others in the group. He will also achieve pretty
+much the same stock of knowledge since that knowledge is an ingredient
+of his habitual pursuits.
+
+The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief
+cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from
+one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an
+idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus
+imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process. But
+learning from language will be found, when analyzed, to confirm the
+principle just laid down. It would probably be admitted with little
+hesitation that a child gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as
+other persons do; by covering the head with it, giving it to others
+to wear, having it put on by others when going out, etc. But it may be
+asked how this principle of shared activity applies to getting through
+speech or reading the idea of, say, a Greek helmet, where no direct use
+of any kind enters in. What shared activity is there in learning from
+books about the discovery of America?
+
+Since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about
+many things, let us see how it works. The baby begins of course with
+mere sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning, expressing, that is,
+no idea. Sounds are just one kind of stimulus to direct response, some
+having a soothing effect, others tending to make one jump, and so on.
+The sound h-a-t would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a
+seemingly inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection
+with an action which is participated in by a number of people. When the
+mother is taking the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she puts
+something on the baby's head. Being taken out becomes an interest to the
+child; mother and child not only go out with each other physically,
+but both are concerned in the going out; they enjoy it in common. By
+conjunction with the other factors in activity the sound "hat" soon gets
+the same meaning for the child that it has for the parent; it becomes a
+sign of the activity into which it enters. The bare fact that language
+consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of
+itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared
+experience.
+
+In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way that
+the thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. And they acquire
+the same meaning with the child which they have with the adult because
+they are used in a common experience by both. The guarantee for the
+same manner of use is found in the fact that the thing and the sound are
+first employed in a joint activity, as a means of setting up an active
+connection between the child and a grownup. Similar ideas or meanings
+spring up because both persons are engaged as partners in an action
+where what each does depends upon and influences what the other does. If
+two savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a certain signal
+meant "move to the right" to the one who uttered it, and "move to the
+left" to the one who heard it, they obviously could not successfully
+carry on their hunt together. Understanding one another means that
+objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to
+carrying on a common pursuit.
+
+After sounds have got meaning through connection with other things
+employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with
+other like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for
+which they stand are combined. Thus the words in which a child
+learns about, say, the Greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were
+understood) by use in an action having a common interest and end. They
+now arouse a new meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads to
+rehearse imaginatively the activities in which the helmet has its use.
+For the time being, the one who understands the words "Greek helmet"
+becomes mentally a partner with those who used the helmet. He engages,
+through his imagination, in a shared activity. It is not easy to get
+the full meaning of words. Most persons probably stop with the idea that
+"helmet" denotes a queer kind of headgear a people called the Greeks
+once wore. We conclude, accordingly, that the use of language to convey
+and acquire ideas is an extension and refinement of the principle
+that things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint
+action; in no sense does it contravene that principle. When words do
+not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or
+imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having
+a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given
+groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.
+Thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act of
+writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the person
+performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless he
+realizes the meaning of what he does.
+
+3. The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that
+social environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of
+behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse
+and strengthen certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail
+certain consequences. A child growing up in a family of musicians will
+inevitably have whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and,
+relatively, stimulated more than other impulses which might have been
+awakened in another environment. Save as he takes an interest in music
+and gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he is unable
+to share in the life of the group to which he belongs. Some kinds of
+participation in the life of those with whom the individual is connected
+are inevitable; with respect to them, the social environment exercises
+an educative or formative influence unconsciously and apart from any set
+purpose.
+
+In savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
+(constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we have
+spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the young into
+the practices and beliefs of the group. Even in present-day societies,
+it furnishes the basic nurture of even the most insistently schooled
+youth. In accord with the interests and occupations of the group,
+certain things become objects of high esteem; others of aversion.
+Association does not create impulses or affection and dislike, but it
+furnishes the objects to which they attach themselves. The way our group
+or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention,
+and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation
+and memory. What is strange or foreign (that is to say outside
+the activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and
+intellectually suspect. It seems almost incredible to us, for example,
+that things which we know very well could have escaped recognition
+in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital
+stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native
+intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes
+of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds
+riveted to other things. Just as the senses require sensible objects
+to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and
+imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the
+demands set up by current social occupations. The main texture of
+disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences.
+What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the
+capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of
+their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more
+productive of meaning.
+
+While this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so subtle and
+pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and mind, it may
+be worth while to specify a few directions in which its effect is most
+marked. First, the habits of language. Fundamental modes of speech, the
+bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life,
+carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.
+The babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech
+habits thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious
+teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes of
+speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into their really native
+tongue. Secondly, manners. Example is notoriously more potent than
+precept. Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are
+good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response
+to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information. Despite the never
+ending play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding
+atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners.
+And manners are but minor morals. Moreover, in major morals, conscious
+instruction is likely to be efficacious only in the degree in which
+it falls in with the general "walk and conversation" of those who
+constitute the child's social environment. Thirdly, good taste and
+esthetic appreciation. If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious
+objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste
+naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry, unarranged, and
+over-decorated environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as
+meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty. Against
+such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than convey second-hand
+information as to what others think. Such taste never becomes
+spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a labored reminder of
+what those think to whom one has been taught to look up. To say that the
+deeper standards of judgments of value are framed by the situations
+into which a person habitually enters is not so much to mention a fourth
+point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned. We
+rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is
+worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not
+conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we
+take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which
+determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these
+habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which
+have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with
+others.
+
+4. The School as a Special Environment. The chief importance of this
+foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on willy-nilly
+is to lead us to note that the only way in which adults consciously
+control the kind of education which the immature get is by controlling
+the environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. We never
+educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether
+we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design
+environments for the purpose makes a great difference. And any
+environment is a chance environment so far as its educative influence
+is concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with reference to
+its educative effect. An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent
+one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are
+chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the
+development of children. But schools remain, of course, the typical
+instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing
+the mental and moral disposition of their members.
+
+Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are
+so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed
+to writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are
+even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked
+up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form
+tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign
+to everyday life. The achievements accumulated from generation to
+generation are deposited in it even though some of them have fallen
+temporarily out of use. Consequently as soon as a community depends to
+any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its
+own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools
+to insure adequate transmission of all its resources. To take an obvious
+illustration: The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly
+influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not
+present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences. In
+similar fashion, peoples still existing, but remote in space, British,
+Germans, Italians, directly concern our own social affairs, but
+the nature of the interaction cannot be understood without explicit
+statement and attention. In precisely similar fashion, our daily
+associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part
+played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible
+structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted,
+the school, to care for such matters.
+
+This mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific,
+as compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. First, a
+complex civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. It has to
+be broken up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a
+gradual and graded way. The relationships of our present social life are
+so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable
+position could not readily share in many of the most important of them.
+Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to him,
+would not become a part of his own mental disposition. There would be
+no seeing the trees because of the forest. Business, politics, art,
+science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention;
+confusion would be the outcome. The first office of the social organ we
+call the school is to provide a simplified environment. It selects the
+features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to
+by the young. Then it establishes a progressive order, using the
+factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more
+complicated.
+
+In the second place, it is the business of the school environment to
+eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing
+environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a
+purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but at
+weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what
+is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively
+perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things from the
+environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to
+counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. By
+selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the
+power of this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes
+that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of
+its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future
+society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this
+end.
+
+In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to
+balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it
+that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations
+of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living
+contact with a broader environment. Such words as "society" and
+"community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to
+make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.
+As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less
+loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension of
+friends makes a society; the village or street group of playmates is a
+community; each business group, each club, is another. Passing beyond
+these more intimate groups, there is in a country like our own a variety
+of races, religious affiliations, economic divisions. Inside the modern
+city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably more
+communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms
+of government or control, than existed in an entire continent at an
+earlier epoch.
+
+Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active
+dispositions of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's
+household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative
+environments for those who enter into their collective or conjoint
+activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership,
+or a political party. Each of them is a mode of associated or community
+life, quite as much as is a family, a town, or a state. There are also
+communities whose members have little or no direct contact with one
+another, like the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the members
+of the professional learned class scattered over the face of the
+earth. For they have aims in common, and the activity of each member is
+directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing.
+
+In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical
+matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory,
+was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce,
+transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the
+United States are composed of a combination of different groups with
+different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps
+more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational
+institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and
+balanced environment for the young. Only in this way can the centrifugal
+forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and the
+same political unit be counteracted. The intermingling in the school
+of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs
+creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter
+accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than
+is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The
+assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony
+to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal.
+
+The school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition
+of each individual the diverse influences of the various social
+environments into which he enters. One code prevails in the family;
+another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth,
+in the religious association. As a person passes from one of the
+environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and
+is in danger of being split into a being having different standards of
+judgment and emotion for different occasions. This danger imposes upon
+the school a steadying and integrating office.
+
+
+Summary. The development within the young of the attitudes and
+dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a
+society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and
+knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary of the environment.
+The environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are
+concerned in the execution of the activity characteristic of a living
+being. The social environment consists of all the activities of fellow
+beings that are bound up in the carrying on of the activities of any
+one of its members. It is truly educative in its effect in the degree in
+which an individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity. By
+doing his share in the associated activity, the individual appropriates
+the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and
+subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its
+emotional spirit.
+
+The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition
+comes, without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the
+activities of the various groups to which they may belong. As a society
+becomes more complex, however, it is found necessary to provide a
+special social environment which shall especially look after nurturing
+the capacities of the immature. Three of the more important functions
+of this special environment are: simplifying and ordering the factors
+of the disposition it is wished to develop; purifying and idealizing
+the existing social customs; creating a wider and better balanced
+environment than that by which the young would be likely, if left to
+themselves, to be influenced.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Three: Education as Direction
+
+1. The Environment as Directive.
+
+We now pass to one of the special forms which the general function of
+education assumes: namely, that of direction, control, or guidance.
+Of these three words, direction, control, and guidance, the last best
+conveys the idea of assisting through cooperation the natural capacities
+of the individuals guided; control conveys rather the notion of an
+energy brought to bear from without and meeting some resistance from the
+one controlled; direction is a more neutral term and suggests the
+fact that the active tendencies of those directed are led in a certain
+continuous course, instead of dispersing aimlessly. Direction expresses
+the basic function, which tends at one extreme to become a guiding
+assistance and at another, a regulation or ruling. But in any case, we
+must carefully avoid a meaning sometimes read into the term "control."
+It is sometimes assumed, explicitly or unconsciously, that an
+individual's tendencies are naturally purely individualistic or
+egoistic, and thus antisocial. Control then denotes the process by which
+he is brought to subordinate his natural impulses to public or common
+ends. Since, by conception, his own nature is quite alien to this
+process and opposes it rather than helps it, control has in this view
+a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it. Systems of government
+and theories of the state have been built upon this notion, and it has
+seriously affected educational ideas and practices. But there is no
+ground for any such view. Individuals are certainly interested, at
+times, in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to
+the ways of others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested
+upon the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking
+part in conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as
+a community would be possible. And there would not even be any one
+interested in furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of harmony
+unless he thought that thereby he could gain some personal advantage.
+Control, in truth, means only an emphatic form of direction of powers,
+and covers the regulation gained by an individual through his own
+efforts quite as much as that brought about when others take the lead.
+
+In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite
+it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object. Put the other way
+around, a response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were,
+against being disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. It
+meets the stimulus, and corresponds with it. There is an adaptation of
+the stimulus and response to each other. A light is the stimulus to the
+eye to see something, and the business of the eye is to see. If the
+eyes are open and there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a
+condition of the fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an
+outside interruption. To some extent, then, all direction or control is
+a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully
+what some organ is already tending to do.
+
+This general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two respects.
+In the first place, except in the case of a small number of instincts,
+the stimuli to which an immature human being is subject are not
+sufficiently definite to call out, in the beginning, specific responses.
+There is always a great deal of superfluous energy aroused. This energy
+may be wasted, going aside from the point; it may also go against the
+successful performance of an act. It does harm by getting in the way.
+Compare the behavior of a beginner in riding a bicycle with that of the
+expert. There is little axis of direction in the energies put forth;
+they are largely dispersive and centrifugal. Direction involves
+a focusing and fixating of action in order that it may be truly a
+response, and this requires an elimination of unnecessary and confusing
+movements. In the second place, although no activity can be produced in
+which the person does not cooperate to some extent, yet a response may
+be of a kind which does not fit into the sequence and continuity of
+action. A person boxing may dodge a particular blow successfully, but in
+such a way as to expose himself the next instant to a still harder
+blow. Adequate control means that the successive acts are brought into
+a continuous order; each act not only meets its immediate stimulus but
+helps the acts which follow.
+
+In short, direction is both simultaneous and successive. At a given
+time, it requires that, from all the tendencies that are partially
+called out, those be selected which center energy upon the point of
+need. Successively, it requires that each act be balanced with those
+which precede and come after, so that order of activity is achieved.
+Focusing and ordering are thus the two aspects of direction, one
+spatial, the other temporal. The first insures hitting the mark; the
+second keeps the balance required for further action. Obviously, it is
+not possible to separate them in practice as we have distinguished them
+in idea. Activity must be centered at a given time in such a way as to
+prepare for what comes next. The problem of the immediate response is
+complicated by one's having to be on the lookout for future occurrences.
+
+Two conclusions emerge from these general statements. On the one hand,
+purely external direction is impossible. The environment can at most
+only supply stimuli to call out responses. These responses proceed from
+tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even when a person
+is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only
+because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though
+having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence
+upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.
+While the customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli which direct
+as well as evoke the activities of the young, the young, after all,
+participate in the direction which their actions finally take. In the
+strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into them. To overlook
+this fact means to distort and pervert human nature. To take into
+account the contribution made by the existing instincts and habits
+of those directed is to direct them economically and wisely. Speaking
+accurately, all direction is but re-direction; it shifts the activities
+already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the
+energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction
+will almost surely go amiss.
+
+On the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and regulations
+of others may be short-sighted. It may accomplish its immediate effect,
+but at the expense of throwing the subsequent action of the person
+out of balance. A threat may, for example, prevent a person from
+doing something to which he is naturally inclined by arousing fear of
+disagreeable consequences if he persists. But he may be left in the
+position which exposes him later on to influences which will lead him
+to do even worse things. His instincts of cunning and slyness may be
+aroused, so that things henceforth appeal to him on the side of evasion
+and trickery more than would otherwise have been the case. Those engaged
+in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking
+the importance of the sequential development of those they direct.
+
+2. Modes of Social Direction. Adults are naturally most conscious of
+directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so
+to do. As a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find
+themselves resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish them
+to do. But the more permanent and influential modes of control are those
+which operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate
+intention on our part.
+
+1. When others are not doing what we would like them to or are
+threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of
+controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled. In
+such cases, our control becomes most direct, and at this point we are
+most likely to make the mistakes just spoken of. We are even likely to
+take the influence of superior force for control, forgetting that while
+we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we
+can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. In
+all such cases of immediate action upon others, we need to discriminate
+between physical results and moral results. A person may be in such a
+condition that forcible feeding or enforced confinement is necessary for
+his own good. A child may have to be snatched with roughness away from
+a fire so that he shall not be burnt. But no improvement of disposition,
+no educative effect, need follow. A harsh and commanding tone may be
+effectual in keeping a child away from the fire, and the same desirable
+physical effect will follow as if he had been snatched away. But there
+may be no more obedience of a moral sort in one case than in the other.
+A man can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by
+shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to
+commit burglary. When we confuse a physical with an educative result,
+we always lose the chance of enlisting the person's own participating
+disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing
+within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way.
+
+In general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control should
+be limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive that the one
+performing them has no means of foreseeing their outcome. If a person
+cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of
+understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more
+experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In
+such a state, every act is alike to him. Whatever moves him does move
+him, and that is all there is to it. In some cases, it is well to permit
+him to experiment, and to discover the consequences for himself in order
+that he may act intelligently next time under similar circumstances. But
+some courses of action are too discommoding and obnoxious to others to
+allow of this course being pursued. Direct disapproval is now resorted
+to. Shaming, ridicule, disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used. Or
+contrary tendencies in the child are appealed to to divert him from his
+troublesome line of behavior. His sensitiveness to approbation, his hope
+of winning favor by an agreeable act, are made use of to induce action
+in another direction.
+
+2. These methods of control are so obvious (because so intentionally
+employed) that it would hardly be worth while to mention them if it were
+not that notice may now be taken, by way of contrast, of the other more
+important and permanent mode of control. This other method resides in
+the ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is associated,
+use things; the instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own
+ends. The very existence of the social medium in which an individual
+lives, moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of
+directing his activity.
+
+This fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail what
+is meant by the social environment. We are given to separating from
+each other the physical and social environments in which we live. The
+separation is responsible on one hand for an exaggeration of the moral
+importance of the more direct or personal modes of control of which
+we have been speaking; and on the other hand for an exaggeration, in
+current psychology and philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of
+contact with a purely physical environment. There is not, in fact, any
+such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart
+from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a
+frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some
+physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to
+alter the attitude of another. Comparatively speaking, such modes of
+influence may be regarded as personal. The physical medium is reduced to
+a mere means of personal contact. In contrast with such direct modes of
+mutual influence, stand associations in common pursuits involving the
+use of things as means and as measures of results. Even if the mother
+never told her daughter to help her, or never rebuked her for not
+helping, the child would be subjected to direction in her activities
+by the mere fact that she was engaged, along with the parent, in the
+household life. Imitation, emulation, the need of working together,
+enforce control.
+
+If the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must reach
+the thing in order to get it. Where there is giving there must be
+taking. The way the child handles the thing after it is got, the use
+to which it is put, is surely influenced by the fact that the child
+has watched the mother. When the child sees the parent looking for
+something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to
+give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to
+receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily
+intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring
+method of giving direction to the activities of the young.
+
+In saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously
+about participating in a joint activity as the chief way of forming
+disposition. We have explicitly added, however, the recognition of the
+part played in the joint activity by the use of things. The philosophy
+of learning has been unduly dominated by a false psychology. It is
+frequently stated that a person learns by merely having the qualities of
+things impressed upon his mind through the gateway of the senses. Having
+received a store of sensory impressions, association or some power of
+mental synthesis is supposed to combine them into ideas--into things
+with a meaning. An object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is supposed to
+convey different impressions of color, shape, size, hardness, smell,
+taste, etc., which aggregated together constitute the characteristic
+meaning of each thing. But as matter of fact, it is the characteristic
+use to which the thing is put, because of its specific qualities, which
+supplies the meaning with which it is identified. A chair is a thing
+which is put to one use; a table, a thing which is employed for another
+purpose; an orange is a thing which costs so much, which is grown in
+warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable odor and
+refreshing taste, etc.
+
+The difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental
+act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning;
+the former does not. A noise may make me jump without my mind being
+implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get water and put out a
+blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant
+need of being extinguished. I bump into a stone, and kick it to one side
+purely physically. I put it to one side for fear some one will stumble
+upon it, intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has. I am
+startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not--more likely, if
+I do not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud or to myself, that
+is thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a meaning. My behavior has
+a mental quality. When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend,
+propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously,
+unintelligently.
+
+In both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or
+controlled. But in the merely blind response, direction is also blind.
+There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated responses to
+recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. All of us
+have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were
+formed without our knowing what we were about. Consequently they possess
+us, rather than we them. They move us; they control us. Unless we become
+aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the worth of the
+result, we do not control them. A child might be made to bow every time
+he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing
+would finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of
+recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end
+in view--as having a certain meaning. And not till he knew what he was
+about and performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said
+to be "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an idea
+of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. It is
+to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive
+scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of
+the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it. To have the
+same ideas about things which others have, to be like-minded with them,
+and thus to be really members of a social group, is therefore to attach
+the same meanings to things and to acts which others attach. Otherwise,
+there is no common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared
+activity, each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing
+and vice-versa. That is, the activity of each is placed in the same
+inclusive situation. To pull at a rope at which others happen to be
+pulling is not a shared or conjoint activity, unless the pulling is
+done with knowledge that others are pulling and for the sake of either
+helping or hindering what they are doing. A pin may pass in the course
+of its manufacture through the hands of many persons. But each may do
+his part without knowledge of what others do or without any reference
+to what they do; each may operate simply for the sake of a separate
+result--his own pay. There is, in this case, no common consequence to
+which the several acts are referred, and hence no genuine intercourse
+or association, in spite of juxtaposition, and in spite of the fact
+that their respective doings contribute to a single outcome. But if each
+views the consequences of his own acts as having a bearing upon what
+others are doing and takes into account the consequences of their
+behavior upon himself, then there is a common mind; a common intent
+in behavior. There is an understanding set up between the different
+contributors; and this common understanding controls the action of each.
+Suppose that conditions were so arranged that one person automatically
+caught a ball and then threw it to another person who caught and
+automatically returned it; and that each so acted without knowing where
+the ball came from or went to. Clearly, such action would be without
+point or meaning. It might be physically controlled, but it would not be
+socially directed. But suppose that each becomes aware of what the
+other is doing, and becomes interested in the other's action and thereby
+interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the action of
+the other. The behavior of each would then be intelligent; and socially
+intelligent and guided. Take one more example of a less imaginary kind.
+An infant is hungry, and cries while food is prepared in his presence.
+If he does not connect his own state with what others are doing, nor
+what they are doing with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with
+increasing impatience to his own increasing discomfort. He is physically
+controlled by his own organic state. But when he makes a back and forth
+reference, his whole attitude changes. He takes an interest, as we say;
+he takes note and watches what others are doing. He no longer reacts
+just to his own hunger, but behaves in the light of what others are
+doing for its prospective satisfaction. In that way, he also no
+longer just gives way to hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or
+recognizes, or identifies his own state. It becomes an object for him.
+His attitude toward it becomes in some degree intelligent. And in such
+noting of the meaning of the actions of others and of his own state, he
+is socially directed.
+
+It will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. One of them
+has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do not influence
+mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are implicated in action
+for prospective consequences. The other point is persons modify one
+another's dispositions only through the special use they make of
+physical conditions. Consider first the case of so-called expressive
+movements to which others are sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning,
+clinching of fists, natural gestures of all kinds. In themselves, these
+are not expressive. They are organic parts of a person's attitude. One
+does not blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but because
+the capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli. But others
+use the blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of the muscles of
+a person with whom they are associated, as a sign of the state in
+which that person finds himself, and as an indication of what course
+to pursue. The frown signifies an imminent rebuke for which one must
+prepare, or an uncertainty and hesitation which one must, if possible,
+remove by saying or doing something to restore confidence. A man at some
+distance is waving his arms wildly. One has only to preserve an attitude
+of detached indifference, and the motions of the other person will be on
+the level of any remote physical change which we happen to note. If we
+have no concern or interest, the waving of the arms is as meaningless
+to us as the gyrations of the arms of a windmill. But if interest is
+aroused, we begin to participate. We refer his action to something we
+are doing ourselves or that we should do. We have to judge the meaning
+of his act in order to decide what to do. Is he beckoning for help? Is
+he warning us of an explosion to be set off, against which we should
+guard ourselves? In one case, his action means to run toward him; in the
+other case, to run away. In any case, it is the change he effects in
+the physical environment which is a sign to us of how we should conduct
+ourselves. Our action is socially controlled because we endeavor to
+refer what we are to do to the same situation in which he is acting.
+
+Language is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this joint
+reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation.
+Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social direction. But
+language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that
+it takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of
+physical means to accomplish results. A child sees persons with whom he
+lives using chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws, plows, horses, money in
+certain ways. If he has any share at all in what they are doing, he is
+led thereby to use things in the same way, or to use other things in a
+way which will fit in. If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign
+that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to
+extend his; and so on in a never ending stream of detail. The prevailing
+habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of
+nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode
+of social control. When children go to school, they already have
+"minds"--they have knowledge and dispositions of judgment which may
+be appealed to through the use of language. But these "minds" are the
+organized habits of intelligent response which they have previously
+required by putting things to use in connection with the way
+other persons use things. The control is inescapable; it saturates
+disposition. The net outcome of the discussion is that the fundamental
+means of control is not personal but intellectual. It is not "moral" in
+the sense that a person is moved by direct personal appeal from others,
+important as is this method at critical junctures. It consists in
+the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects in
+correspondence with others, whether by way of cooperation and assistance
+or rivalry and competition. Mind as a concrete thing is precisely
+the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a
+socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to
+which they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this
+sense is the method of social control.
+
+3. Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the defects of
+a psychology of learning which places the individual mind naked, as
+it were, in contact with physical objects, and which believes that
+knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from their interaction. Only
+comparatively recently has the predominating influence of association
+with fellow beings in the formation of mental and moral disposition been
+perceived. Even now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an
+alleged method of learning by direct contact with things, and as merely
+supplementing knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of persons.
+The purport of our discussion is that such a view makes an absurd and
+impossible separation between persons and things. Interaction with
+things may form habits of external adjustment. But it leads to activity
+having a meaning and conscious intent only when things are used to
+produce a result. And the only way one person can modify the mind of
+another is by using physical conditions, crude or artificial, so as
+to evoke some answering activity from him. Such are our two main
+conclusions. It is desirable to amplify and enforce them by placing them
+in contrast with the theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct
+relationships of human beings to one another as an adjunct to the
+psychology of the supposed direct relation of an individual to physical
+objects. In substance, this so-called social psychology has been built
+upon the notion of imitation. Consequently, we shall discuss the nature
+and role of imitation in the formation of mental disposition.
+
+According to this theory, social control of individuals rests upon the
+instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of
+others. The latter serve as models. The imitative instinct is so strong
+that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by
+others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behavior. According
+to our theory, what is here called imitation is a misleading name for
+partaking with others in a use of things which leads to consequences of
+common interest. The basic error in the current notion of imitation is
+that it puts the cart before the horse. It takes an effect for the
+cause of the effect. There can be no doubt that individuals in forming a
+social group are like-minded; they understand one another. They tend
+to act with the same controlling ideas, beliefs, and intentions, given
+similar circumstances. Looked at from without, they might be said to
+be engaged in "imitating" one another. In the sense that they are doing
+much the same sort of thing in much the same sort of way, this would be
+true enough. But "imitation" throws no light upon why they so act; it
+repeats the fact as an explanation of itself. It is an explanation of
+the same order as the famous saying that opium puts men to sleep because
+of its dormitive power.
+
+Objective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in being in
+conformity with others are baptized by the name imitation. This social
+fact is then taken for a psychological force, which produced the
+likeness. A considerable portion of what is called imitation is simply
+the fact that persons being alike in structure respond in the same way
+to like stimuli. Quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted
+get angry and attack the insulter. This statement may be met by citing
+the undoubted fact that response to an insult takes place in different
+ways in groups having different customs. In one group, it may be met by
+recourse to fisticuffs, in another by a challenge to a duel, in a third
+by an exhibition of contemptuous disregard. This happens, so it is said,
+because the model set for imitation is different. But there is no need
+to appeal to imitation. The mere fact that customs are different means
+that the actual stimuli to behavior are different. Conscious instruction
+plays a part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a large influence.
+Still more effective is the fact that unless an individual acts in the
+way current in his group, he is literally out of it. He can associate
+with others on intimate and equal terms only by behaving in the way in
+which they behave. The pressure that comes from the fact that one is
+let into the group action by acting in one way and shut out by acting
+in another way is unremitting. What is called the effect of imitation
+is mainly the product of conscious instruction and of the selective
+influence exercised by the unconscious confirmations and ratifications
+of those with whom one associates.
+
+Suppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls
+it back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not just the
+sight of the ball, or the sight of the other rolling it. It is the
+situation--the game which is playing. The response is not merely rolling
+the ball back; it is rolling it back so that the other one may catch and
+return it,--that the game may continue. The "pattern" or model is not
+the action of the other person. The whole situation requires that each
+should adapt his action in view of what the other person has done and is
+to do. Imitation may come in but its role is subordinate. The child has
+an interest on his own account; he wants to keep it going. He may then
+note how the other person catches and holds the ball in order to improve
+his own acts. He imitates the means of doing, not the end or thing to be
+done. And he imitates the means because he wishes, on his own behalf, as
+part of his own initiative, to take an effective part in the game. One
+has only to consider how completely the child is dependent from his
+earliest days for successful execution of his purposes upon fitting his
+acts into those of others to see what a premium is put upon behaving as
+others behave, and of developing an understanding of them in order that
+he may so behave. The pressure for likemindedness in action from this
+source is so great that it is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation.
+As matter of fact, imitation of ends, as distinct from imitation of
+means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and transitory affair
+which leaves little effect upon disposition. Idiots are especially apt
+at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts but not the meaning
+of their performance. When we find children engaging in this sort of
+mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as we would do if it were an
+important means of social control) we are more likely to rebuke them
+as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy cats. Imitation of means of
+accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent act. It involves
+close observation, and judicious selection of what will enable one to do
+better something which he already is trying to do. Used for a purpose,
+the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become a factor in
+the development of effective action.
+
+This excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing the
+conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of a certain
+mental disposition; a way of understanding objects, events, and acts
+which enables one to participate effectively in associated activities.
+Only the friction engendered by meeting resistance from others leads
+to the view that it takes place by forcing a line of action contrary to
+natural inclinations. Only failure to take account of the situations
+in which persons are mutually concerned (or interested in acting
+responsively to one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief
+agent in promoting social control.
+
+4. Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group perpetuate
+savagery, and a civilized group civilization? Doubtless the first answer
+to occur to mind is because savages are savages; being of low-grade
+intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. But careful study
+has made it doubtful whether their native capacities are appreciably
+inferior to those of civilized man. It has made it certain that native
+differences are not sufficient to account for the difference in culture.
+In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause,
+of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to
+restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit
+the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come
+within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest
+observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the
+mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of
+natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of
+natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are
+worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural
+forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of
+action, into means for securing ends. We start not so much with superior
+capacities as with superior stimuli for evocation and direction of
+our capacities. The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have
+weighted stimuli. Prior human efforts have made over natural conditions.
+As they originally existed they were indifferent to human endeavors.
+Every domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every
+appliance, every manufactured article, every esthetic decoration,
+every work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile
+or indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and
+favoring conditions. Because the activities of children today are
+controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are able to
+traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow, tortured
+ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes which
+have preceded.
+
+Stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our
+system of roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat,
+light, and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every
+purpose, do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a
+civilization. But the uses to which they are put are civilization,
+and without the things the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise
+necessarily devoted to wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment
+and securing a precarious protection against its inclemencies is
+freed. A body of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which
+is guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is
+incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of nature.
+Thus these appliances of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief
+protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs,
+those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so
+much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we
+add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used,
+but used in the interests of a truly shared or associated life, then
+the appliances become the positive resources of civilization. If Greece,
+with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a worthy and
+noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because Greece operated
+for social ends such resources as it had. But whatever the situation,
+whether one of barbarism or civilization, whether one of stinted control
+of physical forces, or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet
+made tributary to a shared experience, things as they enter into action
+furnish the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation
+of mental and moral disposition.
+
+Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially
+selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials
+and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. Since
+language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected
+to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life--physical
+things which have lost their original quality in becoming social
+tools--it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared
+with other appliances. By it we are led to share vicariously in past
+human experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of the
+present. We are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate
+situations. In countless ways, language condenses meanings that record
+social outcomes and presage social outlooks. So significant is it of
+a liberal share in what is worth while in life that unlettered and
+uneducated have become almost synonymous.
+
+The emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its
+dangers--dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice.
+Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by
+a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so
+entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of "telling"
+and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle
+almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not
+this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself
+merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. But
+its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be
+equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to
+an extent rarely attained. It requires that methods of instruction and
+administration be modified to allow and to secure direct and continuous
+occupations with things. Not that the use of language as an educational
+resource should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and
+fruitful by having its normal connection with shared activities. "These
+things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others
+undone." And for the school "these things" mean equipment with the
+instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.
+
+For when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in
+the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a
+pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go to
+school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most
+adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When treating
+it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which
+comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the
+effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim. We may
+secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an individual by
+himself, but we cannot thereby get him to understand the meaning which
+things have in the life of which he is a part. We may secure technical
+specialized ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of
+intelligence which directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in
+a joint activity, where one person's use of material and tools is
+consciously referred to the use other persons are making of their
+capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition
+attained.
+
+Summary. The natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with
+the life-customs of the group into which they are born. Consequently
+they have to be directed or guided. This control is not the same thing
+as physical compulsion; it consists in centering the impulses acting
+at any one time upon some specific end and in introducing an order of
+continuity into the sequence of acts. The action of others is always
+influenced by deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions. But
+in some cases as in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and disapprovals,
+the stimuli proceed from persons with a direct view to influencing
+action. Since in such cases we are most conscious of controlling the
+action of others, we are likely to exaggerate the importance of this
+sort of control at the expense of a more permanent and effective method.
+The basic control resides in the nature of the situations in which the
+young take part. In social situations the young have to refer their
+way of acting to what others are doing and make it fit in. This directs
+their action to a common result, and gives an understanding common to
+the participants. For all mean the same thing, even when performing
+different acts. This common understanding of the means and ends of
+action is the essence of social control. It is indirect, or emotional
+and intellectual, not direct or personal. Moreover it is intrinsic to
+the disposition of the person, not external and coercive. To achieve
+this internal control through identity of interest and understanding
+is the business of education. While books and conversation can do much,
+these agencies are usually relied upon too exclusively. Schools require
+for their full efficiency more opportunity for conjoint activities in
+which those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social
+sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Four: Education as Growth
+
+1. The Conditions of Growth.
+
+In directing the activities of the young, society determines its own
+future in determining that of the young. Since the young at a given time
+will at some later date compose the society of that period, the latter's
+nature will largely turn upon the direction children's activities were
+given at an earlier period. This cumulative movement of action toward a
+later result is what is meant by growth.
+
+The primary condition of growth is immaturity. This may seem to be a
+mere truism--saying that a being can develop only in some point in which
+he is undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the word immaturity means
+something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is noteworthy that the
+terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one
+sense being negative, the other positive. Capacity may denote mere
+receptivity, like the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by
+potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent state--a capacity to become
+something different under external influences. But we also mean by
+capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency, force. Now
+when we say that immaturity means the possibility of growth, we are
+not referring to absence of powers which may exist at a later time; we
+express a force positively present--the ability to develop.
+
+Our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something
+which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to
+regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat
+it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a
+fixed standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not, and
+will not have till he becomes a man. This comparative standpoint is
+legitimate enough for some purposes, but if we make it final, the
+question arises whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption.
+Children, if they could express themselves articulately and sincerely,
+would tell a different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for
+the conviction that for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults
+must become as little children. The seriousness of the assumption of the
+negative quality of the possibilities of immaturity is apparent when
+we reflect that it sets up as an ideal and standard a static end. The
+fulfillment of growing is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is
+to say, an Ungrowth, something which is no longer growing. The futility
+of the assumption is seen in the fact that every adult resents the
+imputation of having no further possibilities of growth; and so far
+as he finds that they are closed to him mourns the fact as evidence of
+loss, instead of falling back on the achieved as adequate manifestation
+of power. Why an unequal measure for child and man?
+
+Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a
+positive force or ability,--the power to grow. We do not have to draw
+out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational
+doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager
+and impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is
+something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility
+gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity,
+dependence and plasticity.
+
+(1) It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive,
+still more absurd as a power. Yet if helplessness were all there were
+in dependence, no development could ever take place. A merely impotent
+being has to be carried, forever, by others. The fact that dependence is
+accompanied by growth in ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into
+parasitism, suggests that it is already something constructive. Being
+merely sheltered by others would not promote growth. For
+
+(2) it would only build a wall around impotence. With reference to the
+physical world, the child is helpless. He lacks at birth and for a
+long time thereafter power to make his way physically, to make his own
+living. If he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive an
+hour. On this side his helplessness is almost complete. The young of
+the brutes are immeasurably his superiors. He is physically weak and not
+able to turn the strength which he possesses to coping with the physical
+environment.
+
+1. The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however,
+some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
+animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an
+early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound
+up with the life of those about them. They are compelled, so to speak,
+to have physical gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. Human
+infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
+because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk and think as if they
+simply happened to be physically in a social environment; as if social
+forces exclusively existed in the adults who take care of them, they
+being passive recipients. If it were said that children are themselves
+marvelously endowed with power to enlist the cooperative attention of
+others, this would be thought to be a backhanded way of saying
+that others are marvelously attentive to the needs of children. But
+observation shows that children are gifted with an equipment of the
+first order for social intercourse. Few grown-up persons retain all
+of the flexible and sensitive ability of children to vibrate
+sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about them.
+Inattention to physical things (going with incapacity to control them)
+is accompanied by a corresponding intensification of interest and
+attention as to the doings of people. The native mechanism of the child
+and his impulses all tend to facile social responsiveness. The statement
+that children, before adolescence, are egotistically self-centered, even
+if it were true, would not contradict the truth of this statement. It
+would simply indicate that their social responsiveness is employed on
+their own behalf, not that it does not exist. But the statement is not
+true as matter of fact. The facts which are cited in support of the
+alleged pure egoism of children really show the intensity and directness
+with which they go to their mark. If the ends which form the mark seem
+narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because adults (by means of a
+similar engrossment in their day) have mastered these ends, which
+have consequently ceased to interest them. Most of the remainder of
+children's alleged native egoism is simply an egoism which runs counter
+to an adult's egoism. To a grown-up person who is too absorbed in
+his own affairs to take an interest in children's affairs, children
+doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own affairs.
+
+From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a
+weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that
+increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of
+an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more
+self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often
+makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to
+develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone--an
+unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the
+remediable suffering of the world.
+
+2. The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
+constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different from the
+plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a capacity to take on change
+of form in accord with external pressure. It lies near the pliable
+elasticity by which some persons take on the color of their surroundings
+while retaining their own bent. But it is something deeper than this. It
+is essentially the ability to learn from experience; the power to retain
+from one experience something which is of avail in coping with the
+difficulties of a later situation. This means power to modify actions
+on the basis of the results of prior experiences, the power to develop
+dispositions. Without it, the acquisition of habits is impossible.
+
+It is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and
+especially the human young, have to learn to utilize their instinctive
+reactions. The human being is born with a greater number of instinctive
+tendencies than other animals. But the instincts of the lower animals
+perfect themselves for appropriate action at an early period after
+birth, while most of those of the human infant are of little account
+just as they stand. An original specialized power of adjustment secures
+immediate efficiency, but, like a railway ticket, it is good for one
+route only. A being who, in order to use his eyes, ears, hands,
+and legs, has to experiment in making varied combinations of their
+reactions, achieves a control that is flexible and varied. A chick,
+for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few hours after
+hatching. This means that definite coordinations of activities of the
+eyes in seeing and of the body and head in striking are perfected in a
+few trials. An infant requires about six months to be able to gauge with
+approximate accuracy the action in reaching which will coordinate with
+his visual activities; to be able, that is, to tell whether he can reach
+a seen object and just how to execute the reaching. As a result, the
+chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original endowment.
+The infant has the advantage of the multitude of instinctive tentative
+reactions and of the experiences that accompany them, even though he is
+at a temporary disadvantage because they cross one another. In learning
+an action, instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity
+learns to vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them,
+according to change of circumstances. A possibility of continuing
+progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are
+developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the
+fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to
+learn.
+
+The importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and
+variable control has been summed up in the doctrine of the significance
+of prolonged infancy. 1 This prolongation is significant from the
+standpoint of the adult members of the group as well as from that of the
+young. The presence of dependent and learning beings is a stimulus to
+nurture and affection. The need for constant continued care was probably
+a chief means in transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent
+unions. It certainly was a chief influence in forming habits of
+affectionate and sympathetic watchfulness; that constructive interest
+in the well-being of others which is essential to associated life.
+Intellectually, this moral development meant the introduction of many
+new objects of attention; it stimulated foresight and planning for the
+future. Thus there is a reciprocal influence. Increasing complexity of
+social life requires a longer period of infancy in which to acquire the
+needed powers; this prolongation of dependence means prolongation of
+plasticity, or power of acquiring variable and novel modes of control.
+Hence it provides a further push to social progress.
+
+2. Habits as Expressions of Growth. We have already noted that
+plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior
+experience factors which modify subsequent activities. This signifies
+the capacity to acquire habits, or develop definite dispositions. We
+have now to consider the salient features of habits. In the first place,
+a habit is a form of executive skill, of efficiency in doing. A habit
+means an ability to use natural conditions as means to ends. It is
+an active control of the environment through control of the organs of
+action. We are perhaps apt to emphasize the control of the body at the
+expense of control of the environment. We think of walking, talking,
+playing the piano, the specialized skills characteristic of the etcher,
+the surgeon, the bridge-builder, as if they were simply ease, deftness,
+and accuracy on the part of the organism. They are that, of course; but
+the measure of the value of these qualities lies in the economical and
+effective control of the environment which they secure. To be able to
+walk is to have certain properties of nature at our disposal--and so
+with all other habits.
+
+Education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the acquisition
+of those habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his
+environment. The definition expresses an essential phase of growth. But
+it is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense of
+control of means for achieving ends. If we think of a habit simply as
+a change wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change
+consists in ability to effect subsequent changes in the environment, we
+shall be led to think of "adjustment" as a conformity to environment as
+wax conforms to the seal which impresses it. The environment is thought
+of as something fixed, providing in its fixity the end and standard
+of changes taking place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting
+ourselves to this fixity of external conditions. 2 Habit as
+habituation is indeed something relatively passive; we get used to our
+surroundings--to our clothing, our shoes, and gloves; to the atmosphere
+as long as it is fairly equable; to our daily associates, etc.
+Conformity to the environment, a change wrought in the organism without
+reference to ability to modify surroundings, is a marked trait of such
+habituations. Aside from the fact that we are not entitled to carry
+over the traits of such adjustments (which might well be called
+accommodations, to mark them off from active adjustments) into habits of
+active use of our surroundings, two features of habituations are worth
+notice. In the first place, we get used to things by first using them.
+
+Consider getting used to a strange city. At first, there is excessive
+stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response. Gradually certain
+stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are
+degraded. We can say either that we do not respond to them any longer,
+or more truly that we have effected a persistent response to them--an
+equilibrium of adjustment. This means, in the second place, that this
+enduring adjustment supplies the background upon which are made specific
+adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never interested in changing
+the whole environment; there is much that we take for granted and accept
+just as it already is. Upon this background our activities focus at
+certain points in an endeavor to introduce needed changes. Habituation
+is thus our adjustment to an environment which at the time we are not
+concerned with modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active
+habits. Adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the
+environment to our own activities as of our activities to the
+environment. A savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain. It adapts
+itself. But its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating,
+putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence,
+and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use. A civilized
+people enters upon the scene. It also adapts itself. It introduces
+irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will
+flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those
+which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as
+a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits
+which transform the environment.
+
+The significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its executive
+and motor phase. It means formation of intellectual and emotional
+disposition as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency of
+action. Any habit marks an inclination--an active preference and choice
+for the conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not wait,
+Micawber-like, for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy;
+it actively seeks for occasions to pass into full operation. If its
+expression is unduly blocked, inclination shows itself in uneasiness and
+intense craving. A habit also marks an intellectual disposition. Where
+there is a habit, there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment
+to which action is applied. There is a definite way of understanding the
+situations in which the habit operates. Modes of thought, of observation
+and reflection, enter as forms of skill and of desire into the habits
+that make a man an engineer, an architect, a physician, or a merchant.
+In unskilled forms of labor, the intellectual factors are at minimum
+precisely because the habits involved are not of a high grade. But there
+are habits of judging and reasoning as truly as of handling a tool,
+painting a picture, or conducting an experiment. Such statements are,
+however, understatements. The habits of mind involved in habits of the
+eye and hand supply the latter with their significance. Above all,
+the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of the habit to
+varied and elastic use, and hence to continued growth. We speak of fixed
+habits. Well, the phrase may mean powers so well established that their
+possessor always has them as resources when needed. But the phrase
+is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness,
+open-mindedness, and originality. Fixity of habit may mean that
+something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold
+upon things. This fact explains two points in a common notion about
+habits: their identification with mechanical and external modes of
+action to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the tendency
+to give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad habits." Many
+a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his chosen
+profession called a habit, and would naturally think of his use of
+tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the meaning of habit.
+A habit is to him something which has a hold on him, something not
+easily thrown off even though judgment condemn it.
+
+Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into
+ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which
+intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking
+habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that they are
+opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation and decision. As we
+have seen, the acquiring of habits is due to an original plasticity
+of our natures: to our ability to vary responses till we find an
+appropriate and efficient way of acting. Routine habits, and habits that
+possess us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end
+to plasticity. They mark the close of power to vary. There can be no
+doubt of the tendency of organic plasticity, of the physiological basis,
+to lessen with growing years. The instinctively mobile and eagerly
+varying action of childhood, the love of new stimuli and new
+developments, too easily passes into a "settling down," which means
+aversion to change and a resting on past achievements. Only an
+environment which secures the full use of intelligence in the process
+of forming habits can counteract this tendency. Of course, the same
+hardening of the organic conditions affects the physiological structures
+which are involved in thinking. But this fact only indicates the need
+of persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is
+invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted method which falls
+back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure external efficiency
+of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought, marks a deliberate
+closing in of surroundings upon growth.
+
+3. The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development. We have
+had so far but little to say in this chapter about education. We have
+been occupied with the conditions and implications of growth. If our
+conclusions are justified, they carry with them, however, definite
+educational consequences. When it is said that education is development,
+everything depends upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion
+is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is life.
+Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the
+educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and
+that (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing,
+reconstructing, transforming.
+
+1. Development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that is,
+with respect to the special traits of child and adult life, means
+the direction of power into special channels: the formation of habits
+involving executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific
+objects of observation and thought. But the comparative view is not
+final. The child has specific powers; to ignore that fact is to stunt
+or distort the organs upon which his growth depends. The adult uses his
+powers to transform his environment, thereby occasioning new stimuli
+which redirect his powers and keep them developing. Ignoring this fact
+means arrested development, a passive accommodation. Normal child
+and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. The
+difference between them is not the difference between growth and
+no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different
+conditions. With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping
+with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child
+should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity,
+unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult
+should be growing in childlikeness. One statement is as true as the
+other.
+
+Three ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely privative
+nature of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and
+rigidity of habit, are all connected with a false idea of growth or
+development,--that it is a movement toward a fixed goal. Growth is
+regarded as having an end, instead of being an end. The educational
+counterparts of the three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take
+account of the instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly,
+failure to develop initiative in coping with novel situations; thirdly,
+an undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure automatic
+skill at the expense of personal perception. In all cases, the adult
+environment is accepted as a standard for the child. He is to be brought
+up to it.
+
+Natural instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances--as
+obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be brought into
+conformity with external standards. Since conformity is the aim, what is
+distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or regarded
+as a source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to
+uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the
+novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown.
+Since the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process of growing,
+external agents have to be resorted to to induce movement toward it.
+Whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be
+sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end.
+
+2. Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save
+more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save
+more education. It is a commonplace to say that education should not
+cease when one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that the
+purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by
+organizing the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from
+life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn
+in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.
+
+When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed
+comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up
+thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. Abandoning this
+notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of
+instruction as a method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge into
+a mental and moral hole which awaits filling. Since life means growth,
+a living creature lives as truly and positively at one stage as at
+another, with the same intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims.
+Hence education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which
+insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age. We first look
+with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as something to be got
+over as rapidly as possible. Then the adult formed by such educative
+methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood and youth as a
+scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers. This ironical situation
+will endure till it is recognized that living has its own intrinsic
+quality and that the business of education is with that quality.
+Realization that life is growth protects us from that so-called
+idealizing of childhood which in effect is nothing but lazy indulgence.
+Life is not to be identified with every superficial act and interest.
+Even though it is not always easy to tell whether what appears to be
+mere surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained power,
+we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as ends in
+themselves. They are signs of possible growth. They are to be turned
+into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or
+cultivated for their own sake. Excessive attention to surface phenomena
+(even in the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to
+their fixation and thus to arrested development. What impulses are
+moving toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for
+parent and teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity cannot
+be better put than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the child. Be not
+too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry
+which replies to this suggestion: Would you verily throw up the reins
+of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to
+the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy
+a respect for the child's nature? I answer,--Respect the child, respect
+him to the end, but also respect yourself.... The two points in a boy's
+training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that; to keep
+his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling, and horseplay; keep
+his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it
+points." And as Emerson goes on to show this reverence for childhood
+and youth instead of opening up an easy and easy-going path to the
+instructors, "involves at once, immense claims on the time, the thought,
+on the life of the teacher. It requires time, use, insight, event, all
+the great lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it
+implies character and profoundness."
+
+Summary. Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity.
+Both of these conditions are at their height in childhood and youth.
+Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of
+habits. Habits give control over the environment, power to utilize
+it for human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or
+a general and persistent balance of organic activities with the
+surroundings, and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new
+conditions. The former furnishes the background of growth; the latter
+constitute growing. Active habits involve thought, invention, and
+initiative in applying capacities to new aims. They are opposed
+to routine which marks an arrest of growth. Since growth is the
+characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no
+end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the
+extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies
+means for making the desire effective in fact.
+
+1 Intimations of its significance are found in a number of writers, but
+John Fiske, in his Excursions of an Evolutionist, is accredited with its
+first systematic exposition.
+
+2 This conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the conceptions
+of the external relation of stimulus and response, considered in
+the last chapter, and of the negative conceptions of immaturity and
+plasticity noted in this chapter.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
+
+1. Education as Preparation. We have laid it down that the educative
+process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every
+stage an added capacity of growth. This conception contrasts sharply
+with other ideas which have influenced practice. By making the contrast
+explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to
+light. The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process
+of preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared for is, of
+course, the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. Children are
+not regarded as social members in full and regular standing. They are
+looked upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list. The
+conception is only carried a little farther when the life of adults
+is considered as not having meaning on its own account, but as a
+preparatory probation for "another life." The idea is but another form
+of the notion of the negative and privative character of growth already
+criticized; hence we shall not repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the
+evil consequences which flow from putting education on this basis.
+In the first place, it involves loss of impetus. Motive power is not
+utilized. Children proverbially live in the present; that is not only
+a fact not to be evaded, but it is an excellence. The future just as
+future lacks urgency and body. To get ready for something, one knows not
+what nor why, is to throw away the leverage that exists, and to seek for
+motive power in a vague chance. Under such circumstances, there is, in
+the second place, a premium put on shilly-shallying and procrastination.
+The future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of time will intervene
+before it becomes a present. Why be in a hurry about getting ready for
+it? The temptation to postpone is much increased because the present
+offers so many wonderful opportunities and proffers such invitations to
+adventure. Naturally attention and energy go to them; education accrues
+naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education than if the full stress
+of effort had been put upon making conditions as educative as possible.
+A third undesirable result is the substitution of a conventional average
+standard of expectation and requirement for a standard which concerns
+the specific powers of the individual under instruction. For a severe
+and definite judgment based upon the strong and weak points of the
+individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion concerning what
+youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some more or less
+remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions are to take
+place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to enter
+upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as the
+serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the loss
+which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point
+to a comparatively unproductive point. It fails most just where it
+thinks it is succeeding--in getting a preparation for the future.
+
+Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a
+large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The
+future having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the
+possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make
+it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy
+work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely
+unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is
+actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to
+be told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
+accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future,
+rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely
+systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems
+which neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a
+future. Then, in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this
+method, the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of
+information required against some later day is sugar-coated, so that
+pupils may be fooled into taking something which they do not care for.
+
+It is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the
+future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present
+possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with
+later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd
+moments; it is a continuous leading into the future. If the environment,
+in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the
+present capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of
+the present is surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching
+importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the
+mainspring of present effort. Because the need of preparation for a
+continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every energy
+should be bent to making the present experience as rich and significant
+as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the
+future is taken care of.
+
+2. Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education which
+professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it takes back
+with one hand what it proffers with the other. Development is conceived
+not as continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent powers toward
+a definite goal. The goal is conceived of as completion,--perfection.
+Life at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an
+unfolding toward it. Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the
+preparation theory. Practically the two differ in that the adherents of
+the latter make much of the practical and professional duties for which
+one is preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal
+and spiritual qualities of the principle which is unfolding.
+
+The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to
+a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its
+transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life. It
+simulates the style of the latter. It pays the tribute of speaking
+much of development, process, progress. But all of these operations
+are conceived to be merely transitional; they lack meaning on their own
+account. They possess significance only as movements toward something
+away from what is now going on. Since growth is just a movement toward a
+completed being, the final ideal is immobile. An abstract and indefinite
+future is in control with all which that connotes in depreciation of
+present power and opportunity.
+
+Since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is very far
+away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is unattainable.
+Consequently, in order to be available for present guidance it must be
+translated into something which stands for it. Otherwise we should
+be compelled to regard any and every manifestation of the child as an
+unfolding from within, and hence sacred. Unless we set up some definite
+criterion representing the ideal end by which to judge whether a given
+attitude or act is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is
+to withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere with
+proper development. Since that is not practicable, a working substitute
+is set up. Usually, of course, this is some idea which an adult would
+like to have a child acquire. Consequently, by "suggestive questioning"
+or some other pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out"
+from the pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that
+is evidence that the child is unfolding properly. But as the pupil
+generally has no initiative of his own in this direction, the result is
+a random groping after what is wanted, and the formation of habits of
+dependence upon the cues furnished by others. Just because such methods
+simulate a true principle and claim to have its sanction they may do
+more harm than would outright "telling," where, at least, it remains
+with the child how much will stick.
+
+Within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two typical
+attempts to provide a working representative of the absolute goal. Both
+start from the conception of a whole--an absolute--which is "immanent"
+in human life. The perfect or complete ideal is not a mere ideal; it
+is operative here and now. But it is present only implicitly,
+"potentially," or in an enfolded condition. What is termed development
+is the gradual making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up.
+Froebel and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes
+referred to, have different ideas of the path by which the progressive
+realization of manifestation of the complete principle is effected.
+According to Hegel, it is worked out through a series of historical
+institutions which embody the different factors in the Absolute.
+According to Froebel, the actuating force is the presentation of
+symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding to the essential traits
+of the Absolute. When these are presented to the child, the Whole,
+or perfection, sleeping within him, is awakened. A single example
+may indicate the method. Every one familiar with the kindergarten is
+acquainted with the circle in which the children gather. It is not
+enough that the circle is a convenient way of grouping the children. It
+must be used "because it is a symbol of the collective life of mankind
+in general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the native
+capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his influence
+in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the most effective
+single force in modern educational theory in effecting widespread
+acknowledgment of the idea of growth. But his formulation of the notion
+of development and his organization of devices for promoting it were
+badly hampered by the fact that he conceived development to be the
+unfolding of a ready-made latent principle. He failed to see that
+growing is growth, developing is development, and consequently placed
+the emphasis upon the completed product. Thus he set up a goal which
+meant the arrest of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to
+immediate guidance of powers, save through translation into abstract and
+symbolic formulae.
+
+A remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical philosophic
+language, transcendental. That is, it is something apart from direct
+experience and perception. So far as experience is concerned, it is
+empty; it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything
+which can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be
+compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection
+between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of
+development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To
+regard known things as symbols, according to some arbitrary a priori
+formula--and every a priori conception must be arbitrary--is an
+invitation to romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal
+to it and treat them as laws. After the scheme of symbolism has been
+settled upon, some definite technique must be invented by which the
+inner meaning of the sensible symbols used may be brought home to
+children. Adults being the formulators of the symbolism are naturally
+the authors and controllers of the technique. The result was that
+Froebel's love of abstract symbolism often got the better of his
+sympathetic insight; and there was substituted for development as
+arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation as the history of
+instruction has ever seen.
+
+With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of
+the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional, rather than symbolic,
+form. His philosophy, like Froebel's, marks in one direction an
+indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the process of life.
+The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident
+to him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical
+institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and
+nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated
+the efforts of a whole series of German writers--Lessing, Herder, Kant,
+Schiller, Goethe--to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great
+collective institutional products of humanity. For those who learned
+the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive
+of institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely--in
+idea, not in fact--the psychology that regarded "mind" as a ready-made
+possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of
+"objective mind"--language, government, art, religion--in the formation
+of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the conception of an
+absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as they concretely
+exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each in its time
+and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing
+process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its
+existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an integral
+element in the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as they are,
+individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and nurture,
+consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions.
+Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education.
+Institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and
+fall of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the
+great "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have
+no share or lot in it. In the later nineteenth century, this type of
+idealism was amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution.
+
+"Evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end. As against
+it, or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of
+individuals are impotent. Or, rather, they are but the means by which
+it works itself out. Social progress is an "organic growth," not an
+experimental selection. Reason is all powerful, but only Absolute Reason
+has any power.
+
+The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the
+Greeks) that great historic institutions are active factors in the
+intellectual nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational
+philosophy. It indicated a genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had
+marred his assertion that education must be a natural development and
+not something forced or grafted upon individuals from without, by the
+notion that social conditions are not natural. But in its notion of
+a complete and all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory
+swallowed up concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual
+in the abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the
+claims of the Whole and of individuality by the conception of society as
+an organic whole, or organism. That social organization is presupposed
+in the adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted.
+But the social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of
+the body to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual
+has a certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented
+by the place and functions of the other organs. As one portion of the
+bodily tissue is differentiated so that it can be the hand and the
+hand only, another, the eye, and so on, all taken together making the
+organism, so one individual is supposed to be differentiated for the
+exercise of the mechanical operations of society, another for those of
+a statesman, another for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion
+of "organism" is thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class
+distinctions in social organization--a notion which in its educational
+application again means external dictation instead of growth.
+
+3. Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had great
+vogue and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much
+influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." It has in view
+a correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of
+specific powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do
+the chief things which it is important for him to do better than he
+could without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency,
+economy, promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education was
+indicated in what was said about habits as the product of educative
+development. But the theory in question takes, as it were, a short
+cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named) as the direct and
+conscious aims of instruction, and not simply as the results of growth.
+There is a definite number of powers to be trained, as one might
+enumerate the kinds of strokes which a golfer has to master.
+Consequently education should get directly at the business of training
+them. But this implies that they are already there in some untrained
+form; otherwise their creation would have to be an indirect product of
+other activities and agencies. Being there already in some crude form,
+all that remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions,
+and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase "formal
+discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline" refers both
+to the outcome of trained power and to the method of training through
+repeated exercise.
+
+The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of
+perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing,
+feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise
+upon material presented. In its classic form, this theory was expressed
+by Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the material or
+content of knowledge through passively received sensations. On the
+other hand, the mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation,
+retention, comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. Knowledge results
+if the mind discriminates and combines things as they are united and
+divided in nature itself. But the important thing for education is
+the exercise or practice of the faculties of the mind till they become
+thoroughly established habitudes. The analogy constantly employed is
+that of a billiard player or gymnast, who by repeated use of certain
+muscles in a uniform way at last secures automatic skill. Even the
+faculty of thinking was to be formed into a trained habit by repeated
+exercises in making and combining simple distinctions, for which, Locke
+thought, mathematics affords unrivaled opportunity.
+
+Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to
+do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of
+the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which mind
+should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which were few
+in number and which might be trained by specific exercises. The scheme
+appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and
+yet it insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception
+and storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of
+attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization. It
+was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material whatever is
+received from without; it was idealistic in that final stress fell upon
+the formation of intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal
+in its assertion that the individual cannot possess or generate any true
+ideas on his own account; it was individualistic in placing the end of
+education in the perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset
+by the individual. This kind of distribution of values expressed with
+nicety the state of opinion in the generations following upon Locke.
+It became, without explicit reference to Locke, a common-place of
+educational theory and of psychology. Practically, it seemed to provide
+the educator with definite, instead of vague, tasks. It made the
+elaboration of a technique of instruction relatively easy. All that was
+necessary was to provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers.
+This practice consists in repeated acts of attending, observing,
+memorizing, etc. By grading the difficulty of the acts, making each set
+of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set which preceded it,
+a complete scheme of instruction is evolved. There are various ways,
+equally conclusive, of criticizing this conception, in both its alleged
+foundations and in its educational application. (1) Perhaps the most
+direct mode of attack consists in pointing out that the supposed
+original faculties of observation, recollection, willing, thinking,
+etc., are purely mythological. There are no such ready-made powers
+waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. There are, indeed, a great
+number of original native tendencies, instinctive modes of action, based
+on the original connections of neurones in the central nervous system.
+There are impulsive tendencies of the eyes to follow and fixate light;
+of the neck muscles to turn toward light and sound; of the hands to
+reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to
+make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant substances; to gag
+and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number. But these
+tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off from
+one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with one another
+in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent intellectual
+powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they are
+tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment
+so as to bring about other changes. Something in the throat makes one
+cough; the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus
+modify the subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a hot thing; it is
+impulsively, wholly unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal
+alters the stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with
+the needs of the organism. It is by such specific changes of organic
+activities in response to specific changes in the medium that that
+control of the environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is
+effected. Now all of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and
+smellings and tastings are of this kind. In any legitimate sense of the
+words mental or intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these
+qualities, and no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any
+intellectual properties of observation, judgment, or intentional action
+(volition) upon them.
+
+(2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is
+not a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one might
+strengthen a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in selecting
+from the diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which
+are especially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to
+say, among the reactions of the body in general occur upon stimulation
+of the eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to
+reaching, grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are
+gradually eliminated--or else no training occurs. As we have already
+noted, the primary reactions, with a very few exceptions are too
+diffused and general to be practically of much use in the case of the
+human infant. Hence the identity of training with selective response.
+(Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important is the specific coordination of
+different factors of response which takes place. There is not merely a
+selection of the hand reactions which effect grasping, but of the
+particular visual stimuli which call out just these reactions and no
+others, and an establishment of connection between the two. But the
+coordinating does not stop here. Characteristic temperature reactions
+may take place when the object is grasped. These will also be brought
+in; later, the temperature reaction may be connected directly with the
+optical stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed--as a bright flame,
+independent of close contact, may steer one away. Or the child in
+handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues.
+The ear response is then brought into the system of response. If a
+certain sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies
+the activity, response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected
+with auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the
+complex response.
+
+(3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each
+other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the stimuli
+are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the more rigid
+and the less generally available is the training secured. In equivalent
+language, less intellectual or educative quality attaches to the
+training. The usual way of stating this fact is that the more
+specialized the reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing
+and perfecting it transferable to other modes of behavior. According
+to the orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his
+spelling lesson acquires, besides ability to spell those particular
+words, an increase of power of observation, attention, and recollection
+which may be employed whenever these powers are needed. As matter of
+fact, the more he confines himself to noticing and fixating the forms of
+words, irrespective of connection with other things (such as the
+meaning of the words, the context in which they are habitually used, the
+derivation and classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely
+is he to acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the
+mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not even be increasing his
+ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to say
+nothing of ability to observe in general. He is merely selecting the
+stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the motor reactions
+of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination (to use
+our prior terminology) is extremely limited. The connections which are
+employed in other observations and recollections (or reproductions) are
+deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon forms
+of letters and words. Having been excluded, they cannot be restored when
+needed. The ability secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is
+not available for perceiving and recalling other things. In the ordinary
+phraseology, it is not transferable. But the wider the context--that is
+to say, the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated--the more
+the ability acquired is available for the effective performance of
+other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any "transfer,"
+but because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is
+equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to a
+narrow and rigid, coordination. (4) Going to the root of the matter, the
+fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its
+separation of activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no
+such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there
+is only the ability to see or hear or remember something. To talk about
+training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject
+matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. Exercise may react
+upon circulation, breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigor or
+strength, but this reservoir is available for specific ends only by use
+in connection with the material means which accomplish them. Vigor will
+enable a man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he
+would if he were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and
+club, sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one
+of them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far
+as it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordinations or as
+the same kind of coordination is involved in all of them. Moreover, the
+difference between the training of ability to spell which comes from
+taking visual forms in a narrow context and one which takes them in
+connection with the activities required to grasp meaning, such
+as context, affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the
+difference between exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to
+"develop" certain muscles, and a game or sport. The former is uniform
+and mechanical; it is rigidly specialized. The latter is varied from
+moment to moment; no two acts are quite alike; novel emergencies have to
+be met; the coordinations forming have to be kept flexible and elastic.
+Consequently, the training is much more "general"; that is to say, it
+covers a wider territory and includes more factors. Exactly the same
+thing holds of special and general education of the mind.
+
+A monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one
+special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping or
+calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. One may be
+an authority in a particular field and yet of more than usually poor
+judgment in matters not closely allied, unless the training in the
+special field has been of a kind to ramify into the subject matter
+of the other fields. (5) Consequently, such powers as observation,
+recollection, judgment, esthetic taste, represent organized results of
+the occupation of native active tendencies with certain subject matters.
+A man does not observe closely and fully by pressing a button for
+the observing faculty to get to work (in other words by "willing"
+to observe); but if he has something to do which can be accomplished
+successfully only through intensive and extensive use of eye and hand,
+he naturally observes. Observation is an outcome, a consequence, of
+the interaction of sense organ and subject matter. It will vary,
+accordingly, with the subject matter employed.
+
+It is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of
+faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first determined
+what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become expert in
+observing and recalling and for what purpose. And it is only repeating
+in another form what has already been said, to declare that the
+criterion here must be social. We want the person to note and recall and
+judge those things which make him an effective competent member of the
+group in which he is associated with others. Otherwise we might as well
+set the pupil to observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to
+memorizing meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue--which is
+about what we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of formal
+discipline. If the observing habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer
+are better habits than those which are thus formed, it is because
+they deal with subject matter which is more significant in life. In
+concluding this portion of the discussion, we note that the distinction
+between special and general education has nothing to do with the
+transferability of function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer
+is miraculous and impossible. But some activities are broad; they
+involve a coordination of many factors. Their development demands
+continuous alternation and readjustment. As conditions change, certain
+factors are subordinated, and others which had been of minor importance
+come to the front. There is constant redistribution of the focus of the
+action, as is seen in the illustration of a game as over against pulling
+a fixed weight by a series of uniform motions. Thus there is practice in
+prompt making of new combinations with the focus of activity shifted to
+meet change in subject matter. Wherever an activity is broad in
+scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of
+sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to change
+direction in its progressive development, general education is bound
+to result. For this is what "general" means; broad and flexible. In
+practice, education meets these conditions, and hence is general, in the
+degree in which it takes account of social relationships. A person may
+become expert in technical philosophy, or philology, or mathematics or
+engineering or financiering, and be inept and ill-advised in his action
+and judgment outside of his specialty. If however his concern with
+these technical subject matters has been connected with human activities
+having social breadth, the range of active responses called into play
+and flexibly integrated is much wider. Isolation of subject matter
+from a social context is the chief obstruction in current practice to
+securing a general training of mind. Literature, art, religion, when
+thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the technical things which
+the professional upholders of general education strenuously oppose.
+
+Summary. The conception that the result of the educative process is
+capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other
+ideas which have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting
+conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some
+future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which
+result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher
+and taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully
+directed--namely, taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the
+immediate present. Consequently it defeats its own professed purpose.
+The notion that education is an unfolding from within appears to have
+more likeness to the conception of growth which has been set forth. But
+as worked out in the theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves
+ignoring the interaction of present organic tendencies with the present
+environment, just as much as the notion of preparation. Some implicit
+whole is regarded as given ready-made and the significance of growth
+is merely transitory; it is not an end in itself, but simply a means
+of making explicit what is already implicit. Since that which is not
+explicit cannot be made definite use of, something has to be found to
+represent it. According to Froebel, the mystic symbolic value of certain
+objects and acts (largely mathematical) stand for the Absolute
+Whole which is in process of unfolding. According to Hegel, existing
+institutions are its effective actual representatives. Emphasis upon
+symbols and institutions tends to divert perception from the direct
+growth of experience in richness of meaning. Another influential but
+defective theory is that which conceives that mind has, at birth,
+certain mental faculties or powers, such as perceiving, remembering,
+willing, judging, generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is
+the training of these faculties through repeated exercise. This theory
+treats subject matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its
+value residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of
+the general powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of the
+alleged powers from one another and from the material upon which they
+act. The outcome of the theory in practice was shown to be an undue
+emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized modes of skill at the
+expense of initiative, inventiveness, and readaptability--qualities
+which depend upon the broad and consecutive interaction of specific
+activities with one another. 1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is
+so great, there are so many paths of construction, that every stimulus
+brings about some change in all of the organs of response. We are
+accustomed however to ignore most of these modifications of the total
+organic activity, concentrating upon that one which is most specifically
+adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the moment. 2 This statement
+should be compared with what was said earlier about the sequential
+ordering of responses (p. 25). It is merely a more explicit statement of
+the way in which that consecutive arrangement occurs.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
+
+1. Education as Formation. We now come to a type of theory which denies
+the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique role of subject
+matter in the development of mental and moral disposition. According to
+it, education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it
+a training of faculties resident in mind itself. It is rather the
+formation of mind by setting up certain associations or connections of
+content by means of a subject matter presented from without. Education
+proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a building
+into the mind from without. That education is formative of mind is not
+questioned; it is the conception already propounded. But formation here
+has a technical meaning dependent upon the idea of something operating
+from without. Herbart is the best historical representative of this type
+of theory. He denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties. The
+mind is simply endowed with the power of producing various qualities in
+reaction to the various realities which act upon it. These qualitatively
+different reactions are called presentations (Vorstellungen). Every
+presentation once called into being persists; it may be driven below the
+"threshold" of consciousness by new and stronger presentations, produced
+by the reaction of the soul to new material, but its activity continues
+by its own inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness. What
+are termed faculties--attention, memory, thinking, perception, even the
+sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and complications, formed
+by the interaction of these submerged presentations with one another and
+with new presentations. Perception, for example, is the complication of
+presentations which result from the rise of old presentations to greet
+and combine with new ones; memory is the evoking of an old presentation
+above the threshold of consciousness by getting entangled with another
+presentation, etc. Pleasure is the result of reinforcement among the
+independent activities of presentations; pain of their pulling different
+ways, etc.
+
+The concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the various
+arrangements formed by the various presentations in their different
+qualities. The "furniture" of the mind is the mind. Mind is wholly a
+matter of "contents." The educational implications of this doctrine are
+threefold.
+
+(1) This or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects which
+evoke this or that kind of reaction and which produce this or that
+arrangement among the reactions called out. The formation of mind is
+wholly a matter of the presentation of the proper educational materials.
+
+(2) Since the earlier presentations constitute the "apperceiving organs"
+which control the assimilation of new presentations, their character is
+all important. The effect of new presentations is to reinforce groupings
+previously formed. The business of the educator is, first, to select the
+proper material in order to fix the nature of the original reactions,
+and, secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations
+on the basis of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions. The
+control is from behind, from the past, instead of, as in the unfolding
+conception, in the ultimate goal.
+
+(3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down.
+Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the central thing,
+but since knowing consists in the way in which this interacts with the
+contents already submerged below consciousness, the first thing is
+the step of "preparation,"--that is, calling into special activity and
+getting above the floor of consciousness those older presentations which
+are to assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation, follow the
+processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the application of
+the newly formed content to the performance of some task. Everything
+must go through this course; consequently there is a perfectly uniform
+method in instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages.
+
+Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of
+the region of routine and accident. He brought it into the sphere of
+conscious method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim
+and procedure, instead of being a compound of casual inspiration
+and subservience to tradition. Moreover, everything in teaching and
+discipline could be specified, instead of our having to be content with
+vague and more or less mystic generalities about ultimate ideals and
+speculative spiritual symbols. He abolished the notion of ready-made
+faculties, which might be trained by exercise upon any sort of
+material, and made attention to concrete subject matter, to the content,
+all-important. Herbart undoubtedly has had a greater influence in
+bringing to the front questions connected with the material of study
+than any other educational philosopher. He stated problems of method
+from the standpoint of their connection with subject matter: method
+having to do with the manner and sequence of presenting new subject
+matter to insure its proper interaction with old.
+
+The fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring the
+existence in a living being of active and specific functions which are
+developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they are
+occupied with their environment. The theory represents the Schoolmaster
+come to his own. This fact expresses at once its strength and its
+weakness. The conception that the mind consists of what has been
+taught, and that the importance of what has been taught consists in
+its availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue's view
+of life. The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in
+instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of
+learning. It emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment
+upon the mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves a
+personal sharing in common experiences. It exaggerates beyond reason
+the possibilities of consciously formulated and used methods, and
+underestimates the role of vital, unconscious, attitudes. It insists
+upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the operation of the
+genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It takes, in brief, everything
+educational into account save its essence,--vital energy seeking
+opportunity for effective exercise. All education forms character,
+mental and moral, but formation consists in the selection and
+coordination of native activities so that they may utilize the subject
+matter of the social environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a
+formation of native activities, but it takes place through them. It is a
+process of reconstruction, reorganization.
+
+2. Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar combination
+of the ideas of development and formation from without has given rise
+to the recapitulation theory of education, biological and cultural. The
+individual develops, but his proper development consists in repeating in
+orderly stages the past evolution of animal life and human history. The
+former recapitulation occurs physiologically; the latter should be made
+to occur by means of education. The alleged biological truth that the
+individual in his growth from the simple embryo to maturity repeats the
+history of the evolution of animal life in the progress of forms
+from the simplest to the most complex (or expressed technically, that
+ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis) does not concern us, save as it is
+supposed to afford scientific foundation for cultural recapitulation
+of the past. Cultural recapitulation says, first, that children at a
+certain age are in the mental and moral condition of savagery; their
+instincts are vagrant and predatory because their ancestors at one time
+lived such a life. Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper subject
+matter of their education at this time is the material--especially the
+literary material of myths, folk-tale, and song--produced by humanity
+in the analogous stage. Then the child passes on to something
+corresponding, say, to the pastoral stage, and so on till at the time
+when he is ready to take part in contemporary life, he arrives at the
+present epoch of culture.
+
+In this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a small
+school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part), has had
+little currency. But the idea which underlies it is that education
+is essentially retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past
+and especially to the literary products of the past, and that mind
+is adequately formed in the degree in which it is patterned upon the
+spiritual heritage of the past. This idea has had such immense influence
+upon higher instruction especially, that it is worth examination in its
+extreme formulation.
+
+In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embyronic growth
+of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of
+lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of
+past stages. If there were any strict "law" of repetition, evolutionary
+development would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation
+would simply have repeated its predecessors' existence. Development, in
+short, has taken place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in
+the prior scheme of growth. And this suggests that the aim of education
+is to facilitate such short-circuited growth. The great advantage of
+immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate
+the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown past. The business of
+education is rather to liberate the young from reviving and retraversing
+the past than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The social
+environment of the young is constituted by the presence and action
+of the habits of thinking and feeling of civilized men. To ignore the
+directive influence of this present environment upon the young is simply
+to abdicate the educational function. A biologist has said: "The history
+of development in different animals. . . offers to us. . . a series of
+ingenious, determined, varied but more or less unsuccessful efforts to
+escape from the necessity of recapitulating, and to substitute for the
+ancestral method a more direct method." Surely it would be foolish if
+education did not deliberately attempt to facilitate similar efforts in
+conscious experience so that they become increasingly successful.
+
+The two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled
+from association with the false context which perverts them. On the
+biological side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with
+precisely the assortment of impulsive activities with which he does
+start, they being blind, and many of them conflicting with one another,
+casual, sporadic, and unadapted to their immediate environment. The
+other point is that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products
+of past history so far as they are of help for the future. Since they
+represent the results of prior experience, their value for future
+experience may, of course, be indefinitely great. Literatures produced
+in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and use of them, a
+part of the present environment of individuals; but there is an enormous
+difference between availing ourselves of them as present resources and
+taking them as standards and patterns in their retrospective character.
+
+(1) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through misuse
+of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity means that past
+life has somehow predetermined the main traits of an individual, and
+that they are so fixed that little serious change can be introduced into
+them. Thus taken, the influence of heredity is opposed to that of
+the environment, and the efficacy of the latter belittled. But for
+educational purposes heredity means neither more nor less than the
+original endowment of an individual. Education must take the being as he
+is; that a particular individual has just such and such an equipment of
+native activities is a basic fact. That they were produced in such
+and such a way, or that they are derived from one's ancestry, is not
+especially important for the educator, however it may be with the
+biologist, as compared with the fact that they now exist. Suppose one
+had to advise or direct a person regarding his inheritance of
+property. The fallacy of assuming that the fact it is an inheritance,
+predetermines its future use, is obvious. The advisor is concerned with
+making the best use of what is there--putting it at work under the most
+favorable conditions. Obviously he cannot utilize what is not there;
+neither can the educator. In this sense, heredity is a limit of
+education. Recognition of this fact prevents the waste of energy and the
+irritation that ensue from the too prevalent habit of trying to make
+by instruction something out of an individual which he is not naturally
+fitted to become. But the doctrine does not determine what use shall
+be made of the capacities which exist. And, except in the case of the
+imbecile, these original capacities are much more varied and potential,
+even in the case of the more stupid, than we as yet know properly how to
+utilize. Consequently, while a careful study of the native aptitudes
+and deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary necessity, the
+subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment which will
+adequately function whatever activities are present. The relation of
+heredity and environment is well expressed in the case of language. If a
+being had no vocal organs from which issue articulate sounds, if he had
+no auditory or other sense-receptors and no connections between the two
+sets of apparatus, it would be a sheer waste of time to try to teach him
+to converse. He is born short in that respect, and education must accept
+the limitation. But if he has this native equipment, its possession in
+no way guarantees that he will ever talk any language or what language
+he will talk. The environment in which his activities occur and by which
+they are carried into execution settles these things. If he lived in a
+dumb unsocial environment where men refused to talk to one another and
+used only that minimum of gestures without which they could not get
+along, vocal language would be as unachieved by him as if he had no
+vocal organs. If the sounds which he makes occur in a medium of persons
+speaking the Chinese language, the activities which make like sounds
+will be selected and coordinated. This illustration may be applied to
+the entire range of the educability of any individual. It places the
+heritage from the past in its right connection with the demands and
+opportunities of the present.
+
+(2) The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is found
+in the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or more
+specifically in the particular literatures which were produced in
+the culture epoch which is supposed to correspond with the stage of
+development of those taught) affords another instance of that divorce
+between the process and product of growth which has been criticized. To
+keep the process alive, to keep it alive in ways which make it easier
+to keep it alive in the future, is the function of educational subject
+matter. But an individual can live only in the present. The present
+is not just something which comes after the past; much less something
+produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind it. The
+study of past products will not help us understand the present, because
+the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they
+were the products. A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great
+significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. And the
+mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material
+of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past,
+and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more
+or less futile imitation of the past. Under such circumstances, culture
+becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge and an asylum. Men escape
+from the crudities of the present to live in its imagined refinements,
+instead of using what the past offers as an agency for ripening these
+crudities. The present, in short, generates the problems which lead us
+to search the past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we
+find when we search. The past is the past precisely because it does
+not include what is characteristic in the present. The moving present
+includes the past on condition that it uses the past to direct its own
+movement. The past is a great resource for the imagination; it adds a
+new dimension to life, but OD condition that it be seen as the past of
+the present, and not as another and disconnected world. The principle
+which makes little of the present act of living and operation of
+growing, the only thing always present, naturally looks to the past
+because the future goal which it sets up is remote and empty. But having
+turned its back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it laden
+with the spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive to the
+needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the liveliest of
+motives for interest in the background of the present, and will never
+have to hunt for a way back because it will never have lost connection.
+
+3. Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas both
+of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the formation from
+without, whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the
+past, the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is
+a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. It has all the
+time an immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches
+that end--the direct transformation of the quality of experience.
+Infancy, youth, adult life,--all stand on the same educative level
+in the sense that what is really learned at any and every stage of
+experience constitutes the value of that experience, and in the sense
+that it is the chief business of life at every point to make living thus
+contribute to an enrichment of its own perceptible meaning.
+
+We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
+reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning
+of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of
+subsequent experience. (1) The increment of meaning corresponds to
+the increased perception of the connections and continuities of the
+activities in which we are engaged. The activity begins in an impulsive
+form; that is, it is blind. It does not know what it is about; that is
+to say, what are its interactions with other activities. An activity
+which brings education or instruction with it makes one aware of some
+of the connections which had been imperceptible. To recur to our simple
+example, a child who reaches for a bright light gets burned. Henceforth
+he knows that a certain act of touching in connection with a certain
+act of vision (and vice-versa) means heat and pain; or, a certain
+light means a source of heat. The acts by which a scientific man in his
+laboratory learns more about flame differ no whit in principle. By doing
+certain things, he makes perceptible certain connections of heat with
+other things, which had been previously ignored. Thus his acts in
+relation to these things get more meaning; he knows better what he
+is doing or "is about" when he has to do with them; he can intend
+consequences instead of just letting them happen--all synonymous ways
+of saying the same thing. At the same stroke, the flame has gained in
+meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation, about light and
+temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its intellectual content.
+
+(2) The other side of an educative experience is an added power of
+subsequent direction or control. To say that one knows what he is about,
+or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of course, that he can
+better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can, therefore, get
+ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial consequences and
+avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative experience, then, one
+in which instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is
+contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a
+capricious activity on the other. (a) In the latter one "does not
+care what happens"; one just lets himself go and avoids connecting the
+consequences of one's act (the evidences of its connections with other
+things) with the act. It is customary to frown upon such aimless
+random activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or
+lawlessness. But there is a tendency to seek the cause of such aimless
+activities in the youth's own disposition, isolated from everything
+else. But in fact such activity is explosive, and due to maladjustment
+with surroundings. Individuals act capriciously whenever they act under
+external dictation, or from being told, without having a purpose of
+their own or perceiving the bearing of the deed upon other acts. One may
+learn by doing something which he does not understand; even in the most
+intelligent action, we do much which we do not mean, because the largest
+portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend are not
+perceived or anticipated. But we learn only because after the act is
+performed we note results which we had not noted before. But much work
+in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of
+such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to
+see the connection between the result--say the answer--and the method
+pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and
+a kind of miracle. Such action is essentially capricious, and leads to
+capricious habits. (b) Routine action, action which is automatic, may
+increase skill to do a particular thing. In so far, it might be said
+to have an educative effect. But it does not lead to new perceptions
+of bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens the
+meaning-horizon. And since the environment changes and our way of acting
+has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced connection
+with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at
+some critical moment. The vaunted "skill" turns out gross ineptitude.
+
+The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
+reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been
+criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the
+end (the result) and the process. This is verbally self-contradictory,
+but only verbally. It means that experience as an active process
+occupies time and that its later period completes its earlier portion;
+it brings to light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived.
+The later outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the
+experience as a whole establishes a bent or disposition toward the
+things possessing this meaning. Every such continuous experience
+or activity is educative, and all education resides in having such
+experiences.
+
+It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention
+later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as
+personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken in the earlier
+chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them
+with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of
+catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult
+group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of
+established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in
+the main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the
+experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits,
+better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be
+an improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of the
+extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious
+social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce
+these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made
+an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless
+far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive
+agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only
+a development of children and youth but also of the future society of
+which they will be the constituents.
+
+Summary. Education may be conceived either retrospectively or
+prospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as process of
+accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the past
+for a resource in a developing future. The former finds its standards
+and patterns in what has gone before. The mind may be regarded as a
+group of contents resulting from having certain things presented. In
+this case, the earlier presentations constitute the material to which
+the later are to be assimilated. Emphasis upon the value of the early
+experiences of immature beings is most important, especially because of
+the tendency to regard them as of little account. But these experiences
+do not consist of externally presented material, but of interaction of
+native activities with the environment which progressively modifies both
+the activities and the environment. The defect of the Herbartian theory
+of formation through presentations consists in slighting this constant
+interaction and change. The same principle of criticism applies to
+theories which find the primary subject matter of study in the cultural
+products--especially the literary products--of man's history. Isolated
+from their connection with the present environment in which individuals
+have to act, they become a kind of rival and distracting environment.
+Their value lies in their use to increase the meaning of the things with
+which we have actively to do at the present time. The idea of education
+advanced in these chapters is formally summed up in the idea of
+continuous reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off
+from education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as
+external formation, and as recapitulation of the past.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
+
+For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned
+with education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to
+make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of
+education as it operates in different types of community life. To say
+that education is a social function, securing direction and development
+in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to
+which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the
+quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that
+a society which not only changes but-which has the ideal of such
+change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods
+of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its
+own customs. To make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own
+educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer
+quarters with the nature of present social life.
+
+1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word, but many
+things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds
+of purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in
+which his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they
+had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life.
+Within every larger social organization there are numerous minor groups:
+not only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious,
+associations. There are political parties with differing aims, social
+sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely
+together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. In many modern
+states and in some ancient, there is great diversity of populations,
+of varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
+standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for
+example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an
+inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (See ante, p.
+20.)
+
+The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a
+eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning
+de jure and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy, the former
+connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one by
+its very nature. The qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy
+community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of
+sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at the facts which the term
+denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation,
+we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. Men
+banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that
+prey upon the public while serving it, political machines held together
+by the interest of plunder, are included. If it is said that such
+organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal
+requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the
+conception of society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having
+no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations,
+no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of
+the praiseworthy qualities of "Society" which hold it together. There
+is honor among thieves, and a band of robbers has a common interest as
+respects its members. Gangs are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow
+cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes. Family life may be marked
+by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and yet
+be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education given by a
+group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the
+socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once
+more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social
+life. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes. We cannot
+set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We
+must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order
+to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we
+have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are
+actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms
+of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize
+undesirable features and suggest improvement. Now in any social group
+whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in
+common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative
+intercourse with other groups. From these two traits we derive
+our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are
+consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms
+of association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal
+band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members together
+are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and
+that they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other
+groups with respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence, the
+education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on
+the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard,
+we find that there are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in
+which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth for
+the experience of other members--it is readily communicable--and
+that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into
+relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies
+of culture, as well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a
+due part in the political organization and in return receives support
+from it. In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and
+shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes
+of association.
+
+I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically
+governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an
+organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command
+must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects, must
+call some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government
+could do everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical
+declaration is at least a recognition that the bond of union is
+not merely one of coercive force. It may be said, however, that the
+activities appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading--that such
+a government calls into functioning activity simply capacity for fear.
+In a way, this statement is true. But it overlooks the fact that
+fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience. Caution,
+circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert
+what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling
+the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission. The
+real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread
+and hope of specific tangible reward--say comfort and ease--many other
+capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such
+a way as to pervert them. Instead of operating on their own account they
+are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
+
+This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common
+interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of
+the social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. In
+order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of
+the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take
+from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and
+experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters,
+educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party loses in
+meaning, when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience
+is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject-class prevents
+social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the superior class are
+less material and less perceptible, but equally real. Their culture
+tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art
+becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their
+knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.
+
+Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety
+of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity
+of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought.
+The more activity is restricted to a few definite lines--as it is
+when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of
+experiences--the more action tends to become routine on the part of the
+class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on
+the part of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato
+defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which
+control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no
+slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in
+activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do
+not understand and have no personal interest in. Much is said about
+scientific management of work. It is a narrow view which restricts
+the science which secures efficiency of operation to movements of the
+muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the
+relations of a man to his work--including his relations to others who
+take part--which will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is
+doing. Efficiency in production often demands division of labor. But
+it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the technical,
+intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they do,
+and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such
+perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as efficiency of
+activity and scientific management to purely technical externals is
+evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in
+control of industry--those who supply its aims. Because of their lack
+of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not sufficient
+stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in
+industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
+technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and
+intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the
+failure to take into account the significant social factors means none
+the less an absence of mind, and a corresponding distortion of emotional
+life. II. This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all
+associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second
+point. The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its
+antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever
+one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out from full
+interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the
+protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress
+through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from
+one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they
+had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the
+interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned
+and unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity
+and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals
+within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as
+synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact that they have
+identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs.
+On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others,
+for such contact might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion
+reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding mental
+life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical
+environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the
+field where we are apt to ignore it--the sphere of social contacts.
+Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the
+operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between
+peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the
+alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
+fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between
+them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another,
+and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial
+tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers;
+to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible
+connection with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the
+intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of
+space.
+
+2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point
+to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more
+varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon
+the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The
+second means not only freer interaction between social groups (once
+isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change
+in social habit--its continuous readjustment through meeting the new
+situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are
+precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society.
+
+Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form
+of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and
+where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a
+democratic community more interested than other communities have cause
+to be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of democracy
+to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that
+a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless
+those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a
+democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it
+must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these
+can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A
+democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of
+associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension
+in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so
+that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to
+consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own,
+is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race,
+and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import
+of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact
+denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to
+respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action.
+They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as
+the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which
+in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.
+
+The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a
+greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy,
+are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort.
+On the contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of
+manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication
+which flowed from the command of science over natural energy. But
+after greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community
+of interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of
+deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously a society to
+which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must see to
+it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable
+and easy terms. A society marked off into classes need he specially
+attentive only to the education of its ruling elements. A society which
+is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change
+occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated
+to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will
+be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose
+significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be a
+confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of
+the blind and externally directed activities of others.
+
+3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be
+devoted to making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas in
+education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider
+the educational theories which have been evolved in three epochs when
+the social import of education was especially conspicuous. The first one
+to be considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than did
+he the fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is
+doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be
+useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs);
+and that it is the business of education to discover these aptitudes and
+progressively to train them for social use. Much which has been said so
+far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But
+conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict
+these ideas in their application. He never got any conception of the
+indefinite plurality of activities which may characterize an individual
+and a social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited
+number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements. Plato's
+starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately
+upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we
+shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end,
+the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the
+possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements
+are to be ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and
+distribution of activities--what he called justice--as a trait of both
+individual and social organization. But how is the knowledge of the
+final and permanent good to be achieved? In dealing with this question
+we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is
+not possible save in a just and harmonious social order. Everywhere
+else the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false
+perspectives. A disorganized and factional society sets up a number of
+different models and standards. Under such conditions it is impossible
+for the individual to attain consistency of mind. Only a complete whole
+is fully self-consistent. A society which rests upon the supremacy of
+some factor over another irrespective of its rational or proportionate
+claims, inevitably leads thought astray. It puts a premium on certain
+things and slurs over others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is
+forced and distorted. Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns
+furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just state will
+these be such as to give the right education; and only those who have
+rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering
+principle of things. We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle.
+However, Plato suggested a way out. A few men, philosophers or lovers
+of wisdom--or truth--may by study learn at least in outline the proper
+patterns of true existence. If a powerful ruler should form a state
+after these patterns, then its regulations could be preserved. An
+education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what
+they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the
+work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part,
+and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
+maintained.
+
+It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a
+more adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance
+of social arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those
+arrangements upon the means used to educate the young. It would be
+impossible to find a deeper sense of the function of education in
+discovering and developing personal capacities, and training them so
+that they would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society
+in which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato could
+not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he clearly saw.
+
+While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in
+society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional
+status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education,
+he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall
+by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.
+Consequently the testing and sifting function of education only shows
+to which one of three classes an individual belongs. There being no
+recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could
+be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
+combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable. There
+were only three types of faculties or powers in the individual's
+constitution. Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each
+class, for only diversity makes change and progress.
+
+In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned
+to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human
+wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites,
+they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition.
+They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its
+internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of
+reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess
+this are capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time
+the legislators of the state--for laws are the universals which control
+the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in intent, Plato
+subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that
+lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his
+incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a
+society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers
+and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of
+individuality. We cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is
+happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those
+activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that
+it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its
+possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in
+knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping
+of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off
+classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely
+numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say
+that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social
+organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities
+of individuals, not stratification by classes. Although his educational
+philosophy was revolutionary, it was none the less in bondage to static
+ideals. He thought that change or alteration was evidence of lawless
+flux; that true reality was unchangeable. Hence while he would radically
+change the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state
+in which change would subsequently have no place. The final end of life
+is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even
+minor details are to be altered. Though they might not be inherently
+important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds of men to the
+idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic. The breakdown of
+his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to
+gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which
+should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education
+could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after
+that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the
+existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident
+by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of
+ruling power in the state.
+
+4. The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In the
+eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very different
+circle of ideas. "Nature" still means something antithetical to existing
+social organization; Plato exercised a great influence upon Rousseau.
+But the voice of nature now speaks for the diversity of individual
+talent and for the need of free development of individuality in all
+its variety. Education in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the
+method of instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original
+endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even as
+antisocial. Social arrangements were thought of as mere external
+expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might secure a greater
+amount of private happiness for themselves. Nevertheless, these
+statements convey only an inadequate idea of the true significance
+of the movement. In reality its chief interest was in progress and
+in social progress. The seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat
+transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society--toward
+cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was humanity. In membership in
+humanity, as distinct from a state, man's capacities would be liberated;
+while in existing political organizations his powers were hampered and
+distorted to meet the requirements and selfish interests of the
+rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme individualism was but the
+counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite perfectibility of
+man and of a social organization having a scope as wide as humanity.
+The emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a
+comprehensive and progressive society.
+
+The heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the
+social estate in which they found themselves. They attributed these
+evils to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. Such
+limitation was both distorting and corrupting. Their impassioned
+devotion to emancipation of life from external restrictions which
+operated to the exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past feudal
+system consigned power, found intellectual formulation in a worship
+of nature. To give "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial,
+corrupt, and inequitable social order by a new and better kingdom of
+humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a working
+power was strengthened by the advances of natural science. Inquiry
+freed from prejudice and artificial restraints of church and state had
+revealed that the world is a scene of law. The Newtonian solar system,
+which expressed the reign of natural law, was a scene of wonderful
+harmony, where every force balanced with every other. Natural law would
+accomplish the same result in human relations, if men would only get rid
+of the artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.
+
+Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in
+insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen that economic
+and political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of
+thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external chains
+was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and
+ideals. What was called social life, existing institutions, were too
+false and corrupt to be intrusted with this work. How could it
+be expected to undertake it when the undertaking meant its own
+destruction? "Nature" must then be the power to which the enterprise was
+to be left. Even the extreme sensationalistic theory of knowledge which
+was current derived itself from this conception. To insist that mind is
+originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the possibilities
+of education. If the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by
+objects, there were no limits to the possibility of education by means
+of the natural environment. And since the natural world of objects is
+a scene of harmonious "truth," this education would infallibly produce
+minds filled with the truth.
+
+5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm
+for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the constructive side
+became obvious. Merely to leave everything to nature was, after all, but
+to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the accidents
+of circumstance. Not only was some method required but also some
+positive organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the process
+of instruction. The "complete and harmonious development of all
+powers," having as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive
+humanity, required definite organization for its realization. Private
+individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could
+not execute the work. A Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort
+philanthropically inclined persons having wealth and power to follow his
+example. But even Pestalozzi saw that any effective pursuit of the new
+educational ideal required the support of the state. The realization
+of the new education destined to produce a new society was, after all,
+dependent upon the activities of existing states. The movement for the
+democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and
+administered schools.
+
+So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the
+movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement
+in political life--a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent
+movements. Under the influence of German thought in particular,
+education became a civic function and the civic function was identified
+with the realization of the ideal of the national state. The "state" was
+substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To
+form the citizen, not the "man," became the aim of education. 1 The
+historic situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of
+the Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt
+(and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that
+systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and
+maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they were
+weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen they
+made this condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and
+thoroughly grounded system of public education.
+
+This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory.
+The individualistic theory receded into the background. The state
+furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also
+its goal. When the actual practice was such that the school system, from
+the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied
+the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and
+administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and
+political defense and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to
+emphasize the aim of social efficiency. And with the immense importance
+attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and
+more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret
+social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism.
+Since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required
+subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state
+both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy
+in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like
+subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of
+disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since,
+however, the ideal of culture as complete development of personality
+persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the
+two ideas. The reconciliation took the form of the conception of the
+"organic" character of the state. The individual in his isolation is
+nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and meaning of
+organized institutions does he attain true personality. What appears to
+be his subordination to political authority and the demand for sacrifice
+of himself to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his
+own the objective reason manifested in the state--the only way in which
+he can become truly rational. The notion of development which we have
+seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the Hegelian
+philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine the two ideas
+of complete realization of personality and thoroughgoing "disciplinary"
+subordination to existing institutions. The extent of the transformation
+of educational philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation
+occupied by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence,
+may be gathered from Kant, who well expresses the earlier
+individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics, consisting
+of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth century, he
+defines education as the process by which man becomes man. Mankind
+begins its history submerged in nature--not as Man who is a creature of
+reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and appetite. Nature
+offers simply the germs which education is to develop and perfect. The
+peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create himself by his
+own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational,
+and free being. This creative effort is carried on by the educational
+activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon men
+consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing
+state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity.
+But there is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to
+educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of
+with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best
+possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their
+children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as
+instruments of their own purposes.
+
+Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must
+depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity.
+"All culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them.
+Simply through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who
+are capable of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the
+gradual approximation of human nature to its end possible. Rulers are
+simply interested in such training as will make their subjects better
+tools for their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of privately
+conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. For the rulers'
+interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is best
+for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the schools, wish
+to draw their plans. We have in this view an express statement of
+the points characteristic of the eighteenth century individualistic
+cosmopolitanism. The full development of private personality is
+identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with the idea
+of progress. In addition we have an explicit fear of the hampering
+influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the
+attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time,
+Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea
+that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular
+the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education
+carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
+individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to
+his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the
+educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit,
+Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and
+compulsory system of education extending from the primary school
+through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and
+supervision all private educational enterprises. Two results should
+stand out from this brief historical survey. The first is that such
+terms as the individual and the social conceptions of education are
+quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato had
+the ideal of an education which should equate individual realization and
+social coherency and stability. His situation forced his ideal into
+the notion of a society organized in stratified classes, losing the
+individual in the class. The eighteenth century educational philosophy
+was highly individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a
+noble and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include
+humanity, and providing for the indefinite perfectibility of mankind.
+The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early nineteenth century
+endeavored again to equate the ideals of a free and complete
+development of cultured personality with social discipline and political
+subordination. It made the national state an intermediary between the
+realization of private personality on one side and of humanity on the
+other. Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating
+principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of "harmonious
+development of all the powers of personality" or in the more recent
+terminology of "social efficiency." All this reinforces the statement
+which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a social
+process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind
+of society we have in mind. These considerations pave the way for our
+second conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in and
+for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a
+wider social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian" conception
+suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite organs of
+execution and agencies of administration. In Europe, in the Continental
+states particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for
+human welfare and progress was captured by national interests and
+harnessed to do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and
+exclusive. The social aim of education and its national aim were
+identified, and the result was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a
+social aim.
+
+This confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human
+intercourse. On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend
+national boundaries. They are largely international in quality and
+method. They involve interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples
+inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of national
+sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the
+present time. Each nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and
+incipient war with its neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme
+judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as matter of course that
+each has interests which are exclusively its own. To question this is
+to question the very idea of national sovereignty which is assumed to
+be basic to political practice and political science. This contradiction
+(for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere of associated and
+mutually helpful social life and the narrower sphere of exclusive and
+hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational
+theory a clearer conception of the meaning of "social" as a function
+and test of education than has yet been attained. Is it possible for an
+educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full
+social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and
+corrupted? Internally, the question has to face the tendencies, due to
+present economic conditions, which split society into classes some
+of which are made merely tools for the higher culture of others.
+Externally, the question is concerned with the reconciliation of
+national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior devotion to the things
+which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national political
+boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be worked out by merely
+negative means. It is not enough to see to it that education is not
+actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one
+class by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude
+and efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the
+effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the
+nation equality of equipment for their future careers. Accomplishment
+of this end demands not only adequate administrative provision of school
+facilities, and such supplementation of family resources as will
+enable youth to take advantage of them, but also such modification
+of traditional ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and
+traditional methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the
+youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be masters
+of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem remote
+of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet
+tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public
+system of education. The same principle has application on the side of
+the considerations which concern the relations of one nation to another.
+It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything
+which would stimulate international jealousy and animosity. The emphasis
+must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative human
+pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations. The secondary
+and provisional character of national sovereignty in respect to the
+fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all
+human beings with one another must be instilled as a working disposition
+of mind. If these applications seem to be remote from a consideration
+of the philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning
+of the idea of education previously developed has not been adequately
+grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education
+as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to
+social aims. Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be
+inconsistently applied.
+
+Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds
+of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction
+implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to
+measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the
+interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness
+and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable
+society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up
+barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society
+which makes provision for participation in its good of all its
+members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its
+institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated
+life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of
+education which gives individuals a personal interest in social
+relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure
+social changes without introducing disorder. Three typical historic
+philosophies of education were considered from this point of view.
+The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that
+stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class
+rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called individualism
+of the eighteenth-century enlightenment was found to involve the notion
+of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual was
+to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the development
+of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature. The
+institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied
+this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so doing
+narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of
+the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination
+of the individual to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain
+in Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the
+existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the
+citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he preferred to try for
+the latter rather than for the former. But there are many sayings of his
+which point to the formation of the citizen as ideally the higher, and
+which indicate that his own endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was
+simply the best makeshift the corruption of the times permitted him to
+sketch.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
+
+1. The Nature of an Aim.
+
+The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
+anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
+education in a democratic community. For it assumed that the aim of
+education is to enable individuals to continue their education--or that
+the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now
+this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except
+where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there
+is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and
+institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably
+distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our
+search for aims in education, we are not concerned, therefore, with
+finding an end outside of the educative process to which education is
+subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are rather concerned with
+the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which
+they operate and when they are set up from without. And the latter
+state of affairs must obtain when social relationships are not equitably
+balanced. For in that case, some portions of the whole social group will
+find their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will not
+arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal
+aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly
+their own.
+
+Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls
+within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. We approach
+the definition by a contrast of mere results with ends. Any exhibition
+of energy has results. The wind blows about the sands of the desert; the
+position of the grains is changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not
+an end. For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills
+what went before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One state
+of affairs is just as good as any other. Consequently there is no basis
+upon which to select an earlier state of affairs as a beginning, a
+later as an end, and to consider what intervenes as a process of
+transformation and realization.
+
+Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes
+in the sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees'
+actions may be called ends not because they are designed or consciously
+intended, but because they are true terminations or completions of what
+has preceded. When the bees gather pollen and make wax and build cells,
+each step prepares the way for the next. When cells are built, the queen
+lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood
+them and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them. When they
+are hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of themselves.
+Now we are so familiar with such facts, that we are apt to dismiss them
+on the ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing
+anyway. Thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the
+event is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of
+each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while
+the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other
+stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and
+finishes off the process. Since aims relate always to results, the first
+thing to look to when it is a question of aims, is whether the work
+assigned possesses intrinsic continuity. Or is it a mere serial
+aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and then another? To talk about
+an educational aim when approximately each act of a pupil is dictated
+by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that
+which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions
+by another, is to talk nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to
+permit capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous
+self-expression. An aim implies an orderly and ordered activity, one
+in which the order consists in the progressive completing of a process.
+Given an activity having a time span and cumulative growth within
+the time succession, an aim means foresight in advance of the end or
+possible termination. If bees anticipated the consequences of their
+activity, if they perceived their end in imaginative foresight, they
+would have the primary element in an aim. Hence it is nonsense to talk
+about the aim of education--or any other undertaking--where conditions
+do not permit of foresight of results, and do not stimulate a person to
+look ahead to see what the outcome of a given activity is to be. In the
+next place the aim as a foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it
+is not an idle view of a mere spectator, but influences the steps taken
+to reach the end. The foresight functions in three ways. In the first
+place, it involves careful observation of the given conditions to see
+what are the means available for reaching the end, and to discover the
+hindrances in the way. In the second place, it suggests the proper order
+or sequence in the use of means. It facilitates an economical selection
+and arrangement. In the third place, it makes choice of alternatives
+possible. If we can predict the outcome of acting this way or that, we
+can then compare the value of the two courses of action; we can pass
+judgment upon their relative desirability. If we know that stagnant
+water breeds mosquitoes and that they are likely to carry disease, we
+can, disliking that anticipated result, take steps to avert it. Since we
+do not anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons
+concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which produces
+the result. We intervene to bring about this result or that.
+
+Of course these three points are closely connected with one another.
+We can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny
+of present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the
+motive for observations. The more adequate our observations, the more
+varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents itself,
+and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be
+made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the
+situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen
+activity possess, and the more flexibly controllable is it. Where only
+a single outcome has been thought of, the mind has nothing else to think
+of; the meaning attaching to the act is limited. One only steams ahead
+toward the mark. Sometimes such a narrow course may be effective. But if
+unexpected difficulties offer themselves, one has not as many resources
+at command as if he had chosen the same line of action after a broader
+survey of the possibilities of the field. He cannot make needed
+readjustments readily.
+
+The net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting
+intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis
+upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own
+capacities. To do these things means to have a mind--for mind is
+precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of
+facts and their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a
+thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its
+accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan capable of
+execution and the obstructions in the way,--or, if it is really a mind
+to do the thing and not a vague aspiration--it is to have a plan which
+takes account of resources and difficulties. Mind is capacity to refer
+present conditions to future results, and future consequences to present
+conditions. And these traits are just what is meant by having an aim
+or a purpose. A man is stupid or blind or unintelligent--lacking in
+mind--just in the degree in which in any activity he does not know what
+he is about, namely, the probable consequences of his acts. A man is
+imperfectly intelligent when he contents himself with looser guesses
+about the outcome than is needful, just taking a chance with his luck,
+or when he forms plans apart from study of the actual conditions,
+including his own capacities. Such relative absence of mind means to
+make our feelings the measure of what is to happen. To be intelligent we
+must "stop, look, listen" in making the plan of an activity.
+
+To identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to
+show its value--its function in experience. We are only too given to
+making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness." We forget
+that it comes from the adjective "conscious." To be conscious is to
+be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate,
+observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing
+which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or which has
+impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a name for the
+purposeful quality of an activity, for the fact that it is directed by
+an aim. Put the other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning,
+not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to
+perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent.
+
+2. The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our discussion
+to a consideration of the criteria involved in a correct establishing of
+aims. (1) The aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. It
+must be based upon a consideration of what is already going on; upon the
+resources and difficulties of the situation. Theories about the proper
+end of our activities--educational and moral theories--often violate
+this principle. They assume ends lying outside our activities; ends
+foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which issue from
+some outside source. Then the problem is to bring our activities to
+bear upon the realization of these externally supplied ends. They are
+something for which we ought to act. In any case such "aims" limit
+intelligence; they are not the expression of mind in foresight,
+observation, and choice of the better among alternative possibilities.
+They limit intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed
+by some authority external to intelligence, leaving to the latter
+nothing but a mechanical choice of means.
+
+(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the
+attempt to realize them. This impression must now be qualified. The aim
+as it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch. The act of striving
+to realize it tests its worth. If it suffices to direct activity
+successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole function is
+to set a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may suffice. But
+usually--at least in complicated situations--acting upon it brings to
+light conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision
+of the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. An
+aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet
+circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is
+always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed
+to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the
+situation. What happens in the course of action neither confirms,
+refutes, nor alters it. Such an end can only be insisted upon. The
+failure that results from its lack of adaptation is attributed simply
+to the perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the end is not
+reasonable under the circumstances. The value of a legitimate aim, on
+the contrary, lies in the fact that we can use it to change conditions.
+It is a method for dealing with conditions so as to effect desirable
+alterations in them. A farmer who should passively accept things just as
+he finds them would make as great a mistake as he who framed his plans
+in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the
+evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its
+very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard
+snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present state
+of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment,
+keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions
+develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly
+growing as it is tested in action.
+
+(3) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The term end
+in view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination
+or conclusion of some process. The only way in which we can define
+an activity is by putting before ourselves the objects in which it
+terminates--as one's aim in shooting is the target. But we must remember
+that the object is only a mark or sign by which the mind specifies the
+activity one desires to carry out. Strictly speaking, not the target
+but hitting the target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the
+target, but also by the sight on the gun. The different objects which
+are thought of are means of directing the activity. Thus one aims at,
+say, a rabbit; what he wants is to shoot straight: a certain kind of
+activity. Or, if it is the rabbit he wants, it is not rabbit apart from
+his activity, but as a factor in activity; he wants to eat the rabbit,
+or to show it as evidence of his marksmanship--he wants to do something
+with it. The doing with the thing, not the thing in isolation, is
+his end. The object is but a phase of the active end,--continuing the
+activity successfully. This is what is meant by the phrase, used above,
+"freeing activity."
+
+In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go
+on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed from without
+the activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be
+attained and possessed. When one has such a notion, activity is a mere
+unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important
+on its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil;
+something which must be gone through before one can reach the object
+which is alone worth while. In other words, the external idea of the
+aim leads to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows
+up within an activity as plan for its direction is always both ends and
+means, the distinction being only one of convenience. Every means is a
+temporary end until we have attained it. Every end becomes a means of
+carrying activity further as soon as it is achieved. We call it end
+when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are
+engaged; means when it marks off the present direction. Every divorce of
+end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity
+and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he
+could. A farmer has to use plants and animals to carry on his farming
+activities. It certainly makes a great difference to his life whether he
+is fond of them, or whether he regards them merely as means which he has
+to employ to get something else in which alone he is interested. In the
+former case, his entire course of activity is significant; each phase
+of it has its own value. He has the experience of realizing his end at
+every stage; the postponed aim, or end in view, being merely a sight
+ahead by which to keep his activity going fully and freely. For if he
+does not look ahead, he is more likely to find himself blocked. The
+aim is as definitely a means of action as is any other portion of an
+activity.
+
+3. Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about
+educational aims. They are just like aims in any directed occupation.
+The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain
+resources with which to do, and certain obstacles with which to contend.
+The conditions with which the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or
+resources, have their own structure and operation independently of
+any purpose of his. Seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects
+devour, blight comes, the seasons change. His aim is simply to utilize
+these various conditions; to make his activities and their energies
+work together, instead of against one another. It would be absurd if
+the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any reference to these
+conditions of soil, climate, characteristic of plant growth, etc.
+His purpose is simply a foresight of the consequences of his energies
+connected with those of the things about him, a foresight used to direct
+his movements from day to day. Foresight of possible consequences leads
+to more careful and extensive observation of the nature and performances
+of the things he had to do with, and to laying out a plan--that is, of a
+certain order in the acts to be performed.
+
+It is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as
+absurd for the latter to set up his "own" aims as the proper objects of
+the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an
+ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Aims mean acceptance of
+responsibility for the observations, anticipations, and arrangements
+required in carrying on a function--whether farming or educating. Any
+aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and planning
+in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it
+gets in the way of the individual's own common sense (as it will surely
+do if imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm.
+
+And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims.
+Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract
+idea like education. And consequently their purposes are indefinitely
+varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and
+with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even
+the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more
+harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather
+suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and
+how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of the concrete
+situations in which they find themselves. As a recent writer has
+said: "To lead this boy to read Scott's novels instead of old Sleuth's
+stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying
+from John's make-up; to prepare this class to study medicine,--these
+are samples of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the
+concrete work of education." Bearing these qualifications in mind, we
+shall proceed to state some of the characteristics found in all good
+educational aims. (1) An educational aim must be founded upon the
+intrinsic activities and needs (including original instincts and
+acquired habits) of the given individual to be educated. The tendency of
+such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers,
+and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or responsibility. In
+general, there is a disposition to take considerations which are dear
+to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends irrespective of the
+capacities of those educated. There is also an inclination to propound
+aims which are so uniform as to neglect the specific powers and
+requirements of an individual, forgetting that all learning is something
+which happens to an individual at a given time and place. The larger
+range of perception of the adult is of great value in observing the
+abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they may amount
+to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what certain
+tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have the adult
+achievements we should be without assurance as to the significance of
+the drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring activities of childhood.
+So if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to see the
+import of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use
+adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the
+doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a
+fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those educated.
+
+(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating
+with the activities of those undergoing instruction. It must suggest the
+kind of environment needed to liberate and to organize their capacities.
+Unless it lends itself to the construction of specific procedures, and
+unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter
+is worthless. Instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it
+prevents the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the
+situation. It operates to exclude recognition of everything except what
+squares up with the fixed end in view. Every rigid aim just because
+it is rigidly given seems to render it unnecessary to give careful
+attention to concrete conditions. Since it must apply anyhow, what is
+the use of noting details which do not count?
+
+The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive
+them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what
+is current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As
+a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is
+confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is
+the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative
+supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that
+he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and
+the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher's experience is then
+reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The latter
+receive their aims through a double or treble external imposition,
+and are constantly confused by the conflict between the aims which are
+natural to their own experience at the time and those in which they are
+taught to acquiesce. Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic
+significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall be
+intellectually confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims.
+
+(3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged
+to be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific, is,
+of course, general in its ramified connections, for it leads out
+indefinitely into other things. So far as a general idea makes us more
+alive to these connections, it cannot be too general. But "general"
+also means "abstract," or detached from all specific context. And such
+abstractness means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon
+teaching and learning as mere means of getting ready for an end
+disconnected from the means. That education is literally and all
+the time its own reward means that no alleged study or discipline is
+educative unless it is worth while in its own immediate having. A
+truly general aim broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to take more
+consequences (connections) into account. This means a wider and more
+flexible observation of means. The more interacting forces, for example,
+the farmer takes into account, the more varied will be his immediate
+resources. He will see a greater number of possible starting places, and
+a greater number of ways of getting at what he wants to do. The fuller
+one's conception of possible future achievements, the less his present
+activity is tied down to a small number of alternatives. If one knew
+enough, one could start almost anywhere and sustain his activities
+continuously and fruitfully.
+
+Understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the
+sense of a broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall
+take up some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational
+theories of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the
+immediate concrete and diversified aims which are always the educator's
+real concern. We premise (as indeed immediately follows from what
+has been said) that there is no need of making a choice among them or
+regarding them as competitors. When we come to act in a tangible way we
+have to select or choose a particular act at a particular time, but any
+number of comprehensive ends may exist without competition, since they
+mean simply different ways of looking at the same scene. One cannot
+climb a number of different mountains simultaneously, but the views had
+when different mountains are ascended supplement one another: they do
+not set up incompatible, competing worlds. Or, putting the matter in
+a slightly different way, one statement of an end may suggest certain
+questions and observations, and another statement another set of
+questions, calling for other observations. Then the more general ends we
+have, the better. One statement will emphasize what another slurs over.
+What a plurality of hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a
+plurality of stated aims may do for the instructor.
+
+Summary. An aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to
+consciousness and made a factor in determining present observation
+and choice of ways of acting. It signifies that an activity has
+become intelligent. Specifically it means foresight of the alternative
+consequences attendant upon acting in a given situation in different
+ways, and the use of what is anticipated to direct observation and
+experiment. A true aim is thus opposed at every point to an aim which is
+imposed upon a process of action from without. The latter is fixed and
+rigid; it is not a stimulus to intelligence in the given situation, but
+is an externally dictated order to do such and such things. Instead of
+connecting directly with present activities, it is remote, divorced from
+the means by which it is to be reached. Instead of suggesting a
+freer and better balanced activity, it is a limit set to activity. In
+education, the currency of these externally imposed aims is responsible
+for the emphasis put upon the notion of preparation for a remote future
+and for rendering the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and
+slavish.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
+
+1. Nature as Supplying the Aim. We have just pointed out the futility
+of trying to establish the aim of education--some one final aim which
+subordinates all others to itself. We have indicated that since general
+aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey the
+existing conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might have any
+number of them, all consistent with one another. As matter of fact, a
+large number have been stated at different times, all having great local
+value. For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time.
+And we do not emphasize things which do not require emphasis--that is,
+such things as are taking care of themselves fairly well. We tend rather
+to frame our statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the
+contemporary situation; we take for granted, without explicit statement
+which would be of no use, whatever is right or approximately so. We
+frame our explicit aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about.
+It is, then, DO paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or
+generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just the
+things which it has least of in actual fact. A time of domination by
+authority will call out as response the desirability of great individual
+freedom; one of disorganized individual activities the need of social
+control as an educational aim.
+
+The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus
+balance each other. At different times such aims as complete living,
+better methods of language study, substitution of things for words,
+social efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete
+development of personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, a
+esthetic contemplation, utility, etc., have served. The following
+discussion takes up three statements of recent influence; certain others
+have been incidentally discussed in the previous chapters, and others
+will be considered later in a discussion of knowledge and of the values
+of studies. We begin with a consideration that education is a process
+of development in accordance with nature, taking Rousseau's statement,
+which opposed natural to social (See ante, p. 91); and then pass over
+to the antithetical conception of social efficiency, which often opposes
+social to natural.
+
+(1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and
+artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone
+to resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the
+law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her
+ways. The positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way
+in which it calls attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have
+regard to the natural endowment of those educated. Its weakness is the
+ease with which natural in the sense of normal is confused with the
+physical. The constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and
+contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out of the way and
+allow nature to do the work. Since no one has stated in the doctrine
+both its truth and falsity better than Rousseau, we shall turn to him.
+
+"Education," he says, "we receive from three sources--Nature, men,
+and things. The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities
+constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which we are taught to
+put this development constitutes that education given us by Men. The
+acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects constitutes
+that of things. Only when these three kinds of education are consonant
+and make for the same end, does a man tend towards his true goal. If we
+are asked what is this end, the answer is that of Nature. For since
+the concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their
+completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our control must
+necessarily regulate us in determining the other two." Then he defines
+Nature to mean the capacities and dispositions which are inborn, "as
+they exist prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the
+influence of the opinion of others."
+
+The wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as
+fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction
+with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say better what is said
+in the first sentences. The three factors of educative development
+are (a) the native structure of our bodily organs and their functional
+activities; (b) the uses to which the activities of these organs are put
+under the influence of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with
+the environment. This statement certainly covers the ground. His other
+two propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the
+three factors of education are consonant and cooperative does adequate
+development of the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities
+of the organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But
+it requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other
+statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these
+three things as factors which must work together to some extent in
+order that any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as
+separate and independent operations. Especially does he believe that
+there is an independent and, as he says, "spontaneous" development of
+the native organs and faculties. He thinks that this development can
+go on irrespective of the use to which they are put. And it is to this
+separate development that education coming from social contact is to be
+subordinated. Now there is an immense difference between a use of native
+activities in accord with those activities themselves--as distinct from
+forcing them and perverting them--and supposing that they have a normal
+development apart from any use, which development furnishes the standard
+and norm of all learning by use. To recur to our previous illustration,
+the process of acquiring language is a practically perfect model of
+proper educative growth. The start is from native activities of the
+vocal apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose
+that these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself
+would evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle
+would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and
+noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the development
+of articulate speech--which they are--but as furnishing language
+itself--the standard for all teaching of language.
+
+The point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right,
+introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the
+structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all
+teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating
+that they supply not only the conditions but also the ends of their
+development. As matter of fact, the native activities develop, in
+contrast with random and capricious exercise, through the uses to which
+they are put. And the office of the social medium is, as we have seen,
+to direct growth through putting powers to the best possible use. The
+instinctive activities may be called, metaphorically, spontaneous,
+in the sense that the organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of
+operation,--a bias so strong that we cannot go contrary to it, though by
+trying to go contrary we may pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. But the
+notion of a spontaneous normal development of these activities is pure
+mythology. The natural, or native, powers furnish the initiating and
+limiting forces in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims.
+There is no learning except from a beginning in unlearned powers, but
+learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the unlearned
+powers. Rousseau's contrary opinion is doubtless due to the fact that he
+identified God with Nature; to him the original powers are wholly good,
+coming directly from a wise and good creator. To paraphrase the old
+saying about the country and the town, God made the original human
+organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put.
+Consequently the development of the former furnishes the standard to
+which the latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to determine the
+uses to which the original activities shall be put, they interfere with
+a divine plan. The interference by social arrangements with Nature,
+God's work, is the primary source of corruption in individuals.
+
+Rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all natural
+tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total
+depravity of innate human nature, and has had a powerful influence in
+modifying the attitude towards children's interests. But it is hardly
+necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good
+nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects for which
+they are employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing
+of some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many
+avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not to leave
+them alone to follow their own "spontaneous development," but to provide
+an environment which shall organize them.
+
+Returning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's statements,
+we find that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point the
+means of correcting many evils in current practices, and to indicate
+a number of desirable specific aims. (1) Natural development as an aim
+fixes attention upon the bodily organs and the need of health and vigor.
+The aim of natural development says to parents and teachers: Make health
+an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of
+the body--an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due recognition
+in practice would almost automatically revolutionize many of our
+educational practices. "Nature" is indeed a vague and metaphorical
+term, but one thing that "Nature" may be said to utter is that there are
+conditions of educational efficiency, and that till we have learned what
+these conditions are and have learned to make our practices accord with
+them, the noblest and most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer--are
+verbal and sentimental rather than efficacious.
+
+(2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect
+for physical mobility. In Rousseau's words: "Children are always in
+motion; a sedentary life is injurious." When he says that "Nature's
+intention is to strengthen the body before exercising the mind"
+he hardly states the fact fairly. But if he had said that nature's
+"intention" (to adopt his poetical form of speech) is to develop the
+mind especially by exercise of the muscles of the body he would have
+stated a positive fact. In other words, the aim of following nature
+means, in the concrete, regard for the actual part played by use of the
+bodily organs in explorations, in handling of materials, in plays
+and games. (3) The general aim translates into the aim of regard for
+individual differences among children. Nobody can take the principle of
+consideration of native powers into account without being struck by the
+fact that these powers differ in different individuals. The difference
+applies not merely to their intensity, but even more to their quality
+and arrangement. As Rouseau said: "Each individual is born with
+a distinctive temperament. We indiscriminately employ children of
+different bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the
+special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we have
+wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the
+short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while
+the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive."
+
+Lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the
+waxing, and waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and
+bloom irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. We must
+strike while the iron is hot. Especially precious are the first dawnings
+of power. More than we imagine, the ways in which the tendencies of
+early childhood are treated fix fundamental dispositions and condition
+the turn taken by powers that show themselves later. Educational concern
+with the early years of life--as distinct from inculcation of useful
+arts--dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi
+and Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth.
+The irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in the
+following passage of a student of the growth of the nervous system.
+"While growth continues, things bodily and mental are lopsided, for
+growth is never general, but is accentuated now at one spot, now at
+another. The methods which shall recognize in the presence of these
+enormous differences of endowment the dynamic values of natural
+inequalities of growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity to the
+rounding out gained by pruning will most closely follow that which
+takes place in the body and thus prove most effective." 1 Observation of
+natural tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint. They
+show themselves most readily in a child's spontaneous sayings and
+doings,--that is, in those he engages in when not put at set tasks and
+when not aware of being under observation. It does not follow that
+these tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but it does
+follow that since they are there, they are operative and must be
+taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones have an
+environment which keeps them active, and that their activity shall
+control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of
+the latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble
+parents when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too
+much direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them.
+At all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes as
+standards, and regard all deviations of children's impulses as evils
+to be eliminated. That artificiality against which the conception of
+following nature is so largely a protest, is the outcome of attempts to
+force children directly into the mold of grown-up standards.
+
+In conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following
+nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one
+another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been
+inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically
+unlimited power to it. All the differences between peoples and between
+classes and persons among the same people were said to be due to
+differences of training, of exercise, and practice. Originally, mind,
+reason, understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all.
+This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and
+the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As a protest
+against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less
+formal and abstract view of mind and its powers. It substituted specific
+instincts and impulses and physiological capacities, differing from
+individual to individual (just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out,
+even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment,
+memory, and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative
+accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of modern
+biology, physiology, and psychology. It means, in effect, that great
+as is the significance of nurture, of modification, and transformation
+through direct educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities,
+affords the foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. On the
+other hand, the doctrine of following nature was a political dogma. It
+meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs, and
+ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau's statement that everything is good
+as it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification only in
+its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence: "Everything
+degenerates in the hands of man." And again he says: "Natural man has
+an absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a complete integer and has no
+relation save to himself and to his fellow man. Civilized man is only a
+relative unit, the numerator of a fraction whose value depends upon its
+dominator, its relation to the integral body of society. Good political
+institutions are those which make a man unnatural." It is upon this
+conception of the artificial and harmful character of organized social
+life as it now exists 2 that he rested the notion that nature not merely
+furnishes prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan and goal.
+That evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a
+wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is
+true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart from the
+environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers will
+be put to better uses.
+
+2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the
+end of a true education and society the end of an evil one, could hardly
+fail to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the form of a
+doctrine that the business of education is to supply precisely what
+nature fails to secure; namely, habituation of an individual to social
+control; subordination of natural powers to social rules. It is not
+surprising to find that the value in the idea of social efficiency
+resides largely in its protest against the points at which the doctrine
+of natural development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is
+employed to slur over the truth in that conception. It is a fact that we
+must look to the activities and achievements of associated life to find
+what the development of power--that is to say, efficiency--means. The
+error is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather
+than of utilization to secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered
+adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by
+negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities
+in occupations having a social meaning. (1) Translated into specific
+aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial
+competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways
+in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence
+upon all the relationships of persons to one another. If an individual
+is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent
+upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He
+misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. If he
+is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there
+is grave danger that he may deprave himself and injure others in his
+possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect
+such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual
+ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only
+neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of
+educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic
+society, it is natural that the significance of an education which
+should have as a result ability to make one's way economically in the
+world, and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere
+display and luxury, should receive emphasis.
+
+There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end,
+existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final.
+A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of
+competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated
+when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite
+industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original
+capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a
+matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt
+changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring
+up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train
+for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. When the
+occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left behind
+with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had a less
+definite training. But, most of all, the present industrial constitution
+of society is, like every society which has ever existed, full of
+inequities. It is the aim of progressive education to take part in
+correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate
+them. Wherever social control means subordination of individual
+activities to class authority, there is danger that industrial education
+will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo. Differences
+of economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of
+individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the defects
+of the Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened method of
+selection.
+
+(2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary
+to separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. But
+the latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications which
+are vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from whatever make
+an individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political
+sense: it denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take
+a determining part in making as well as obeying laws. The aim of civic
+efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the notion of a
+training of mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that
+power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the
+things which most need to be done are things which involve one's
+relationships with others.
+
+Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too
+narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain periods have
+excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last
+analysis security of social progress depends upon them. For scientific
+men would have been thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally
+lacking in social efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately
+social efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share
+in a give and take of experience. It covers all that makes one's own
+experience more worth while to others, and all that enables one to
+participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of others. Ability
+to produce and to enjoy art, capacity for recreation, the significant
+utilization of leisure, are more important elements in it than elements
+conventionally associated oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest
+sense, social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind
+which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable;
+in breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make
+individuals impervious to the interests of others. When social
+efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its
+chief constituent (because its only guarantee) is omitted,--intelligent
+sympathy or good will. For sympathy as a desirable quality is something
+more than mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have
+in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.
+What is sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an
+unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall
+be, instead of an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find
+the good of their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service,
+are hard and metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgment
+of the diversity of goods which life may afford to different persons,
+and from faith in the social utility of encouraging every individual to
+make his own choice intelligent.
+
+3. Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is
+consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means
+at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to
+the raw and crude. When the "natural" is identified with this rawness,
+culture is opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is
+also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation
+of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is
+identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and
+meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency. Whether called
+culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is identical
+with the true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given
+to what is unique in an individual--and he would not be an individual if
+there were not something incommensurable about him. Its opposite is
+the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed,
+distinction of personality results, and with it greater promise for
+a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material
+commodities. For how can there be a society really worth serving unless
+it is constituted of individuals of significant personal qualities?
+
+The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social
+efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its rigid
+division of inferior and superior. The latter are supposed to have time
+and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the former are
+confined to providing external products. When social efficiency as
+measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be
+democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the
+masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and
+carried over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is
+that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for
+development of distinctive capacities be afforded all. The separation
+of the two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of
+the narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential
+justification.
+
+The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within
+the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external
+products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable
+experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities
+which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the
+strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are
+inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. To set up an
+external aim strengthens by reaction the false conception of culture
+which identifies it with something purely "inner." And the idea of
+perfecting an "inner" personality is a sure sign of social divisions.
+What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with
+others--which is not capable of free and full communication. What is
+termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten
+about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man
+might have internally--and therefore exclusively. What one is as a
+person is what one is as associated with others, in a free give and take
+of intercourse. This transcends both the efficiency which consists
+in supplying products to others and the culture which is an exclusive
+refinement and polish.
+
+Any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher,
+student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value
+to others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently
+worth while. Why then should it be thought that one must take his
+choice between sacrificing himself to doing useful things for others,
+or sacrificing them to pursuit of his own exclusive ends, whether the
+saving of his own soul or the building of an inner spiritual life and
+personality? What happens is that since neither of these things is
+persistently possible, we get a compromise and an alternation. One tries
+each course by turns. There is no greater tragedy than that so much
+of the professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world
+has emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual
+self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this dualism of
+life. The dualism is too deeply established to be easily overthrown; for
+that reason, it is the particular task of education at the present time
+to struggle in behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal
+culture are synonyms instead of antagonists.
+
+Summary. General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying
+the specific problems of education. Consequently it is a test of the
+value of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it
+will translate readily and consistently into the procedures which are
+suggested by another. We have applied this test to three general aims:
+Development according to nature, social efficiency, and culture or
+personal mental enrichment. In each case we have seen that the aims
+when partially stated come into conflict with each other. The partial
+statement of natural development takes the primitive powers in an
+alleged spontaneous development as the end-all. From this point of view
+training which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint;
+one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is
+corrupting. But when we recognize that natural activities mean native
+activities which develop only through the uses in which they are
+nurtured, the conflict disappears. Similarly a social efficiency which
+is defined in terms of rendering external service to others is of
+necessity opposed to the aim of enriching the meaning of experience,
+while a culture which is taken to consist in an internal refinement of a
+mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But social efficiency as an
+educational purpose should mean cultivation of power to join freely
+and fully in shared or common activities. This is impossible without
+culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because one cannot share
+in intercourse with others without learning--without getting a broader
+point of view and perceiving things of which one would otherwise be
+ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that
+it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of
+one's perception of meanings.
+
+1 Donaldson, Growth of Brain, p. 356.
+
+2 We must not forget that Rousseau had the idea of a radically different
+sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should be identical with
+the good of all its members, which he thought to be as much better than
+existing states as these are worse than the state of nature.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
+
+1. The Meaning of the Terms. We have already noticed the difference in
+the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former
+is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as
+another, since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound
+up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him. His
+fortunes are more or less at stake in the issue of events. Consequently
+he does whatever he can to influence the direction present occurrences
+take. One is like a man in a prison cell watching the rain out of the
+window; it is all the same to him. The other is like a man who has
+planned an outing for the next day which continuing rain will frustrate.
+He cannot, to be sure, by his present reactions affect to-morrow's
+weather, but he may take some steps which will influence future
+happenings, if only to postpone the proposed picnic. If a man sees a
+carriage coming which may run over him, if he cannot stop its movement,
+he can at least get out of the way if he foresees the consequence
+in time. In many instances, he can intervene even more directly. The
+attitude of a participant in the course of affairs is thus a double
+one: there is solicitude, anxiety concerning future consequences, and a
+tendency to act to assure better, and avert worse, consequences. There
+are words which denote this attitude: concern, interest. These words
+suggest that a person is bound up with the possibilities inhering in
+objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout for what they are likely
+to do to him; and that, on the basis of his expectation or foresight,
+he is eager to act so as to give things one turn rather than another.
+Interest and aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily connected. Such
+words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the results which are wanted and
+striven for; they take for granted the personal attitude of solicitude
+and attentive eagerness. Such words as interest, affection, concern,
+motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is foreseen upon the
+individual's fortunes, and his active desire to act to secure a possible
+result. They take for granted the objective changes. But the difference
+is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in one set of words
+is illuminated in the other. What is anticipated is objective and
+impersonal; to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being run over. But
+for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of
+standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response.
+The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference,
+which finds expression in solicitude and effort. While such words
+as affection, concern, and motive indicate an attitude of personal
+preference, they are always attitudes toward objects--toward what is
+foreseen. We may call the phase of objective foresight intellectual, and
+the phase of personal concern emotional and volitional, but there is no
+separation in the facts of the situation.
+
+Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran their
+course in a world by themselves. But they are always responses to
+what is going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their
+successful or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction
+with other changes. Life activities flourish and fail only in connection
+with changes of the environment. They are literally bound up with these
+changes; our desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in
+which our doings are tied up with the doings of things and persons about
+us. Instead of marking a purely personal or subjective realm, separated
+from the objective and impersonal, they indicate the non-existence of
+such a separate world. They afford convincing evidence that changes in
+things are not alien to the activities of a self, and that the career
+and welfare of the self are bound up with the movement of persons and
+things. Interest, concern, mean that self and world are engaged with
+each other in a developing situation.
+
+The word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole state
+of active development, (ii) the objective results that are foreseen and
+wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional inclination.
+
+(I) An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often referred to
+as an interest. Thus we say that a man's interest is politics, or
+journalism, or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting Japanese
+prints, or banking.
+
+(ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object touches
+or engages a man; the point where it influences him. In some legal
+transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to have a standing
+at court. He has to show that some proposed step concerns his affairs.
+A silent partner has an interest in a business, although he takes no
+active part in its conduct because its prosperity or decline affects his
+profits and liabilities.
+
+(iii) When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the emphasis
+falls directly upon his personal attitude. To be interested is to be
+absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an
+interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. We say
+of an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and
+that he has found himself in it. Both terms express the engrossment of
+the self in an object.
+
+When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory
+way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first
+exaggerated and then isolated. Interest is taken to mean merely the
+effect of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or
+failure. Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are
+reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain. Educationally, it
+then follows that to attach importance to interest means to attach some
+feature of seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure
+attention and effort by offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is
+properly stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of
+education.
+
+But the objection is based upon the fact--or assumption--that the forms
+of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be appropriated have
+no interest on their own account: in other words, they are supposed to
+be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils. The remedy is not
+in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to
+search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material.
+It is to discover objects and modes of action, which are connected with
+present powers. The function of this material in engaging activity and
+carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest. If the
+material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for
+devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary,
+semi-coerced effort.
+
+The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,--that
+which connects two things otherwise distant. In education, the distance
+covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a process takes
+time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. We
+overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between
+an initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is
+something intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are
+the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
+Between the two lie means--that is middle conditions:--acts to be
+performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used. Only
+through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial activities
+reach a satisfactory consummation.
+
+These intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because the
+development of existing activities into the foreseen and desired end
+depends upon them. To be means for the achieving of present tendencies,
+to be "between" the agent and his end, to be of interest, are different
+names for the same thing. When material has to be made interesting,
+it signifies that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and
+present power: or that if the connection be there, it is not perceived.
+To make it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that
+exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous
+and artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which have been
+applied to the doctrine of interest in education.
+
+So much for the meaning of the term interest. Now for that of
+discipline. Where an activity takes time, where many means and obstacles
+lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation and persistence
+are required. It is obvious that a very large part of the everyday
+meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or conscious disposition
+to persist and endure in a planned course of action in spite of
+difficulties and contrary solicitations. A man of strong will, in
+the popular usage of the words, is a man who is neither fickle nor
+half-hearted in achieving chosen ends. His ability is executive; that
+is, he persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out
+his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.
+
+Clearly there are two factors in will. One has to do with the foresight
+of results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has
+upon the person.
+
+(I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition.
+Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps
+on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any
+clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally
+declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make
+clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if
+he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not
+be worth while. Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to
+criticize ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and
+energy in use of means to achieve the end. The really executive man is
+a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his
+actions as clear and full as possible. The people we called weak-willed
+or self-indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of
+their acts. They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect
+all attendant circumstances. When they begin to act, the disagreeable
+results they ignored begin to show themselves. They are discouraged,
+or complain of being thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and
+shift to some other line of action. That the primary difference between
+strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree
+of persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought
+out, cannot be over-emphasized.
+
+(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out
+of results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of
+a person. They are something to look at and for curiosity to play
+with rather than something to achieve. There is no such thing as
+over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-sided
+intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as we say in considering the
+consequences of proposed lines of action. A certain flabbiness of fiber
+prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in
+action. And most persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course
+of action by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of
+inducements to an action that is directly more agreeable.
+
+A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them
+deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability
+a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of
+distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of
+discipline. Discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources
+available for carrying through the action undertaken. To know what one
+is to do and to move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means
+is to be disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind.
+Discipline is positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to
+compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an
+uncongenial task--these things are or are not disciplinary according as
+they do or do not tend to the development of power to recognize what one
+is about and to persistence in accomplishment.
+
+It is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline
+are connected, not opposed.
+
+(i) Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained
+power--apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in
+consequences--is not possible without interest. Deliberation will be
+perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. Parents and
+teachers often complain--and correctly--that children "do not want
+to hear, or want to understand." Their minds are not upon the subject
+precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into their
+concerns. This is a state of things that needs to be remedied, but the
+remedy is not in the use of methods which increase indifference and
+aversion. Even punishing a child for inattention is one way of trying to
+make him realize that the matter is not a thing of complete unconcern;
+it is one way of arousing "interest," or bringing about a sense of
+connection. In the long run, its value is measured by whether it
+supplies a mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by the
+adult or whether it leads the child "to think"--that is, to reflect upon
+his acts and impregnate them with aims.
+
+(ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even more
+obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who are not interested
+in what they are doing. If one were engaging a lawyer or a doctor, it
+would never occur to one to reason that the person engaged would stick
+to his work more conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he
+did it merely from a sense of obligation. Interest measures--or rather
+is--the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one, moving
+one to act for its realization.
+
+2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education. Interest
+represents the moving force of objects--whether perceived or presented
+in imagination--in any experience having a purpose. In the concrete,
+the value of recognizing the dynamic place of interest in an educative
+development is that it leads to considering individual children in their
+specific capabilities, needs, and preferences. One who recognizes the
+importance of interest will not assume that all minds work in the same
+way because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook. Attitudes
+and methods of approach and response vary with the specific appeal
+the same material makes, this appeal itself varying with difference of
+natural aptitude, of past experience, of plan of life, and so on. But
+the facts of interest also supply considerations of general value to the
+philosophy of education. Rightly understood, they put us on our guard
+against certain conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have
+had great vogue in philosophic thought in the past, and which exercise
+a serious hampering influence upon the conduct of instruction and
+discipline. Too frequently mind is set over the world of things and
+facts to be known; it is regarded as something existing in isolation,
+with mental states and operations that exist independently. Knowledge is
+then regarded as an external application of purely mental existences
+to the things to be known, or else as a result of the impressions which
+this outside subject matter makes on mind, or as a combination of the
+two. Subject matter is then regarded as something complete in itself;
+it is just something to be learned or known, either by the voluntary
+application of mind to it or through the impressions it makes on mind.
+
+The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind
+appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the
+basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view
+to controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place. The
+things, the subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized
+as having a bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether
+assisting or retarding it. These statements are too formal to be very
+intelligible. An illustration may clear up their significance. You are
+engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a typewriter. If you
+are an expert, your formed habits take care of the physical movements
+and leave your thoughts free to consider your topic. Suppose, however,
+you are not skilled, or that, even if you are, the machine does not work
+well. You then have to use intelligence. You do not wish to strike the
+keys at random and let the consequences be what they may; you wish to
+record certain words in a given order so as to make sense. You attend to
+the keys, to what you have written, to your movements, to the ribbon
+or the mechanism of the machine. Your attention is not distributed
+indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail. It is
+centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective pursuit of
+your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are concerned to note
+the existing facts because and in so far as they are factors in the
+achievement of the result intended. You have to find out what your
+resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the difficulties
+and obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with reference to
+what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not involve such a
+forecast of results and such an examination of means and hindrances
+is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither case is
+it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended and
+careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to be, in
+that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
+
+If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical
+manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the
+case is the same. There is an activity in process; one is taken up with
+the development of a theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph talks,
+this means intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various
+conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending,
+together with continually renewed observation and recollection to
+get hold of the subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be
+reached. The whole attitude is one of concern with what is to be, and
+with what is so far as the latter enters into the movement toward the
+end. Leave out the direction which depends upon foresight of possible
+future results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let
+there be imaginative forecast but no attention to the conditions upon
+which its attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle
+dreaming--abortive intelligence.
+
+If this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something
+complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as
+that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims,
+ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the attainment
+of aims. Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns;
+but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he
+plays a part have the qualities mentioned. Nor are the activities
+in which a person engages, whether intelligently or not, exclusive
+properties of himself; they are something in which he engages and
+partakes. Other things, the independent changes of other things and
+persons, cooperate and hinder. The individual's act may be initial in
+a course of events, but the outcome depends upon the interaction of
+his response with energies supplied by other agencies. Conceive mind as
+anything but one factor partaking along with others in the production of
+consequences, and it becomes meaningless.
+
+The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will
+engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of
+moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic
+appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends. The remedy for
+the evils attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously
+spoken of, is not to be found by substituting a doctrine of specialized
+disciplines, but by reforming the notion of mind and its training.
+Discovery of typical modes of activity, whether play or useful
+occupations, in which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they
+recognize they have something at stake, and which cannot be carried
+through without reflection and use of judgment to select material of
+observation and recollection, is the remedy. In short, the root of the
+error long prevalent in the conception of training of mind consists in
+leaving out of account movements of things to future results in which
+an individual shares, and in the direction of which observation,
+imagination, and memory are enlisted. It consists in regarding mind as
+complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to a present material.
+
+In historic practice the error has cut two ways. On one hand, it has
+screened and protected traditional studies and methods of teaching
+from intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say that they are
+"disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all inquiry. It has not been
+enough to show that they were of no use in life or that they did
+not really contribute to the cultivation of the self. That they were
+"disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed
+the subject from the realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the
+allegation could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue
+as matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and
+lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not
+with the study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof
+that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining
+the old methods. The responsibility was transferred from the educator to
+the pupil because the material did not have to meet specific tests; it
+did not have to be shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served
+any specific end. It was designed to discipline in general, and if it
+failed, it was because the individual was unwilling to be disciplined.
+In the other direction, the tendency was towards a negative conception
+of discipline, instead of an identification of it with growth in
+constructive power of achievement. As we have already seen, will
+means an attitude toward the future, toward the production of possible
+consequences, an attitude involving effort to foresee clearly and
+comprehensively the probable results of ways of acting, and an active
+identification with some anticipated consequences. Identification
+of will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a mind is set up,
+endowed with powers that are only to be applied to existing material. A
+person just either will or will not apply himself to the matter in hand.
+The more indifferent the subject matter, the less concern it has for the
+habits and preferences of the individual, the more demand there is
+for an effort to bring the mind to bear upon it--and hence the more
+discipline of will. To attend to material because there is something
+to be done in which the person is concerned is not disciplinary in this
+view; not even if it results in a desirable increase of constructive
+power. Application just for the sake of application, for the sake of
+training, is alone disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if the
+subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive
+(so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of
+discipline. The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the
+words of an American humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a
+boy so long as he doesn't like it."
+
+The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing with
+objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject matter to be
+learned. In the traditional schemes of education, subject matter means
+so much material to be studied. Various branches of study represent so
+many independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement
+complete within itself. History is one such group of facts; algebra
+another; geography another, and so on till we have run through the
+entire curriculum. Having a ready-made existence on their own account,
+their relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire.
+This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program
+of school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists
+of "studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be
+complete by itself--for educational purposes at least.
+
+Later on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the
+meaning of the subject matter of instruction. At this point, we need
+only to say that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything
+which intelligence studies represents things in the part which they
+play in the carrying forward of active lines of interest. Just as one
+"studies" his typewriter as part of the operation of putting it to use
+to effect results, so with any fact or truth. It becomes an object of
+study--that is, of inquiry and reflection--when it figures as a factor
+to be reckoned with in the completion of a course of events in which one
+is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected. Numbers are not objects
+of study just because they are numbers already constituting a branch of
+learning called mathematics, but because they represent qualities and
+relations of the world in which our action goes on, because they are
+factors upon which the accomplishment of our purposes depends. Stated
+thus broadly, the formula may appear abstract. Translated into details,
+it means that the act of learning or studying is artificial and
+ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented with
+a lesson to be learned. Study is effectual in the degree in which the
+pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with
+in carrying to fruition activities in which he is concerned. This
+connection of an object and a topic with the promotion of an activity
+having a purpose is the first and the last word of a genuine theory of
+interest in education.
+
+3. Some Social Aspects of the Question. While the theoretical errors
+of which we have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of
+schools, they are themselves the outcome of conditions of social life.
+A change confined to the theoretical conviction of educators will not
+remove the difficulties, though it should render more effective efforts
+to modify social conditions. Men's fundamental attitudes toward the
+world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which
+they partake. The ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic
+attitude. Art is neither merely internal nor merely external; merely
+mental nor merely physical. Like every mode of action, it brings about
+changes in the world. The changes made by some actions (those which
+by contrast may be called mechanical) are external; they are shifting
+things about. No ideal reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect,
+accompanies them. Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and
+to its external adornment and display. Many of our existing social
+activities, industrial and political, fall in these two classes. Neither
+the people who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by
+them, are capable of full and free interest in their work. Because of
+the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing it, or because
+of the restricted character of its aim, intelligence is not adequately
+engaged. The same conditions force many people back upon themselves.
+They take refuge in an inner play of sentiment and fancies. They are
+aesthetic but not artistic, since their feelings and ideas are
+turned upon themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify
+conditions. Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an inner
+landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become an asylum of refuge
+from the hard conditions of life--not a temporary retreat for the sake
+of recuperation and clarification in future dealings with the world. The
+very word art may become associated not with specific transformation of
+things, making them more significant for mind, but with stimulations
+of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The separation and
+mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of theory or culture,
+the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are indications of this
+situation. Thus interest and mind are either narrowed, or else made
+perverse. Compare what was said in an earlier chapter about the
+one-sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of efficiency
+and of culture.
+
+This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a
+basis of division between laboring classes and leisure classes. The
+intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting
+struggle with things; that of those freed from the discipline of
+occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate. Moreover, the majority of
+human beings still lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are fixed
+by accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal
+expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and resources
+of the environment. Our economic conditions still relegate many men to
+a servile status. As a consequence, the intelligence of those in control
+of the practical situation is not liberal. Instead of playing freely
+upon the subjugation of the world for human ends, it is devoted to the
+manipulation of other men for ends that are non-human in so far as they
+are exclusive.
+
+This state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational
+traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in
+different portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian
+character of most elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary
+or cultural character of most higher education. It accounts for the
+tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic,
+academic, and professionally technical, and for the widespread
+conviction that liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an
+education which shall count in the vocations of life. But it also helps
+define the peculiar problem of present education. The school cannot
+immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social conditions. But
+it should contribute through the type of intellectual and emotional
+disposition which it forms to the improvement of those conditions. And
+just here the true conceptions of interest and discipline are full
+of significance. Persons whose interests have been enlarged and
+intelligence trained by dealing with things and facts in active
+occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those
+most likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof
+knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice. To
+organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully
+enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the doing
+requires observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of
+a constructive imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve
+social conditions. To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to
+attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and
+an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in
+itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as
+final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating
+them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place
+in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful
+activities is a slow work. It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a
+step at a time. But this is not a reason for nominally accepting one
+educational philosophy and accommodating ourselves in practice to
+another. It is a challenge to undertake the task of reorganization
+courageously and to keep at it persistently.
+
+Summary. Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity
+having an aim. Interest means that one is identified with the objects
+which define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to
+its realization. Any activity with an aim implies a distinction between
+an earlier incomplete phase and later completing phase; it implies also
+intermediate steps. To have an interest is to take things as entering
+into such a continuously developing situation, instead of taking them
+in isolation. The time difference between the given incomplete state of
+affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort in transformation, it
+demands continuity of attention and endurance. This attitude is what
+is practically meant by will. Discipline or development of power of
+continuous attention is its fruit. The significance of this doctrine for
+the theory of education is twofold. On the one hand it protects us
+from the notion that mind and mental states are something complete in
+themselves, which then happen to be applied to some ready-made objects
+and topics so that knowledge results. It shows that mind and intelligent
+or purposeful engagement in a course of action into which things
+enter are identical. Hence to develop and train mind is to provide an
+environment which induces such activity. On the other side, it protects
+us from the notion that subject matter on its side is something isolated
+and independent. It shows that subject matter of learning is identical
+with all the objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or
+obstacles into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of action.
+The developing course of action, whose end and conditions are perceived,
+is the unity which holds together what are often divided into an
+independent mind on one side and an independent world of objects and
+facts on the other.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
+
+1. The Nature of Experience. The nature of experience can be understood
+only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element
+peculiarly combined. On the active hand, experience is trying--a meaning
+which is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On the passive,
+it is undergoing. When we experience something we act upon it, we do
+something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. We do
+something to the thing and then it does something to us in return:
+such is the peculiar combination. The connection of these two phases of
+experience measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience. Mere
+activity does not constitute experience. It is dispersive, centrifugal,
+dissipating. Experience as trying involves change, but change is
+meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the
+return wave of consequences which flow from it. When an activity is
+continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made
+by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is
+loaded with significance. We learn something. It is not experience when
+a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience when the
+movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes in consequence.
+Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame means a burn. Being
+burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick of wood,
+if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action. Blind and
+capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. So
+far as this happens, everything is writ in water. There is none of that
+cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of that
+term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure
+and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own.
+They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is no before
+or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and consequently
+no meaning. We get nothing which may be carried over to foresee what
+is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves
+to what is coming--no added control. Only by courtesy can such an
+experience be called experience. To "learn from experience" is to make a
+backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we
+enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing
+becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is
+like; the undergoing becomes instruction--discovery of the connection of
+things.
+
+Two conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience is
+primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive. But
+(2) the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception
+of relationships or continuities to which it leads up. It includes
+cognition in the degree in which it is cumulative or amounts to
+something, or has meaning. In schools, those under instruction are
+too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical
+spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of
+intellect. The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is
+engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge
+directly. Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed
+from the physical organs of activity. The former is then thought to be
+purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an irrelevant and
+intruding physical factor. The intimate union of activity and undergoing
+its consequences which leads to recognition of meaning is broken;
+instead we have two fragments: mere bodily action on one side, and
+meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity on the other.
+
+It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have
+flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate them.
+Some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated. (a)
+In part bodily activity becomes an intruder. Having nothing, so it is
+thought, to do with mental activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil
+to be contended with. For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school
+along with his mind. And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of
+energy; it has to do something. But its activities, not being utilized
+in occupation with things which yield significant results, have to be
+frowned upon. They lead the pupil away from the lesson with which his
+"mind" ought to be occupied; they are sources of mischief. The chief
+source of the "problem of discipline" in schools is that the teacher
+has often to spend the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily
+activities which take the mind away from its material. A premium is put
+on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and
+movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent
+interest. The teachers' business is to hold the pupils up to these
+requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.
+
+The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil
+are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which
+bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning. Callous
+indifference and explosions from strain alternate. The neglected body,
+having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without
+knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into
+equally meaningless fooling--both very different from the normal play
+of children. Physically active children become restless and unruly; the
+more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend what energy they have
+in the negative task of keeping their instincts and active tendencies
+suppressed, instead of in a positive one of constructive planning
+and execution; they are thus educated not into responsibility for the
+significant and graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty
+not to give them free play. It may be seriously asserted that a chief
+cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that it was
+never misled by false notions into an attempted separation of mind and
+body.
+
+(b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned
+by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have to be used.
+The senses--especially the eye and ear--have to be employed to take in
+what the book, the map, the blackboard, and the teacher say. The lips
+and vocal organs, and the hands, have to be used to reproduce in speech
+and writing what has been stowed away. The senses are then regarded as
+a kind of mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from
+the external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways and
+avenues of knowledge. To keep the eyes on the book and the ears open
+to the teacher's words is a mysterious source of intellectual grace.
+Moreover, reading, writing, and figuring--important school arts--demand
+muscular or motor training. The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs
+accordingly have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge
+back out of the mind into external action. For it happens that using the
+muscles repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an automatic tendency
+to repeat.
+
+The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which
+(in spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering character of the
+body in mental action) have to be employed more or less. For the
+senses and muscles are used not as organic participants in having an
+instructive experience, but as external inlets and outlets of mind.
+Before the child goes to school, he learns with his hand, eye, and ear,
+because they are organs of the process of doing something from which
+meaning results. The boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite,
+and has to note the various pressures of the string on his hand. His
+senses are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow
+"conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing something
+with a purpose. The qualities of seen and touched things have a bearing
+on what is done, and are alertly perceived; they have a meaning. But
+when pupils are expected to use their eyes to note the form of words,
+irrespective of their meaning, in order to reproduce them in spelling or
+reading, the resulting training is simply of isolated sense organs and
+muscles. It is such isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it
+mechanical. It is customary for teachers to urge children to read with
+expression, so as to bring out the meaning. But if they originally
+learned the sensory-motor technique of reading--the ability to identify
+forms and to reproduce the sounds they stand for--by methods which did
+not call for attention to meaning, a mechanical habit was established
+which makes it difficult to read subsequently with intelligence. The
+vocal organs have been trained to go their own way automatically in
+isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will. Drawing, singing, and
+writing may be taught in the same mechanical way; for, we repeat, any
+way is mechanical which narrows down the bodily activity so that a
+separation of body from mind--that is, from recognition of meaning--is
+set up. Mathematics, even in its higher branches, when undue emphasis
+is put upon the technique of calculation, and science, when laboratory
+exercises are given for their own sake, suffer from the same evil.
+
+(c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from direct
+occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the expense of
+relations or connections. It is altogether too common to separate
+perceptions and even ideas from judgments. The latter are thought to
+come after the former in order to compare them. It is alleged that the
+mind perceives things apart from relations; that it forms ideas of them
+in isolation from their connections--with what goes before and comes
+after. Then judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated
+items of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection
+shall be brought out. As matter of fact, every perception and every idea
+is a sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a thing. We do not really
+know a chair or have an idea of it by inventorying and enumerating its
+various isolated qualities, but only by bringing these qualities into
+connection with something else--the purpose which makes it a chair and
+not a table; or its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed
+to, or the "period" which it represents, and so on. A wagon is not
+perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic
+connection of the parts which makes it a wagon. And these connections
+are not those of mere physical juxtaposition; they involve connection
+with the animals that draw it, the things that are carried on it, and so
+on. Judgment is employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is
+mere sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior
+judgment, as in the case of familiar objects.
+
+Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for ideas.
+And in just the degree in which mental activity is separated from active
+concern with the world, from doing something and connecting the doing
+with what is undergone, words, symbols, come to take the place of ideas.
+The substitution is the more subtle because some meaning is recognized.
+But we are very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning,
+and to fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations
+which confer significance. We get so thoroughly used to a kind of
+pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not aware how half-dead
+our mental action is, and how much keener and more extensive our
+observations and ideas would be if we formed them under conditions of
+a vital experience which required us to use judgment: to hunt for the
+connections of the thing dealt with. There is no difference of opinion
+as to the theory of the matter. All authorities agree that that
+discernment of relationships is the genuinely intellectual matter;
+hence, the educative matter. The failure arises in supposing that
+relationships can become perceptible without experience--without that
+conjoint trying and undergoing of which we have spoken. It is assumed
+that "mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that this
+attention may be given at will irrespective of the situation. Hence
+the deluge of half-observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated
+"knowledge" which afflicts the world. An ounce of experience is better
+than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any
+theory has vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very
+humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of
+theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience
+cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. It tends to become a mere
+verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine
+theorizing, unnecessary and impossible. Because of our education we use
+words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal
+being in reality simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us
+from seeing any longer the difficulty.
+
+2. Reflection in Experience. Thought or reflection, as we have already
+seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation
+between what we try to do and what happens in consequence. No experience
+having a meaning is possible without some element of thought. But we
+may contrast two types of experience according to the proportion of
+reflection found in them. All our experiences have a phase of "cut and
+try" in them--what psychologists call the method of trial and error. We
+simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and keep
+on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then we adopt
+that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent procedure. Some
+experiences have very little else in them than this hit and miss or
+succeed process. We see that a certain way of acting and a certain
+consequence are connected, but we do not see how they are. We do not see
+the details of the connection; the links are missing. Our discernment is
+very gross. In other cases we push our observation farther. We analyze
+to see just what lies between so as to bind together cause and effect,
+activity and consequence. This extension of our insight makes foresight
+more accurate and comprehensive. The action which rests simply upon the
+trial and error method is at the mercy of circumstances; they may change
+so that the act performed does not operate in the way it was expected
+to. But if we know in detail upon what the result depends, we can look
+to see whether the required conditions are there. The method extends our
+practical control. For if some of the conditions are missing, we may,
+if we know what the needed antecedents for an effect are, set to work to
+supply them; or, if they are such as to produce undesirable effects
+as well, we may eliminate some of the superfluous causes and economize
+effort.
+
+In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what
+happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience is
+made explicit. Its quantity increases so that its proportionate value is
+very different. Hence the quality of the experience changes; the
+change is so significant that we may call this type of experience
+reflective--that is, reflective par excellence. The deliberate
+cultivation of this phase of thought constitutes thinking as a
+distinctive experience. Thinking, in other words, is the intentional
+endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do
+and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous.
+Their isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary going together,
+is canceled; a unified developing situation takes its place. The
+occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is reasonable, as we
+say, that the thing should happen as it does.
+
+Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the intelligent
+element in our experience. It makes it possible to act with an end
+in view. It is the condition of our having aims. As soon as an infant
+begins to expect he begins to use something which is now going on as
+a sign of something to follow; he is, in however simple a fashion,
+judging. For he takes one thing as evidence of something else, and so
+recognizes a relationship. Any future development, however elaborate
+it may be, is only an extending and a refining of this simple act of
+inference. All that the wisest man can do is to observe what is going on
+more widely and more minutely and then select more carefully from what
+is noted just those factors which point to something to happen. The
+opposites, once more, to thoughtful action are routine and capricious
+behavior. The former accepts what has been customary as a full measure
+of possibility and omits to take into account the connections of the
+particular things done. The latter makes the momentary act a measure
+of value, and ignores the connections of our personal action with the
+energies of the environment. It says, virtually, "things are to be just
+as I happen to like them at this instant," as routine says in effect
+"let things continue just as I have found them in the past." Both refuse
+to acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which
+flow from present action. Reflection is the acceptance of such
+responsibility.
+
+The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on,
+something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled. Its
+point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it
+is going to turn out. As this is written, the world is filled with the
+clang of contending armies. For an active participant in the war, it is
+clear that the momentous thing is the issue, the future consequences, of
+this and that happening. He is identified, for the time at least, with
+the issue; his fate hangs upon the course things are taking. But even
+for an onlooker in a neutral country, the significance of every move
+made, of every advance here and retreat there, lies in what it portends.
+To think upon the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is
+indicated as probable or possible regarding an outcome. To fill our
+heads, like a scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and
+done-for thing, is not to think. It is to turn ourselves into a piece
+of registering apparatus. To consider the bearing of the occurrence
+upon what may be, but is not yet, is to think. Nor will the reflective
+experience be different in kind if we substitute distance in time for
+separation in space. Imagine the war done with, and a future historian
+giving an account of it. The episode is, by assumption, past. But he
+cannot give a thoughtful account of the war save as he preserves the
+time sequence; the meaning of each occurrence, as he deals with it, lies
+in what was future for it, though not for the historian. To take it by
+itself as a complete existence is to take it unreflectively.
+Reflection also implies concern with the issue--a certain sympathetic
+identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of
+the course of events. For the general in the war, or a common soldier,
+or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to thinking
+is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is indirect and dependent upon
+imagination. But the flagrant partisanship of human nature is evidence
+of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves with one possible
+course of events, and to reject the other as foreign. If we cannot take
+sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to help determine
+the final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively. We
+desire this or that outcome. One wholly indifferent to the outcome does
+not follow or think about what is happening at all. From this dependence
+of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences
+of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought. Born in
+partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain
+detached impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and desires to
+affect his observations and interpretations of the existing situation
+will surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes and fears may be
+the chief motive for a thoughtful following of the war on the part of
+an onlooker in a neutral country, he too will think ineffectively in the
+degree in which his preferences modify the stuff of his observations and
+reasonings. There is, however, no incompatibility between the fact that
+the occasion of reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is going
+on and the fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping one's
+self out of the data. The almost insurmountable difficulty of achieving
+this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in situations where
+the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of events and is
+designed to influence the result. Only gradually and with a widening of
+the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does thinking
+develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of
+great significance for education.
+
+To say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which are still
+going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking occurs when things are
+uncertain or doubtful or problematic. Only what is finished, completed,
+is wholly assured. Where there is reflection there is suspense. The
+object of thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to project a possible
+termination on the basis of what is already given. Certain other facts
+about thinking accompany this feature. Since the situation in which
+thinking occurs is a doubtful one, thinking is a process of inquiry, of
+looking into things, of investigating. Acquiring is always secondary,
+and instrumental to the act of inquiring. It is seeking, a quest,
+for something that is not at hand. We sometimes talk as if "original
+research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of
+advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is
+native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in
+the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
+
+It also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be
+guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of
+an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. The conclusions of thinking,
+till confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or
+hypothetical. Their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of
+the issue, in fact. The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we
+learn? For either we know already what we are after, or else we do not
+know. In neither case is learning possible; on the first alternative
+because we know already; on the second, because we do not know what to
+look for, nor if, by chance, we find it can we tell that it is what
+we were after. The dilemma makes no provision for coming to know, for
+learning; it assumes either complete knowledge or complete ignorance.
+Nevertheless the twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists. The
+possibility of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is
+the fact which the Greek dilemma overlooked. The perplexities of the
+situation suggest certain ways out. We try these ways, and either push
+our way out, in which case we know we have found what we were looking
+for, or the situation gets darker and more confused--in which case, we
+know we are still ignorant. Tentative means trying out, feeling one's
+way along provisionally. Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice
+piece of formal logic. But it is also true that as long as men kept a
+sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science made only
+slow and accidental advance. Systematic advance in invention and
+discovery began when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for
+purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to guide action in tentative
+explorations, whose development would confirm, refute, or modify the
+guiding conjecture. While the Greeks made knowledge more than learning,
+modern science makes conserved knowledge only a means to learning, to
+discovery. To recur to our illustration. A commanding general cannot
+base his actions upon either absolute certainty or absolute ignorance.
+He has a certain amount of information at hand which is, we will assume,
+reasonably trustworthy. He then infers certain prospective movements,
+thus assigning meaning to the bare facts of the given situation. His
+inference is more or less dubious and hypothetical. But he acts upon it.
+He develops a plan of procedure, a method of dealing with the situation.
+The consequences which directly follow from his acting this way rather
+than that test and reveal the worth of his reflections. What he already
+knows functions and has value in what he learns. But will this account
+apply in the case of the one in a neutral country who is thoughtfully
+following as best he can the progress of events? In form, yes, though
+not of course in content. It is self-evident that his guesses about
+the future indicated by present facts, guesses by which he attempts to
+supply meaning to a multitude of disconnected data, cannot be the basis
+of a method which shall take effect in the campaign. That is not his
+problem. But in the degree in which he is actively thinking, and
+not merely passively following the course of events, his tentative
+inferences will take effect in a method of procedure appropriate to his
+situation. He will anticipate certain future moves, and will be on the
+alert to see whether they happen or not. In the degree in which he is
+intellectually concerned, or thoughtful, he will be actively on the
+lookout; he will take steps which although they do not affect the
+campaign, modify in some degree his subsequent actions. Otherwise his
+later "I told you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does
+not mark any testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a
+coincidence that yields emotional satisfaction--and includes a
+large factor of self-deception. The case is comparable to that of an
+astronomer who from given data has been led to foresee (infer) a future
+eclipse. No matter how great the mathematical probability, the inference
+is hypothetical--a matter of probability. 1 The hypothesis as to the
+date and position of the anticipated eclipse becomes the material of
+forming a method of future conduct. Apparatus is arranged; possibly
+an expedition is made to some far part of the globe. In any case, some
+active steps are taken which actually change some physical conditions.
+And apart from such steps and the consequent modification of the
+situation, there is no completion of the act of thinking. It remains
+suspended. Knowledge, already attained knowledge, controls thinking and
+makes it fruitful.
+
+So much for the general features of a reflective experience. They are
+(i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated
+in an incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined;
+(ii) a conjectural anticipation--a tentative interpretation of the given
+elements, attributing to them a tendency to effect certain consequences;
+(iii) a careful survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis)
+of all attainable consideration which will define and clarify the
+problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative
+hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent, because squaring
+with a wider range of facts; (v) taking one stand upon the projected
+hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to the existing state of
+affairs: doing something overtly to bring about the anticipated result,
+and thereby testing the hypothesis. It is the extent and accuracy of
+steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience
+from one on the trial and error plane. They make thinking itself into an
+experience. Nevertheless, we never get wholly beyond the trial and error
+situation. Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to
+be tried in the world and thereby tried out. And since it can never
+take into account all the connections, it can never cover with perfect
+accuracy all the consequences. Yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is
+so careful, and the guessing at results so controlled, that we have a
+right to mark off the reflective experience from the grosser trial and
+error forms of action.
+
+Summary. In determining the place of thinking in experience we first
+noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with
+something which is undergone in consequence. A separation of the active
+doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning
+of an experience. Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of
+connections between what is done and its consequences. It notes not only
+that they are connected, but the details of the connection. It makes
+connecting links explicit in the form of relationships. The stimulus
+to thinking is found when we wish to determine the significance of some
+act, performed or to be performed. Then we anticipate consequences. This
+implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us,
+incomplete and hence indeterminate. The projection of consequences means
+a proposed or tentative solution. To perfect this hypothesis, existing
+conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of the
+hypothesis developed--an operation called reasoning. Then the suggested
+solution--the idea or theory--has to be tested by acting upon it. If it
+brings about certain consequences, certain determinate changes, in the
+world, it is accepted as valid. Otherwise it is modified, and another
+trial made. Thinking includes all of these steps,--the sense of a
+problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and rational
+elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experimental
+testing. While all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately the value
+of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking. For we live not in a
+settled and finished world, but in one which is going on, and where our
+main task is prospective, and where retrospect--and all knowledge
+as distinct from thought is retrospect--is of value in the solidity,
+security, and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.
+
+1 It is most important for the practice of science that men in many
+cases can calculate the degree of probability and the amount of probable
+error involved, but that does alter the features of the situation as
+described. It refines them.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
+
+1. The Essentials of Method. No one doubts, theoretically, the
+importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking. But apart
+from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as in
+theory, there is not adequate theoretical recognition that all which the
+school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned
+(that is, leaving out certain specialized muscular abilities), is to
+develop their ability to think. The parceling out of instruction
+among various ends such as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling,
+writing, drawing, reciting); acquiring information (in history and
+geography), and training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way
+in which we accomplish all three. Thinking which is not connected with
+increase of efficiency in action, and with learning more about ourselves
+and the world in which we live, has something the matter with it just
+as thought (See ante, p. 147). And skill obtained apart from thinking is
+not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used.
+It consequently leaves a man at the mercy of his routine habits and of
+the authoritative control of others, who know what they are about and
+who are not especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement.
+And information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing
+load. Since it simulates knowledge and thereby develops the poison of
+conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to further growth in the grace
+of intelligence. The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the
+methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the
+conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking. Thinking is the
+method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards
+mind. We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but
+the important thing to bear in mind about method is that thinking is
+method, the method of intelligent experience in the course which it
+takes.
+
+I. The initial stage of that developing experience which is called
+thinking is experience. This remark may sound like a silly truism. It
+ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not. On the contrary, thinking
+is often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice
+as something cut off from experience, and capable of being cultivated
+in isolation. In fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often
+urged as the sufficient ground for attention to thinking. Experience
+is then thought to be confined to the senses and appetites; to a mere
+material world, while thinking proceeds from a higher faculty (of
+reason), and is occupied with spiritual or at least literary things. So,
+oftentimes, a sharp distinction is made between pure mathematics as a
+peculiarly fit subject matter of thought (since it has nothing to do
+with physical existences) and applied mathematics, which has utilitarian
+but not mental value.
+
+Speaking generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of instruction
+lies in supposing that experience on the part of pupils may be assumed.
+What is here insisted upon is the necessity of an actual empirical
+situation as the initiating phase of thought. Experience is here taken
+as previously defined: trying to do something and having the thing
+perceptibly do something to one in return. The fallacy consists
+in supposing that we can begin with ready-made subject matter of
+arithmetic, or geography, or whatever, irrespective of some direct
+personal experience of a situation. Even the kindergarten and Montessori
+techniques are so anxious to get at intellectual distinctions, without
+"waste of time," that they tend to ignore--or reduce--the immediate
+crude handling of the familiar material of experience, and to introduce
+pupils at once to material which expresses the intellectual distinctions
+which adults have made. But the first stage of contact with any new
+material, at whatever age of maturity, must inevitably be of the trial
+and error sort. An individual must actually try, in play or work, to do
+something with material in carrying out his own impulsive activity,
+and then note the interaction of his energy and that of the material
+employed. This is what happens when a child at first begins to build
+with blocks, and it is equally what happens when a scientific man in his
+laboratory begins to experiment with unfamiliar objects.
+
+Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be
+aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible.
+To realize what an experience, or empirical situation, means, we have
+to call to mind the sort of situation that presents itself outside of
+school; the sort of occupations that interest and engage activity in
+ordinary life. And careful inspection of methods which are permanently
+successful in formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to
+read, or studying geography, or learning physics or a foreign language,
+will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that
+they go back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out
+of school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do, not
+something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand
+thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally
+results.
+
+That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse thinking
+means of course that it should suggest something to do which is not
+either routine or capricious--something, in other words, presenting
+what is new (and hence uncertain or problematic) and yet sufficiently
+connected with existing habits to call out an effective response. An
+effective response means one which accomplishes a perceptible result,
+in distinction from a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences
+cannot be mentally connected with what is done. The most significant
+question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or
+experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem it
+involves.
+
+At first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods measured
+well up to the standard here set. The giving of problems, the putting of
+questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is
+a large part of school work. But it is indispensable to discriminate
+between genuine and simulated or mock problems. The following questions
+may aid in making such discrimination. (a) Is there anything but
+a problem? Does the question naturally suggest itself within some
+situation or personal experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem
+only for the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic?
+Is it the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage
+experimentation outside of school? (b) Is it the pupil's own problem, or
+is it the teacher's or textbook's problem, made a problem for the pupil
+only because he cannot get the required mark or be promoted or win
+the teacher's approval, unless he deals with it? Obviously, these two
+questions overlap. They are two ways of getting at the same point:
+Is the experience a personal thing of such a nature as inherently to
+stimulate and direct observation of the connections involved, and to
+lead to inference and its testing? Or is it imposed from without, and
+is the pupil's problem simply to meet the external requirement? Such
+questions may give us pause in deciding upon the extent to which
+current practices are adapted to develop reflective habits. The physical
+equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom are hostile to the
+existence of real situations of experience. What is there similar to
+the conditions of everyday life which will generate difficulties? Almost
+everything testifies to the great premium put upon listening, reading,
+and the reproduction of what is told and read. It is hardly possible
+to overstate the contrast between such conditions and the situations of
+active contact with things and persons in the home, on the playground,
+in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life. Much of it is not
+even comparable with the questions which may arise in the mind of a boy
+or girl in conversing with others or in reading books outside of the
+school. No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions
+outside of the school (so that they pester grown-up persons if they get
+any encouragement), and the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity
+about the subject matter of school lessons. Reflection on this striking
+contrast will throw light upon the question of how far customary school
+conditions supply a context of experience in which problems naturally
+suggest themselves. No amount of improvement in the personal technique
+of the instructor will wholly remedy this state of things. There must
+be more actual material, more stuff, more appliances, and more
+opportunities for doing things, before the gap can be overcome. And
+where children are engaged in doing things and in discussing what arises
+in the course of their doing, it is found, even with comparatively
+indifferent modes of instruction, that children's inquiries are
+spontaneous and numerous, and the proposals of solution advanced,
+varied, and ingenious.
+
+As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which
+generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his; or, rather,
+they are his only as a pupil, not as a human being. Hence the lamentable
+waste in carrying over such expertness as is achieved in dealing
+with them to the affairs of life beyond the schoolroom. A pupil has a
+problem, but it is the problem of meeting the peculiar requirements set
+by the teacher. His problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher
+wants, what will satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and
+outward deportment. Relationship to subject matter is no longer direct.
+The occasions and material of thought are not found in the arithmetic
+or the history or geography itself, but in skillfully adapting
+that material to the teacher's requirements. The pupil studies, but
+unconsciously to himself the objects of his study are the conventions
+and standards of the school system and school authority, not the nominal
+"studies." The thinking thus evoked is artificially one-sided at the
+best. At its worst, the problem of the pupil is not how to meet the
+requirements of school life, but how to seem to meet them--or, how to
+come near enough to meeting them to slide along without an undue amount
+of friction. The type of judgment formed by these devices is not a
+desirable addition to character. If these statements give too highly
+colored a picture of usual school methods, the exaggeration may at least
+serve to illustrate the point: the need of active pursuits, involving
+the use of material to accomplish purposes, if there are to be
+situations which normally generate problems occasioning thoughtful
+inquiry.
+
+II. There must be data at command to supply the considerations required
+in dealing with the specific difficulty which has presented itself.
+Teachers following a "developing" method sometimes tell children to
+think things out for themselves as if they could spin them out of their
+own heads. The material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions,
+facts, events, and the relations of things. In other words, to think
+effectively one must have had, or now have, experiences which will
+furnish him resources for coping with the difficulty at hand. A
+difficulty is an indispensable stimulus to thinking, but not all
+difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they overwhelm and submerge
+and discourage. The perplexing situation must be sufficiently like
+situations which have already been dealt with so that pupils will have
+some control of the meanings of handling it. A large part of the art of
+instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough
+to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the
+confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be
+luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.
+
+In one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what psychological means
+the subject matter for reflection is provided. Memory, observation,
+reading, communication, are all avenues for supplying data. The relative
+proportion to be obtained from each is a matter of the specific
+features of the particular problem in hand. It is foolish to insist
+upon observation of objects presented to the senses if the student is
+so familiar with the objects that he could just as well recall the facts
+independently. It is possible to induce undue and crippling dependence
+upon sense-presentations. No one can carry around with him a museum of
+all the things whose properties will assist the conduct of thought. A
+well-trained mind is one that has a maximum of resources behind it, so
+to speak, and that is accustomed to go over its past experiences to
+see what they yield. On the other hand, a quality or relation of even
+a familiar object may previously have been passed over, and be just the
+fact that is helpful in dealing with the question. In this case direct
+observation is called for. The same principle applies to the use to
+be made of observation on one hand and of reading and "telling" on the
+other. Direct observation is naturally more vivid and vital. But it has
+its limitations; and in any case it is a necessary part of education
+that one should acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his
+immediately personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of others.
+Excessive reliance upon others for data (whether got from reading
+or listening) is to be depreciated. Most objectionable of all is the
+probability that others, the book or the teacher, will supply solutions
+ready-made, instead of giving material that the student has to adapt and
+apply to the question in hand for himself.
+
+There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is usually
+both too much and too little information supplied by others. The
+accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction
+in recitation and examination is made too much of. "Knowledge," in
+the sense of information, means the working capital, the indispensable
+resources, of further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things.
+Frequently it is treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes
+to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage
+ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only
+lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one
+could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk.
+Pupils who have stored their "minds" with all kinds of material which
+they have never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered
+when they try to think. They have no practice in selecting what is
+appropriate, and no criterion to go by; everything is on the same dead
+static level. On the other hand, it is quite open to question whether,
+if information actually functioned in experience through use in
+application to the student's own purposes, there would not be need of
+more varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually at
+command.
+
+III. The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already
+acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings,
+suppositions, tentative explanations:--ideas, in short. Careful
+observation and recollection determine what is given, what is already
+there, and hence assured. They cannot furnish what is lacking. They
+define, clarify, and locate the question; they cannot supply its answer.
+Projection, invention, ingenuity, devising come in for that purpose. The
+data arouse suggestions, and only by reference to the specific data can
+we pass upon the appropriateness of the suggestions. But the suggestions
+run beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience. They forecast
+possible results, things to do, not facts (things already done).
+Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.
+
+In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is
+presented) is creative,--an incursion into the novel. It involves some
+inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some
+context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light
+in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton
+thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his
+thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of
+them commonplaces--sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of
+numbers. These were not original ideas; they were established facts. His
+originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances were
+put by introduction into an unfamiliar context. The same is true of
+every striking scientific discovery, every great invention, every
+admirable artistic production. Only silly folk identify creative
+originality with the extraordinary and fanciful; others recognize
+that its measure lies in putting everyday things to uses which had not
+occurred to others. The operation is novel, not the materials out of
+which it is constructed.
+
+The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is
+original in a projection of considerations which have not been
+previously apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be
+done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting
+five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though
+everybody else in the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of
+experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a
+new quality. The charm which the spontaneity of little children has
+for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual
+originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the joy of
+intellectual constructiveness--of creativeness, if the word may be used
+without misunderstanding. The educational moral I am chiefly concerned
+to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of
+a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense
+of discovery and not in that of storing away what others pour into
+them; nor that it would be possible to give even children and youth the
+delights of personal intellectual productiveness--true and important
+as are these things. It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be
+conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it
+is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. The
+communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for
+himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual
+interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he
+directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions
+of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does
+he think. When the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which
+stimulate thinking and has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the
+activities of the learner by entering into a common or conjoint
+experience, all has been done which a second party can do to instigate
+learning. The rest lies with the one directly concerned. If he
+cannot devise his own solution (not of course in isolation, but in
+correspondence with the teacher and other pupils) and find his own way
+out he will not learn, not even if he can recite some correct answer
+with one hundred per cent accuracy. We can and do supply ready-made
+"ideas" by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see
+that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own
+activities generate, support, and clinch ideas--that is, perceived
+meanings or connections. This does not mean that the teacher is to stand
+off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject
+matter and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not
+quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared
+activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing
+it, a teacher--and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on
+either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better.
+IV. Ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble guesses or
+dignified theories, are anticipations of possible solutions. They are
+anticipations of some continuity or connection of an activity and a
+consequence which has not as yet shown itself. They are therefore tested
+by the operation of acting upon them. They are to guide and organize
+further observations, recollections, and experiments. They are
+intermediate in learning, not final. All educational reformers, as we
+have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the passivity of
+traditional education. They have opposed pouring in from without, and
+absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked drilling in material as into
+hard and resisting rock. But it is not easy to secure conditions which
+will make the getting of an idea identical with having an experience
+which widens and makes more precise our contact with the environment.
+Activity, even self-activity, is too easily thought of as something
+merely mental, cooped up within the head, or finding expression only
+through the vocal organs.
+
+While the need of application of ideas gained in study is acknowledged
+by all the more successful methods of instruction, the exercises in
+application are sometimes treated as devices for fixing what has
+already been learned and for getting greater practical skill in its
+manipulation. These results are genuine and not to be despised. But
+practice in applying what has been gained in study ought primarily to
+have an intellectual quality. As we have already seen, thoughts just
+as thoughts are incomplete. At best they are tentative; they are
+suggestions, indications. They are standpoints and methods for dealing
+with situations of experience. Till they are applied in these situations
+they lack full point and reality. Only application tests them, and only
+testing confers full meaning and a sense of their reality. Short of use
+made of them, they tend to segregate into a peculiar world of their
+own. It may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies (to which
+reference has been made in section 2 of chapter X) which isolate mind
+and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact
+that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock
+of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and
+test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends
+in themselves.
+
+However this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar artificiality
+attaches to much of what is learned in schools. It can hardly be said
+that many students consciously think of the subject matter as unreal;
+but it assuredly does not possess for them the kind of reality which the
+subject matter of their vital experiences possesses. They learn not to
+expect that sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating
+it as having reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and
+examinations. That it should remain inert for the experiences of daily
+life is more or less a matter of course. The bad effects are twofold.
+Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment which it should;
+it is not fertilized by school learning. And the attitudes which spring
+from getting used to and accepting half-understood and ill-digested
+material weaken vigor and efficiency of thought.
+
+If we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the sake
+of suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual development
+of thought. Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops,
+and gardens, where dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used,
+opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life, and for
+acquiring and applying information and ideas in the carrying forward of
+progressive experiences. Ideas are not segregated, they do not form an
+isolated island. They animate and enrich the ordinary course of life.
+Information is vitalized by its function; by the place it occupies in
+direction of action. The phrase "opportunities exist" is used purposely.
+They may not be taken advantage of; it is possible to employ manual
+and constructive activities in a physical way, as means of getting just
+bodily skill; or they may be used almost exclusively for "utilitarian,"
+i.e., pecuniary, ends. But the disposition on the part of upholders of
+"cultural" education to assume that such activities are merely physical
+or professional in quality, is itself a product of the philosophies
+which isolate mind from direction of the course of experience and hence
+from action upon and with things. When the "mental" is regarded as
+a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart fate befalls bodily
+activity and movements. They are regarded as at the best mere external
+annexes to mind. They may be necessary for the satisfaction of bodily
+needs and the attainment of external decency and comfort, but they do
+not occupy a necessary place in mind nor enact an indispensable role
+in the completion of thought. Hence they have no place in a liberal
+education--i.e., one which is concerned with the interests of
+intelligence. If they come in at all, it is as a concession to the
+material needs of the masses. That they should be allowed to invade
+the education of the elite is unspeakable. This conclusion follows
+irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind, but by the same
+logic it disappears when we perceive what mind really is--namely, the
+purposive and directive factor in the development of experience. While
+it is desirable that all educational institutions should be equipped so
+as to give students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and
+information in active pursuits typifying important social situations, it
+will, doubtless, be a long time before all of them are thus furnished.
+But this state of affairs does not afford instructors an excuse for
+folding their hands and persisting in methods which segregate school
+knowledge. Every recitation in every subject gives an opportunity for
+establishing cross connections between the subject matter of the lesson
+and the wider and more direct experiences of everyday life. Classroom
+instruction falls into three kinds. The least desirable treats each
+lesson as an independent whole. It does not put upon the student the
+responsibility of finding points of contact between it and other lessons
+in the same subject, or other subjects of study. Wiser teachers see to
+it that the student is systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons
+to help understand the present one, and also to use the present to
+throw additional light upon what has already been acquired. Results are
+better, but school subject matter is still isolated. Save by accident,
+out-of-school experience is left in its crude and comparatively
+irreflective state. It is not subject to the refining and expanding
+influences of the more accurate and comprehensive material of direct
+instruction. The latter is not motivated and impregnated with a sense of
+reality by being intermingled with the realities of everyday life. The
+best type of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this
+interconnection. It puts the student in the habitual attitude of finding
+points of contact and mutual bearings.
+
+Summary. Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which
+they center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may
+speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is
+that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials
+of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection.
+They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of
+experience--that there be a continuous activity in which he is
+interested for its own sake; secondly, that a genuine problem develop
+within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess
+the information and make the observations needed to deal with it;
+fourth, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be
+responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have
+opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their
+meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
+
+1. The Unity of Subject Matter and Method.
+
+The trinity of school topics is subject matter, methods, and
+administration or government. We have been concerned with the two former
+in recent chapters. It remains to disentangle them from the context in
+which they have been referred to, and discuss explicitly their nature.
+We shall begin with the topic of method, since that lies closest to the
+considerations of the last chapter. Before taking it up, it may be well,
+however, to call express attention to one implication of our theory; the
+connection of subject matter and method with each other. The idea
+that mind and the world of things and persons are two separate
+and independent realms--a theory which philosophically is known as
+dualism--carries with it the conclusion that method and subject matter
+of instruction are separate affairs. Subject matter then becomes a
+ready-made systematized classification of the facts and principles
+of the world of nature and man. Method then has for its province a
+consideration of the ways in which this antecedent subject matter may
+be best presented to and impressed upon the mind; or, a consideration
+of the ways in which the mind may be externally brought to bear upon the
+matter so as to facilitate its acquisition and possession. In theory, at
+least, one might deduce from a science of the mind as something existing
+by itself a complete theory of methods of learning, with no knowledge of
+the subjects to which the methods are to be applied. Since many who
+are actually most proficient in various branches of subject matter
+are wholly innocent of these methods, this state of affairs gives
+opportunity for the retort that pedagogy, as an alleged science
+of methods of the mind in learning, is futile;--a mere screen for
+concealing the necessity a teacher is under of profound and accurate
+acquaintance with the subject in hand.
+
+But since thinking is a directed movement of subject matter to a
+completing issue, and since mind is the deliberate and intentional phase
+of the process, the notion of any such split is radically false. The
+fact that the material of a science is organized is evidence that it has
+already been subjected to intelligence; it has been methodized, so
+to say. Zoology as a systematic branch of knowledge represents crude,
+scattered facts of our ordinary acquaintance with animals after
+they have been subjected to careful examination, to deliberate
+supplementation, and to arrangement to bring out connections which
+assist observation, memory, and further inquiry. Instead of furnishing a
+starting point for learning, they mark out a consummation. Method means
+that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use.
+Never is method something outside of the material.
+
+How about method from the standpoint of an individual who is dealing
+with subject matter? Again, it is not something external. It is simply
+an effective treatment of material--efficiency meaning such treatment as
+utilizes the material (puts it to a purpose) with a minimum of waste of
+time and energy. We can distinguish a way of acting, and discuss it by
+itself; but the way exists only as way-of-dealing-with-material. Method
+is not antithetical to subject matter; it is the effective direction
+of subject matter to desired results. It is antithetical to random and
+ill-considered action,--ill-considered signifying ill-adapted.
+
+The statement that method means directed movement of subject matter
+towards ends is formal. An illustration may give it content. Every
+artist must have a method, a technique, in doing his work. Piano playing
+is not hitting the keys at random. It is an orderly way of using them,
+and the order is not something which exists ready-made in the musician's
+hands or brain prior to an activity dealing with the piano. Order is
+found in the disposition of acts which use the piano and the hands and
+brain so as to achieve the result intended. It is the action of the
+piano directed to accomplish the purpose of the piano as a musical
+instrument. It is the same with "pedagogical" method. The only
+difference is that the piano is a mechanism constructed in advance for
+a single end; while the material of study is capable of indefinite uses.
+But even in this regard the illustration may apply if we consider the
+infinite variety of kinds of music which a piano may produce, and
+the variations in technique required in the different musical results
+secured. Method in any case is but an effective way of employing some
+material for some end.
+
+These considerations may be generalized by going back to the conception
+of experience. Experience as the perception of the connection between
+something tried and something undergone in consequence is a process.
+Apart from effort to control the course which the process takes, there
+is no distinction of subject matter and method. There is simply an
+activity which includes both what an individual does and what the
+environment does. A piano player who had perfect mastery of his
+instrument would have no occasion to distinguish between his
+contribution and that of the piano. In well-formed, smooth-running
+functions of any sort,--skating, conversing, hearing music, enjoying a
+landscape,--there is no consciousness of separation of the method of the
+person and of the subject matter. In whole-hearted play and work there
+is the same phenomenon.
+
+When we reflect upon an experience instead of just having it, we
+inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects toward
+which we sustain the attitude. When a man is eating, he is eating food.
+He does not divide his act into eating and food. But if he makes a
+scientific investigation of the act, such a discrimination is the first
+thing he would effect. He would examine on the one hand the properties
+of the nutritive material, and on the other hand the acts of the
+organism in appropriating and digesting. Such reflection upon experience
+gives rise to a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and
+the experiencing--the how. When we give names to this distinction we
+have subject matter and method as our terms. There is the thing seen,
+heard, loved, hated, imagined, and there is the act of seeing, hearing,
+loving, hating, imagining, etc.
+
+This distinction is so natural and so important for certain purposes,
+that we are only too apt to regard it as a separation in existence and
+not as a distinction in thought. Then we make a division between a self
+and the environment or world. This separation is the root of the dualism
+of method and subject matter. That is, we assume that knowing, feeling,
+willing, etc., are things which belong to the self or mind in its
+isolation, and which then may be brought to bear upon an independent
+subject matter. We assume that the things which belong in isolation to
+the self or mind have their own laws of operation irrespective of the
+modes of active energy of the object. These laws are supposed to furnish
+method. It would be no less absurd to suppose that men can eat without
+eating something, or that the structure and movements of the jaws,
+throat muscles, the digestive activities of stomach, etc., are not what
+they are because of the material with which their activity is engaged.
+Just as the organs of the organism are a continuous part of the very
+world in which food materials exist, so the capacities of seeing,
+hearing, loving, imagining are intrinsically connected with the subject
+matter of the world. They are more truly ways in which the environment
+enters into experience and functions there than they are independent
+acts brought to bear upon things. Experience, in short, is not a
+combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject
+matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity
+(literally countless in number) of energies.
+
+For the purpose of controlling the course or direction which the moving
+unity of experience takes we draw a mental distinction between the
+how and the what. While there is no way of walking or of eating or of
+learning over and above the actual walking, eating, and studying, there
+are certain elements in the act which give the key to its more effective
+control. Special attention to these elements makes them more obvious
+to perception (letting other factors recede for the time being from
+conspicuous recognition). Getting an idea of how the experience proceeds
+indicates to us what factors must be secured or modified in order that
+it may go on more successfully. This is only a somewhat elaborate way
+of saying that if a man watches carefully the growth of several plants,
+some of which do well and some of which amount to little or nothing, he
+may be able to detect the special conditions upon which the prosperous
+development of a plant depends. These conditions, stated in an orderly
+sequence, would constitute the method or way or manner of its growth.
+There is no difference between the growth of a plant and the prosperous
+development of an experience. It is not easy, in either case, to seize
+upon just the factors which make for its best movement. But study of
+cases of success and failure and minute and extensive comparison, helps
+to seize upon causes. When we have arranged these causes in order, we
+have a method of procedure or a technique.
+
+A consideration of some evils in education that flow from the isolation
+of method from subject matter will make the point more definite.
+
+(I) In the first place, there is the neglect (of which we have spoken)
+of concrete situations of experience. There can be no discovery of
+a method without cases to be studied. The method is derived from
+observation of what actually happens, with a view to seeing that it
+happen better next time. But in instruction and discipline, there is
+rarely sufficient opportunity for children and youth to have the direct
+normal experiences from which educators might derive an idea of method
+or order of best development. Experiences are had under conditions
+of such constraint that they throw little or no light upon the normal
+course of an experience to its fruition. "Methods" have then to be
+authoritatively recommended to teachers, instead of being an expression
+of their own intelligent observations. Under such circumstances, they
+have a mechanical uniformity, assumed to be alike for all minds. Where
+flexible personal experiences are promoted by providing an environment
+which calls out directed occupations in work and play, the methods
+ascertained will vary with individuals--for it is certain that each
+individual has something characteristic in his way of going at things.
+
+(ii) In the second place, the notion of methods isolated from subject
+matter is responsible for the false conceptions of discipline and
+interest already noted. When the effective way of managing material
+is treated as something ready-made apart from material, there are just
+three possible ways in which to establish a relationship lacking by
+assumption. One is to utilize excitement, shock of pleasure, tickling
+the palate. Another is to make the consequences of not attending
+painful; we may use the menace of harm to motivate concern with the
+alien subject matter. Or a direct appeal may be made to the person to
+put forth effort without any reason. We may rely upon immediate strain
+of "will." In practice, however, the latter method is effectual only
+when instigated by fear of unpleasant results. (iii) In the third place,
+the act of learning is made a direct and conscious end in itself. Under
+normal conditions, learning is a product and reward of occupation with
+subject matter. Children do not set out, consciously, to learn walking
+or talking. One sets out to give his impulses for communication and for
+fuller intercourse with others a show. He learns in consequence of his
+direct activities. The better methods of teaching a child, say, to read,
+follow the same road. They do not fix his attention upon the fact that
+he has to learn something and so make his attitude self-conscious
+and constrained. They engage his activities, and in the process of
+engagement he learns: the same is true of the more successful methods in
+dealing with number or whatever. But when the subject matter is not used
+in carrying forward impulses and habits to significant results, it is
+just something to be learned. The pupil's attitude to it is just that
+of having to learn it. Conditions more unfavorable to an alert and
+concentrated response would be hard to devise. Frontal attacks are even
+more wasteful in learning than in war. This does not mean, however, that
+students are to be seduced unaware into preoccupation with lessons. It
+means that they shall be occupied with them for real reasons or ends,
+and not just as something to be learned. This is accomplished whenever
+the pupil perceives the place occupied by the subject matter in the
+fulfilling of some experience.
+
+(iv) In the fourth place, under the influence of the conception of the
+separation of mind and material, method tends to be reduced to a cut and
+dried routine, to following mechanically prescribed steps. No one can
+tell in how many schoolrooms children reciting in arithmetic or grammar
+are compelled to go through, under the alleged sanction of method,
+certain preordained verbal formulae. Instead of being encouraged to
+attack their topics directly, experimenting with methods that seem
+promising and learning to discriminate by the consequences that accrue,
+it is assumed that there is one fixed method to be followed. It is
+also naively assumed that if the pupils make their statements and
+explanations in a certain form of "analysis," their mental habits will
+in time conform. Nothing has brought pedagogical theory into greater
+disrepute than the belief that it is identified with handing out to
+teachers recipes and models to be followed in teaching. Flexibility and
+initiative in dealing with problems are characteristic of any conception
+to which method is a way of managing material to develop a conclusion.
+Mechanical rigid woodenness is an inevitable corollary of any theory
+which separates mind from activity motivated by a purpose.
+
+2. Method as General and as Individual. In brief, the method of teaching
+is the method of an art, of action intelligently directed by ends. But
+the practice of a fine art is far from being a matter of extemporized
+inspirations. Study of the operations and results of those in the past
+who have greatly succeeded is essential. There is always a tradition, or
+schools of art, definite enough to impress beginners, and often to take
+them captive. Methods of artists in every branch depend upon thorough
+acquaintance with materials and tools; the painter must know canvas,
+pigments, brushes, and the technique of manipulation of all his
+appliances. Attainment of this knowledge requires persistent and
+concentrated attention to objective materials. The artist studies the
+progress of his own attempts to see what succeeds and what fails. The
+assumption that there are no alternatives between following ready-made
+rules and trusting to native gifts, the inspiration of the moment and
+undirected "hard work," is contradicted by the procedures of every art.
+
+Such matters as knowledge of the past, of current technique, of
+materials, of the ways in which one's own best results are assured,
+supply the material for what may be called general method. There exists
+a cumulative body of fairly stable methods for reaching results, a body
+authorized by past experience and by intellectual analysis, which an
+individual ignores at his peril. As was pointed out in the discussion of
+habit-forming (ante, p. 49), there is always a danger that these methods
+will become mechanized and rigid, mastering an agent instead of being
+powers at command for his own ends. But it is also true that the
+innovator who achieves anything enduring, whose work is more than a
+passing sensation, utilizes classic methods more than may appear to
+himself or to his critics. He devotes them to new uses, and in so far
+transforms them.
+
+
+Education also has its general methods. And if the application of this
+remark is more obvious in the case of the teacher than of the pupil, it
+is equally real in the case of the latter. Part of his learning, a very
+important part, consists in becoming master of the methods which the
+experience of others has shown to be more efficient in like cases of
+getting knowledge. 1 These general methods are in no way opposed to
+individual initiative and originality--to personal ways of doing things.
+On the contrary they are reinforcements of them. For there is radical
+difference between even the most general method and a prescribed rule.
+The latter is a direct guide to action; the former operates indirectly
+through the enlightenment it supplies as to ends and means. It operates,
+that is to say, through intelligence, and not through conformity to
+orders externally imposed. Ability to use even in a masterly way an
+established technique gives no warranty of artistic work, for the latter
+also depends upon an animating idea.
+
+If knowledge of methods used by others does not directly tell us what to
+do, or furnish ready-made models, how does it operate? What is meant by
+calling a method intellectual? Take the case of a physician. No mode
+of behavior more imperiously demands knowledge of established modes of
+diagnosis and treatment than does his. But after all, cases are like,
+not identical. To be used intelligently, existing practices, however
+authorized they may be, have to be adapted to the exigencies of
+particular cases. Accordingly, recognized procedures indicate to the
+physician what inquiries to set on foot for himself, what measures to
+try. They are standpoints from which to carry on investigations; they
+economize a survey of the features of the particular case by suggesting
+the things to be especially looked into. The physician's own personal
+attitudes, his own ways (individual methods) of dealing with the
+situation in which he is concerned, are not subordinated to the general
+principles of procedure, but are facilitated and directed by the latter.
+The instance may serve to point out the value to the teacher of a
+knowledge of the psychological methods and the empirical devices found
+useful in the past. When they get in the way of his own common sense,
+when they come between him and the situation in which he has to act,
+they are worse than useless. But if he has acquired them as intellectual
+aids in sizing up the needs, resources, and difficulties of the unique
+experiences in which he engages, they are of constructive value. In the
+last resort, just because everything depends upon his own methods of
+response, much depends upon how far he can utilize, in making his own
+response, the knowledge which has accrued in the experience of others.
+As already intimated, every word of this account is directly applicable
+also to the method of the pupil, the way of learning. To suppose that
+students, whether in the primary school or in the university, can
+be supplied with models of method to be followed in acquiring and
+expounding a subject is to fall into a self-deception that has
+lamentable consequences. (See ante, p. 169.) One must make his own
+reaction in any case. Indications of the standardized or general methods
+used in like cases by others--particularly by those who are already
+experts--are of worth or of harm according as they make his personal
+reaction more intelligent or as they induce a person to dispense with
+exercise of his own judgment. If what was said earlier (See p. 159)
+about originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding more of
+education than the capacities of average human nature permit, the
+difficulty is that we lie under the incubus of a superstition. We have
+set up the notion of mind at large, of intellectual method that is the
+same for all. Then we regard individuals as differing in the quantity of
+mind with which they are charged. Ordinary persons are then expected to
+be ordinary. Only the exceptional are allowed to have originality. The
+measure of difference between the average student and the genius is a
+measure of the absence of originality in the former. But this notion
+of mind in general is a fiction. How one person's abilities compare in
+quantity with those of another is none of the teacher's business. It is
+irrelevant to his work. What is required is that every individual shall
+have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have
+meaning. Mind, individual method, originality (these are convertible
+terms) signify the quality of purposive or directed action. If we act
+upon this conviction, we shall secure more originality even by the
+conventional standard than now develops. Imposing an alleged uniform
+general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very
+exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds
+eccentricity in them. Thus we stifle the distinctive quality of the
+many, and save in rare instances (like, say, that of Darwin) infect the
+rare geniuses with an unwholesome quality.
+
+3. The Traits of Individual Method. The most general features of the
+method of knowing have been given in our chapter on thinking. They
+are the features of the reflective situation: Problem, collection and
+analysis of data, projection and elaboration of suggestions or ideas,
+experimental application and testing; the resulting conclusion or
+judgment. The specific elements of an individual's method or way of
+attack upon a problem are found ultimately in his native tendencies and
+his acquired habits and interests. The method of one will vary from that
+of another (and properly vary) as his original instinctive capacities
+vary, as his past experiences and his preferences vary. Those who have
+already studied these matters are in possession of information which
+will help teachers in understanding the responses different pupils
+make, and help them in guiding these responses to greater efficiency.
+Child-study, psychology, and a knowledge of social environment
+supplement the personal acquaintance gained by the teacher. But methods
+remain the personal concern, approach, and attack of an individual, and
+no catalogue can ever exhaust their diversity of form and tint.
+
+Some attitudes may be named, however,-which are central in effective
+intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter. Among the most
+important are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or
+whole-heartedness), and responsibility.
+
+1. It is easier to indicate what is meant by directness through negative
+terms than in positive ones. Self-consciousness, embarrassment, and
+constraint are its menacing foes. They indicate that a person is not
+immediately concerned with subject matter. Something has come between
+which deflects concern to side issues. A self-conscious person is partly
+thinking about his problem and partly about what others think of his
+performances. Diverted energy means loss of power and confusion of
+ideas. Taking an attitude is by no means identical with being conscious
+of one's attitude. The former is spontaneous, naive, and simple. It is
+a sign of whole-souled relationship between a person and what he is
+dealing with. The latter is not of necessity abnormal. It is sometimes
+the easiest way of correcting a false method of approach, and of
+improving the effectiveness of the means one is employing,--as golf
+players, piano players, public speakers, etc., have occasionally to give
+especial attention to their position and movements. But this need
+is occasional and temporary. When it is effectual a person thinks of
+himself in terms of what is to be done, as one means among others of the
+realization of an end--as in the case of a tennis player practicing to
+get the "feel" of a stroke. In abnormal cases, one thinks of himself not
+as part of the agencies of execution, but as a separate object--as when
+the player strikes an attitude thinking of the impression it will make
+upon spectators, or is worried because of the impression he fears his
+movements give rise to.
+
+Confidence is a good name for what is intended by the term directness.
+It should not be confused, however, with self-confidence which may be a
+form of self-consciousness--or of "cheek." Confidence is not a name for
+what one thinks or feels about his attitude it is not reflex. It denotes
+the straightforwardness with which one goes at what he has to do.
+It denotes not conscious trust in the efficacy of one's powers but
+unconscious faith in the possibilities of the situation. It signifies
+rising to the needs of the situation. We have already pointed out (See
+p. 169) the objections to making students emphatically aware of the fact
+that they are studying or learning. Just in the degree in which they
+are induced by the conditions to be so aware, they are not studying
+and learning. They are in a divided and complicated attitude. Whatever
+methods of a teacher call a pupil's attention off from what he has to
+do and transfer it to his own attitude towards what he is doing impair
+directness of concern and action. Persisted in, the pupil acquires a
+permanent tendency to fumble, to gaze about aimlessly, to look for some
+clew of action beside that which the subject matter supplies. Dependence
+upon extraneous suggestions and directions, a state of foggy confusion,
+take the place of that sureness with which children (and grown-up people
+who have not been sophisticated by "education") confront the situations
+of life.
+
+2. Open-mindedness. Partiality is, as we have seen, an accompaniment of
+the existence of interest, since this means sharing, partaking, taking
+sides in some movement. All the more reason, therefore, for an attitude
+of mind which actively welcomes suggestions and relevant information
+from all sides. In the chapter on Aims it was shown that foreseen ends
+are factors in the development of a changing situation. They are
+the means by which the direction of action is controlled. They are
+subordinate to the situation, therefore, not the situation to them. They
+are not ends in the sense of finalities to which everything must be bent
+and sacrificed. They are, as foreseen, means of guiding the development
+of a situation. A target is not the future goal of shooting; it is
+the centering factor in a present shooting. Openness of mind means
+accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw
+light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help
+determine the consequences of acting this way or that. Efficiency in
+accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as unalterable can
+coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But intellectual growth means
+constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes
+and new responses. These are impossible without an active disposition
+to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain
+considerations which modify existing purposes. Retention of capacity
+to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. The worst
+thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest
+development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli. Open-mindedness
+means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means
+premature intellectual old age.
+
+Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external
+results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in
+school. The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of
+operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders
+upon pupils--restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's mind
+happens to approve. Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity
+of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately
+measurable, correct results. The zeal for "answers" is the explanation
+of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods. Forcing and
+overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert and
+varied intellectual interest.
+
+Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign
+saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent
+of hospitality. But there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let
+experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which is an essential of
+development. Results (external answers or solutions) may be hurried;
+processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were
+all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not
+the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth
+something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
+
+3. Single-mindedness. So far as the word is concerned, much that was
+said under the head of "directness" is applicable. But what the word is
+here intended to convey is completeness of interest, unity of purpose;
+the absence of suppressed but effectual ulterior aims for which the
+professed aim is but a mask. It is equivalent to mental integrity.
+Absorption, engrossment, full concern with subject matter for its own
+sake, nurture it. Divided interest and evasion destroy it.
+
+Intellectual integrity, honesty, and sincerity are at bottom not
+matters of conscious purpose but of quality of active response.
+Their acquisition is fostered of course by conscious intent, but
+self-deception is very easy. Desires are urgent. When the demands and
+wishes of others forbid their direct expression they are easily driven
+into subterranean and deep channels. Entire surrender, and wholehearted
+adoption of the course of action demanded by others are almost
+impossible. Deliberate revolt or deliberate attempts to deceive others
+may result. But the more frequent outcome is a confused and divided
+state of interest in which one is fooled as to one's own real intent.
+One tries to serve two masters at once. Social instincts, the strong
+desire to please others and get their approval, social training, the
+general sense of duty and of authority, apprehension of penalty, all
+lead to a half-hearted effort to conform, to "pay attention to the
+lesson," or whatever the requirement is. Amiable individuals want to do
+what they are expected to do. Consciously the pupil thinks he is
+doing this. But his own desires are not abolished. Only their evident
+exhibition is suppressed. Strain of attention to what is hostile to
+desire is irksome; in spite of one's conscious wish, the underlying
+desires determine the main course of thought, the deeper emotional
+responses. The mind wanders from the nominal subject and devotes
+itself to what is intrinsically more desirable. A systematized divided
+attention expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result.
+One has only to recall his own experiences in school or at the present
+time when outwardly employed in actions which do not engage one's
+desires and purposes, to realize how prevalent is this attitude of
+divided attention--double-mindedness. We are so used to it that we take
+it for granted that a considerable amount of it is necessary. It may be;
+if so, it is the more important to face its bad intellectual effects.
+Obvious is the loss of energy of thought immediately available when
+one is consciously trying (or trying to seem to try) to attend to one
+matter, while unconsciously one's imagination is spontaneously going out
+to more congenial affairs. More subtle and more permanently crippling
+to efficiency of intellectual activity is a fostering of habitual
+self-deception, with the confused sense of reality which accompanies it.
+A double standard of reality, one for our own private and more or less
+concealed interests, and another for public and acknowledged concerns,
+hampers, in most of us, integrity and completeness of mental action.
+Equally serious is the fact that a split is set up between conscious
+thought and attention and impulsive blind affection and desire.
+Reflective dealings with the material of instruction is constrained
+and half-hearted; attention wanders. The topics to which it wanders are
+unavowed and hence intellectually illicit; transactions with them
+are furtive. The discipline that comes from regulating response by
+deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails; worse than that, the deepest
+concern and most congenial enterprises of the imagination (since they
+center about the things dearest to desire) are casual, concealed. They
+enter into action in ways which are unacknowledged. Not subject to
+rectification by consideration of consequences, they are demoralizing.
+
+School conditions favorable to this division of mind between
+avowed, public, and socially responsible undertakings, and private,
+ill-regulated, and suppressed indulgences of thought are not hard
+to find. What is sometimes called "stern discipline," i.e., external
+coercive pressure, has this tendency. Motivation through rewards
+extraneous to the thing to be done has a like effect. Everything that
+makes schooling merely preparatory (See ante, p. 55) works in this
+direction. Ends being beyond the pupil's present grasp, other agencies
+have to be found to procure immediate attention to assigned tasks. Some
+responses are secured, but desires and affections not enlisted must
+find other outlets. Not less serious is exaggerated emphasis upon
+drill exercises designed to produce skill in action, independent of any
+engagement of thought--exercises have no purpose but the production of
+automatic skill. Nature abhors a mental vacuum. What do teachers imagine
+is happening to thought and emotion when the latter get no outlet in
+the things of immediate activity? Were they merely kept in temporary
+abeyance, or even only calloused, it would not be a matter of so much
+moment. But they are not abolished; they are not suspended; they are
+not suppressed--save with reference to the task in question. They follow
+their own chaotic and undisciplined course. What is native, spontaneous,
+and vital in mental reaction goes unused and untested, and the habits
+formed are such that these qualities become less and less available for
+public and avowed ends.
+
+4. Responsibility. By responsibility as an element in intellectual
+attitude is meant the disposition to consider in advance the probable
+consequences of any projected step and deliberately to accept them: to
+accept them in the sense of taking them into account, acknowledging them
+in action, not yielding a mere verbal assent. Ideas, as we have seen,
+are intrinsically standpoints and methods for bringing about a solution
+of a perplexing situation; forecasts calculated to influence responses.
+It is only too easy to think that one accepts a statement or believes a
+suggested truth when one has not considered its implications; when one
+has made but a cursory and superficial survey of what further things one
+is committed to by acceptance. Observation and recognition, belief and
+assent, then become names for lazy acquiescence in what is externally
+presented.
+
+It would be much better to have fewer facts and truths in
+instruction--that is, fewer things supposedly accepted,--if a smaller
+number of situations could be intellectually worked out to the point
+where conviction meant something real--some identification of the self
+with the type of conduct demanded by facts and foresight of results. The
+most permanent bad results of undue complication of school subjects
+and congestion of school studies and lessons are not the worry, nervous
+strain, and superficial acquaintance that follow (serious as these are),
+but the failure to make clear what is involved in really knowing and
+believing a thing. Intellectual responsibility means severe standards
+in this regard. These standards can be built up only through practice in
+following up and acting upon the meaning of what is acquired.
+
+Intellectual thoroughness is thus another name for the attitude we are
+considering. There is a kind of thoroughness which is almost purely
+physical: the kind that signifies mechanical and exhausting drill upon
+all the details of a subject. Intellectual thoroughness is seeing a
+thing through. It depends upon a unity of purpose to which details are
+subordinated, not upon presenting a multitude of disconnected details.
+It is manifested in the firmness with which the full meaning of the
+purpose is developed, not in attention, however "conscientious" it may
+be, to the steps of action externally imposed and directed.
+
+Summary. Method is a statement of the way the subject matter of an
+experience develops most effectively and fruitfully. It is derived,
+accordingly, from observation of the course of experiences where
+there is no conscious distinction of personal attitude and manner from
+material dealt with. The assumption that method is something separate
+is connected with the notion of the isolation of mind and self from the
+world of things. It makes instruction and learning formal, mechanical,
+constrained. While methods are individualized, certain features of the
+normal course of an experience to its fruition may be discriminated,
+because of the fund of wisdom derived from prior experiences and because
+of general similarities in the materials dealt with from time to time.
+Expressed in terms of the attitude of the individual the traits of
+good method are straightforwardness, flexible intellectual interest
+or open-minded will to learn, integrity of purpose, and acceptance of
+responsibility for the consequences of one's activity including thought.
+
+
+1 This point is developed below in a discussion of what are termed
+psychological and logical methods respectively. See p. 219.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
+
+1. Subject Matter of Educator and of Learner. So far as the nature of
+subject matter in principle is concerned, there is nothing to add
+to what has been said (See ante, p. 134). It consists of the facts
+observed, recalled, read, and talked about, and the ideas suggested, in
+course of a development of a situation having a purpose. This statement
+needs to be rendered more specific by connecting it with the materials
+of school instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. What is
+the significance of our definition in application to reading, writing,
+mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing, physics,
+chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on? Let us recur to two
+of the points made earlier in our discussion. The educator's part in the
+enterprise of education is to furnish the environment which stimulates
+responses and directs the learner's course. In last analysis, all that
+the educator can do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely
+as is possible result in the formation of desirable intellectual and
+emotional dispositions. Obviously studies or the subject matter of the
+curriculum have intimately to do with this business of supplying an
+environment. The other point is the necessity of a social environment
+to give meaning to habits formed. In what we have termed informal
+education, subject matter is carried directly in the matrix of social
+intercourse. It is what the persons with whom an individual associates
+do and say. This fact gives a clew to the understanding of the subject
+matter of formal or deliberate instruction. A connecting link is found
+in the stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which accompany the
+doings and rites of a primitive social group. They represent the stock
+of meanings which have been precipitated out of previous experience,
+which are so prized by the group as to be identified with their
+conception of their own collective life. Not being obviously a part of
+the skill exhibited in the daily occupations of eating, hunting, making
+war and peace, constructing rugs, pottery, and baskets, etc., they
+are consciously impressed upon the young; often, as in the initiation
+ceremonies, with intense emotional fervor. Even more pains are
+consciously taken to perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal
+formulae of the group than to transmit the directly useful customs of
+the group just because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in
+the ordinary processes of association.
+
+As the social group grows more complex, involving a greater number of
+acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or in the belief
+of the group, upon standard ideas deposited from past experience, the
+content of social life gets more definitely formulated for purposes of
+instruction. As we have previously noted, probably the chief motive for
+consciously dwelling upon the group life, extracting the meanings which
+are regarded as most important and systematizing them in a coherent
+arrangement, is just the need of instructing the young so as to
+perpetuate group life. Once started on this road of selection,
+formulation, and organization, no definite limit exists. The invention
+of writing and of printing gives the operation an immense impetus.
+Finally, the bonds which connect the subject matter of school study with
+the habits and ideals of the social group are disguised and covered up.
+The ties are so loosened that it often appears as if there were none;
+as if subject matter existed simply as knowledge on its own independent
+behoof, and as if study were the mere act of mastering it for its own
+sake, irrespective of any social values. Since it is highly important
+for practical reasons to counter-act this tendency (See ante, p. 8)
+the chief purposes of our theoretical discussion are to make clear the
+connection which is so readily lost from sight, and to show in some
+detail the social content and function of the chief constituents of the
+course of study.
+
+The points need to be considered from the standpoint of instructor and
+of student. To the former, the significance of a knowledge of subject
+matter, going far beyond the present knowledge of pupils, is to supply
+definite standards and to reveal to him the possibilities of the
+crude activities of the immature. (i) The material of school studies
+translates into concrete and detailed terms the meanings of current
+social life which it is desirable to transmit. It puts clearly
+before the instructor the essential ingredients of the culture to
+be perpetuated, in such an organized form as to protect him from the
+haphazard efforts he would be likely to indulge in if the meanings had
+not been standardized. (ii) A knowledge of the ideas which have been
+achieved in the past as the outcome of activity places the educator in
+a position to perceive the meaning of the seeming impulsive and aimless
+reactions of the young, and to provide the stimuli needed to direct them
+so that they will amount to something. The more the educator knows of
+music the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate musical
+impulses of a child. Organized subject matter represents the ripe
+fruitage of experiences like theirs, experiences involving the same
+world, and powers and needs similar to theirs. It does not represent
+perfection or infallible wisdom; but it is the best at command to
+further new experiences which may, in some respects at least, surpass
+the achievements embodied in existing knowledge and works of art.
+
+From the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various studies
+represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness from
+the experience of the young is not, however, seeming; it is real. The
+subject matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical
+with the formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter
+of the adult; the material as found in books and in works of art, etc.
+The latter represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing
+state. It enters directly into the activities of the expert and the
+educator, not into that of the beginner, the learner. Failure to bear in
+mind the difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of
+teacher and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the
+use of texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge.
+
+The need for a knowledge of the constitution and functions, in the
+concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's attitude
+to subject matter is so different from that of the pupil. The teacher
+presents in actuality what the pupil represents only in posse. That is,
+the teacher already knows the things which the student is only learning.
+Hence the problem of the two is radically unlike. When engaged in the
+direct act of teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter
+at his fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and
+response of the pupil. To understand the latter in its interplay with
+subject matter is his task, while the pupil's mind, naturally, should be
+not on itself but on the topic in hand. Or to state the same point in
+a somewhat different manner: the teacher should be occupied not with
+subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils' present
+needs and capacities. Hence simple scholarship is not enough. In
+fact, there are certain features of scholarship or mastered subject
+matter--taken by itself--which get in the way of effective teaching
+unless the instructor's habitual attitude is one of concern with
+its interplay in the pupil's own experience. In the first place,
+his knowledge extends indefinitely beyond the range of the pupil's
+acquaintance. It involves principles which are beyond the immature
+pupil's understanding and interest. In and of itself, it may no
+more represent the living world of the pupil's experience than the
+astronomer's knowledge of Mars represents a baby's acquaintance with the
+room in which he stays. In the second place, the method of organization
+of the material of achieved scholarship differs from that of
+the beginner. It is not true that the experience of the young is
+unorganized--that it consists of isolated scraps. But it is organized in
+connection with direct practical centers of interest. The child's home
+is, for example, the organizing center of his geographical knowledge.
+His own movements about the locality, his journeys abroad, the tales of
+his friends, give the ties which hold his items of information together.
+But the geography of the geographer, of the one who has already
+developed the implications of these smaller experiences, is organized
+on the basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to
+one another--not the relations which they bear to his house, bodily
+movements, and friends. To the one who is learned, subject matter is
+extensive, accurately defined, and logically interrelated. To the
+one who is learning, it is fluid, partial, and connected through
+his personal occupations. 1 The problem of teaching is to keep the
+experience of the student moving in the direction of what the expert
+already knows. Hence the need that the teacher know both subject matter
+and the characteristic needs and capacities of the student.
+
+
+2. The Development of Subject Matter in the Learner. It is possible,
+without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three fairly typical
+stages in the growth of subject matter in the experience of the learner.
+In its first estate, knowledge exists as the content of intelligent
+ability--power to do. This kind of subject matter, or known material, is
+expressed in familiarity or acquaintance with things. Then this material
+gradually is surcharged and deepened through communicated knowledge or
+information. Finally, it is enlarged and worked over into rationally or
+logically organized material--that of the one who, relatively speaking,
+is expert in the subject.
+
+I. The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains most
+deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read,
+write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine, calculate, drive a
+horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely. The popular
+tendency to regard instinctive acts which are adapted to an end as a
+sort of miraculous knowledge, while unjustifiable, is evidence of the
+strong tendency to identify intelligent control of the means of action
+with knowledge. When education, under the influence of a scholastic
+conception of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically
+formulated facts and truths, fails to recognize that primary or initial
+subject matter always exists as matter of an active doing, involving
+the use of the body and the handling of material, the subject matter of
+instruction is isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and
+so becomes just a something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand.
+Recognition of the natural course of development, on the contrary,
+always sets out with situations which involve learning by doing. Arts
+and occupations form the initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding
+as they do to knowing how to go about the accomplishment of ends.
+Popular terms denoting knowledge have always retained the connection
+with ability in action lost by academic philosophies. Ken and can are
+allied words. Attention means caring for a thing, in the sense of both
+affection and of looking out for its welfare. Mind means carrying out
+instructions in action--as a child minds his mother--and taking care
+of something--as a nurse minds the baby. To be thoughtful, considerate,
+means to heed the claims of others. Apprehension means dread of
+undesirable consequences, as well as intellectual grasp. To have
+good sense or judgment is to know the conduct a situation calls for;
+discernment is not making distinctions for the sake of making them, an
+exercise reprobated as hair splitting, but is insight into an affair
+with reference to acting. Wisdom has never lost its association with
+the proper direction of life. Only in education, never in the life of
+farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does
+knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
+Having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in acquaintance
+or familiarity. The things we are best acquainted with are the things we
+put to frequent use--such things as chairs, tables, pen, paper, clothes,
+food, knives and forks on the commonplace level, differentiating into
+more special objects according to a person's occupations in life.
+Knowledge of things in that intimate and emotional sense suggested by
+the word acquaintance is a precipitate from our employing them with a
+purpose. We have acted with or upon the thing so frequently that we can
+anticipate how it will act and react--such is the meaning of familiar
+acquaintance. We are ready for a familiar thing; it does not catch us
+napping, or play unexpected tricks with us. This attitude carries with
+it a sense of congeniality or friendliness, of ease and illumination;
+while the things with which we are not accustomed to deal are strange,
+foreign, cold, remote, "abstract."
+
+II. But it is likely that elaborate statements regarding this primary
+stage of knowledge will darken understanding. It includes practically
+all of our knowledge which is not the result of deliberate technical
+study. Modes of purposeful doing include dealings with persons as well
+as things. Impulses of communication and habits of intercourse have to
+be adapted to maintaining successful connections with others; a large
+fund of social knowledge accrues. As a part of this intercommunication
+one learns much from others. They tell of their experiences and of the
+experiences which, in turn, have been told them. In so far as one is
+interested or concerned in these communications, their matter becomes a
+part of one's own experience. Active connections with others are such
+an intimate and vital part of our own concerns that it is impossible to
+draw sharp lines, such as would enable us to say, "Here my experience
+ends; there yours begins." In so far as we are partners in common
+undertakings, the things which others communicate to us as the
+consequences of their particular share in the enterprise blend at once
+into the experience resulting from our own special doings. The ear is as
+much an organ of experience as the eye or hand; the eye is available
+for reading reports of what happens beyond its horizon. Things remote in
+space and time affect the issue of our actions quite as much as
+things which we can smell and handle. They really concern us, and,
+consequently, any account of them which assists us in dealing with
+things at hand falls within personal experience.
+
+Information is the name usually given to this kind of subject matter.
+The place of communication in personal doing supplies us with a
+criterion for estimating the value of informational material in school.
+Does it grow naturally out of some question with which the student
+is concerned? Does it fit into his more direct acquaintance so as to
+increase its efficacy and deepen its meaning? If it meets these two
+requirements, it is educative. The amount heard or read is of no
+importance--the more the better, provided the student has a need for it
+and can apply it in some situation of his own.
+
+But it is not so easy to fulfill these requirements in actual practice
+as it is to lay them down in theory. The extension in modern times of
+the area of intercommunication; the invention of appliances for securing
+acquaintance with remote parts of the heavens and bygone events of
+history; the cheapening of devices, like printing, for recording and
+distributing information--genuine and alleged--have created an immense
+bulk of communicated subject matter. It is much easier to swamp a
+pupil with this than to work it into his direct experiences. All too
+frequently it forms another strange world which just overlies the world
+of personal acquaintance. The sole problem of the student is to learn,
+for school purposes, for purposes of recitations and promotions, the
+constituent parts of this strange world. Probably the most conspicuous
+connotation of the word knowledge for most persons to-day is just the
+body of facts and truths ascertained by others; the material found in
+the rows and rows of atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books
+of travel, scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries.
+
+The imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously
+influenced men's notions of the nature of knowledge itself. The
+statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active
+concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves
+knowledge. The record of knowledge, independent of its place as an
+outcome of inquiry and a resource in further inquiry, is taken to be
+knowledge. The mind of man is taken captive by the spoils of its prior
+victories; the spoils, not the weapons and the acts of waging the battle
+against the unknown, are used to fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact,
+and truth.
+
+If this identification of knowledge with propositions stating
+information has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers, it is
+not surprising that the same ideal has almost dominated instruction.
+The "course of study" consists largely of information distributed into
+various branches of study, each study being subdivided into lessons
+presenting in serial cutoff portions of the total store. In the
+seventeenth century, the store was still small enough so that men set up
+the ideal of a complete encyclopedic mastery of it. It is now so bulky
+that the impossibility of any one man's coming into possession of it
+all is obvious. But the educational ideal has not been much affected.
+Acquisition of a modicum of information in each branch of learning,
+or at least in a selected group, remains the principle by which the
+curriculum, from elementary school through college, is formed; the
+easier portions being assigned to the earlier years, the more difficult
+to the later. The complaints of educators that learning does not enter
+into character and affect conduct; the protests against memoriter work,
+against cramming, against gradgrind preoccupation with "facts," against
+devotion to wire-drawn distinctions and ill-understood rules and
+principles, all follow from this state of affairs. Knowledge which
+is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge, tends to become merely
+verbal. It is no objection to information that it is clothed in words;
+communication necessarily takes place through words. But in the degree
+in which what is communicated cannot be organized into the existing
+experience of the learner, it becomes mere words: that is, pure
+sense-stimuli, lacking in meaning. Then it operates to call out
+mechanical reactions, ability to use the vocal organs to repeat
+statements, or the hand to write or to do "sums."
+
+To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the subject
+matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem, and for giving
+added significance to the search for solution and to the solution
+itself. Informational knowledge is the material which can be fallen back
+upon as given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation. It
+is a kind of bridge for mind in its passage from doubt to discovery. It
+has the office of an intellectual middleman. It condenses and records in
+available form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as
+an agency of enhancing the meaning of new experiences. When one is told
+that Brutus assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the year is
+three hundred sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the ratio of the
+diameter of the circle to its circumference is 3.1415. . . one receives
+what is indeed knowledge for others, but for him it is a stimulus to
+knowing. His acquisition of knowledge depends upon his response to what
+is communicated.
+
+3. Science or Rationalized Knowledge. Science is a name for knowledge in
+its most characteristic form. It represents in its degree, the perfected
+outcome of learning,--its consummation. What is known, in a given case,
+is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think with
+rather than that which we think about. In its honorable sense, knowledge
+is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere
+tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and
+not dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is
+difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our
+certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is
+natural. The undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual
+hesitation; it is prone to assertion. It likes things undisturbed,
+settled, and treats them as such without due warrant. Familiarity,
+common repute, and congeniality to desire are readily made measuring
+rods of truth. Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error,--a
+greater foe to learning than ignorance itself. A Socrates is thus led
+to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective
+love of wisdom, and a Descartes to say that science is born of doubting.
+
+We have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data, and
+ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in themselves
+they are tentative and provisional. Our predilection for premature
+acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs
+that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are
+satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. If
+these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose
+that our assumptions have been confirmed. Even in the case of failure,
+we are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness
+of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of
+circumstance. We charge the evil consequence not to the error of our
+schemes and our incomplete inquiry into conditions (thereby getting
+material for revising the former and stimulus for extending the latter)
+but to untoward fate. We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in
+clinging to our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out.
+
+Science represents the safeguard of the race against these natural
+propensities and the evils which flow from them. It consists of the
+special appliances and methods which the race has slowly worked out in
+order to conduct reflection under conditions whereby its procedures and
+results are tested. It is artificial (an acquired art), not spontaneous;
+learned, not native. To this fact is due the unique, the invaluable
+place of science in education, and also the dangers which threaten its
+right use. Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not
+in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for
+effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts
+inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails
+to understand the full meaning of knowledge. For he does not become
+acquainted with the traits that mark off opinion and assent from
+authorized conviction. On the other hand, the fact that science marks
+the perfecting of knowing in highly specialized conditions of technique
+renders its results, taken by themselves, remote from ordinary
+experience--a quality of aloofness that is popularly designated by the
+term abstract. When this isolation appears in instruction, scientific
+information is even more exposed to the dangers attendant upon
+presenting ready-made subject matter than are other forms of
+information.
+
+Science has been defined in terms of method of inquiry and testing. At
+first sight, this definition may seem opposed to the current conception
+that science is organized or systematized knowledge. The opposition,
+however, is only seeming, and disappears when the ordinary definition
+is completed. Not organization but the kind of organization effected by
+adequate methods of tested discovery marks off science. The knowledge of
+a farmer is systematized in the degree in which he is competent. It
+is organized on the basis of relation of means to ends--practically
+organized. Its organization as knowledge (that is, in the eulogistic
+sense of adequately tested and confirmed) is incidental to its
+organization with reference to securing crops, live-stock, etc. But
+scientific subject matter is organized with specific reference to the
+successful conduct of the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a
+specialized undertaking. Reference to the kind of assurance
+attending science will shed light upon this statement. It is rational
+assurance,--logical warranty. The ideal of scientific organization is,
+therefore, that every conception and statement shall be of such a
+kind as to follow from others and to lead to others. Conceptions
+and propositions mutually imply and support one another. This double
+relation of "leading to and confirming" is what is meant by the terms
+logical and rational. The everyday conception of water is more available
+for ordinary uses of drinking, washing, irrigation, etc., than the
+chemist's notion of it. The latter's description of it as H20 is
+superior from the standpoint of place and use in inquiry. It states
+the nature of water in a way which connects it with knowledge of other
+things, indicating to one who understands it how the knowledge is
+arrived at and its bearings upon other portions of knowledge of the
+structure of things. Strictly speaking, it does not indicate the
+objective relations of water any more than does a statement that water
+is transparent, fluid, without taste or odor, satisfying to thirst,
+etc. It is just as true that water has these relations as that it is
+constituted by two molecules of hydrogen in combination with one of
+oxygen. But for the particular purpose of conducting discovery with a
+view to ascertainment of fact, the latter relations are fundamental. The
+more one emphasizes organization as a mark of science, then, the more he
+is committed to a recognition of the primacy of method in the definition
+of science. For method defines the kind of organization in virtue of
+which science is science.
+
+4. Subject Matter as Social. Our next chapters will take up various
+school activities and studies and discuss them as successive stages
+in that evolution of knowledge which we have just been discussing. It
+remains to say a few words upon subject matter as social, since our
+prior remarks have been mainly concerned with its intellectual aspect. A
+difference in breadth and depth exists even in vital knowledge; even
+in the data and ideas which are relevant to real problems and which are
+motivated by purposes. For there is a difference in the social scope of
+purposes and the social importance of problems. With the wide range
+of possible material to select from, it is important that education
+(especially in all its phases short of the most specialized) should use
+a criterion of social worth. All information and systematized scientific
+subject matter have been worked out under the conditions of social life
+and have been transmitted by social means. But this does not prove that
+all is of equal value for the purposes of forming the disposition and
+supplying the equipment of members of present society. The scheme of a
+curriculum must take account of the adaptation of studies to the needs
+of the existing community life; it must select with the intention of
+improving the life we live in common so that the future shall be better
+than the past. Moreover, the curriculum must be planned with reference
+to placing essentials first, and refinements second. The things which
+are socially most fundamental, that is, which have to do with the
+experiences in which the widest groups share, are the essentials. The
+things which represent the needs of specialized groups and technical
+pursuits are secondary. There is truth in the saying that education must
+first be human and only after that professional. But those who utter
+the saying frequently have in mind in the term human only a highly
+specialized class: the class of learned men who preserve the classic
+traditions of the past. They forget that material is humanized in the
+degree in which it connects with the common interests of men as men.
+Democratic society is peculiarly dependent for its maintenance upon the
+use in forming a course of study of criteria which are broadly human.
+Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting
+subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived
+for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions
+of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the "essentials" of
+elementary education are the three R's mechanically treated, is based
+upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic
+ideals. Unconsciously it assumes that these ideals are unrealizable;
+it assumes that in the future, as in the past, getting a livelihood,
+"making a living," must signify for most men and women doing things
+which are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those who
+do them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged in
+them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of pecuniary
+reward. For preparation of large numbers for a life of this sort, and
+only for this purpose, are mechanical efficiency in reading, writing,
+spelling and figuring, together with attainment of a certain amount
+of muscular dexterity, "essentials." Such conditions also infect the
+education called liberal, with illiberality. They imply a somewhat
+parasitic cultivation bought at the expense of not having the
+enlightenment and discipline which come from concern with the deepest
+problems of common humanity. A curriculum which acknowledges the social
+responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are
+relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and
+information are calculated to develop social insight and interest.
+
+Summary. The subject matter of education consists primarily of the
+meanings which supply content to existing social life. The continuity of
+social life means that many of these meanings are contributed to present
+activity by past collective experience. As social life grows more
+complex, these factors increase in number and import. There is need of
+special selection, formulation, and organization in order that they may
+be adequately transmitted to the new generation. But this very process
+tends to set up subject matter as something of value just by itself,
+apart from its function in promoting the realization of the meanings
+implied in the present experience of the immature. Especially is the
+educator exposed to the temptation to conceive his task in terms of the
+pupil's ability to appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set
+statements, irrespective of its organization into his activities as a
+developing social member. The positive principle is maintained when the
+young begin with active occupations having a social origin and use,
+and proceed to a scientific insight in the materials and laws involved,
+through assimilating into their more direct experience the ideas and
+facts communicated by others who have had a larger experience. 1 Since
+the learned man should also still be a learner, it will be understood
+that these contrasts are relative, not absolute. But in the earlier
+stages of learning at least they are practically all-important.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
+
+1. The Place of Active Occupations in Education. In consequence partly
+of the efforts of educational reformers, partly of increased interest in
+child-psychology, and partly of the direct experience of the schoolroom,
+the course of study has in the past generation undergone considerable
+modification. The desirability of starting from and with the experience
+and capacities of learners, a lesson enforced from all three quarters,
+has led to the introduction of forms of activity, in play and work,
+similar to those in which children and youth engage outside of school.
+Modern psychology has substituted for the general, ready-made faculties
+of older theory a complex group of instinctive and impulsive tendencies.
+Experience has shown that when children have a chance at physical
+activities which bring their natural impulses into play, going to
+school is a joy, management is less of a burden, and learning is easier.
+Sometimes, perhaps, plays, games, and constructive occupations are
+resorted to only for these reasons, with emphasis upon relief from the
+tedium and strain of "regular" school work. There is no reason, however,
+for using them merely as agreeable diversions. Study of mental life has
+made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore,
+to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, to give expression
+to joyous emotion, etc. When exercises which are prompted by these
+instincts are a part of the regular school program, the whole pupil is
+engaged, the artificial gap between life in school and out is reduced,
+motives are afforded for attention to a large variety of materials and
+processes distinctly educative in effect, and cooperative associations
+which give information in a social setting are provided. In short, the
+grounds for assigning to play and active work a definite place in
+the curriculum are intellectual and social, not matters of temporary
+expediency and momentary agreeableness. Without something of the kind,
+it is not possible to secure the normal estate of effective learning;
+namely, that knowledge-getting be an outgrowth of activities having
+their own end, instead of a school task. More specifically, play and
+work correspond, point for point, with the traits of the initial stage
+of knowing, which consists, as we saw in the last chapter, in learning
+how to do things and in acquaintance with things and processes gained
+in the doing. It is suggestive that among the Greeks, till the rise
+of conscious philosophy, the same word, techne, was used for art and
+science. Plato gave his account of knowledge on the basis of an
+analysis of the knowledge of cobblers, carpenters, players of musical
+instruments, etc., pointing out that their art (so far as it was not
+mere routine) involved an end, mastery of material or stuff worked upon,
+control of appliances, and a definite order of procedure--all of which
+had to be known in order that there be intelligent skill or art.
+
+Doubtless the fact that children normally engage in play and work out
+of school has seemed to many educators a reason why they should concern
+themselves in school with things radically different. School time seemed
+too precious to spend in doing over again what children were sure to do
+any way. In some social conditions, this reason has weight. In pioneer
+times, for example, outside occupations gave a definite and valuable
+intellectual and moral training. Books and everything concerned with
+them were, on the other hand, rare and difficult of access; they were
+the only means of outlet from a narrow and crude environment. Wherever
+such conditions obtain, much may be said in favor of concentrating
+school activity upon books. The situation is very different, however,
+in most communities to-day. The kinds of work in which the young
+can engage, especially in cities, are largely anti-educational. That
+prevention of child labor is a social duty is evidence on this point.
+On the other hand, printed matter has been so cheapened and is in such
+universal circulation, and all the opportunities of intellectual culture
+have been so multiplied, that the older type of book work is far from
+having the force it used to possess.
+
+But it must not be forgotten that an educational result is a by-product
+of play and work in most out-of-school conditions. It is incidental,
+not primary. Consequently the educative growth secured is more or less
+accidental. Much work shares in the defects of existing industrial
+society--defects next to fatal to right development. Play tends to
+reproduce and affirm the crudities, as well as the excellencies, of
+surrounding adult life. It is the business of the school to set up an
+environment in which play and work shall be conducted with reference to
+facilitating desirable mental and moral growth. It is not enough just
+to introduce plays and games, hand work and manual exercises. Everything
+depends upon the way in which they are employed.
+
+2. Available Occupations. A bare catalogue of the list of activities
+which have already found their way into schools indicates what a rich
+field is at hand. There is work with paper, cardboard, wood, leather,
+cloth, yarns, clay and sand, and the metals, with and without tools.
+Processes employed are folding, cutting, pricking, measuring, molding,
+modeling, pattern-making, heating and cooling, and the operations
+characteristic of such tools as the hammer, saw, file, etc. Outdoor
+excursions, gardening, cooking, sewing, printing, book-binding, weaving,
+painting, drawing, singing, dramatization, story-telling, reading and
+writing as active pursuits with social aims (not as mere exercises for
+acquiring skill for future use), in addition to a countless variety of
+plays and games, designate some of the modes of occupation.
+
+The problem of the educator is to engage pupils in these activities in
+such ways that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained
+and immediate satisfaction found in the work, together with
+preparation for later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated
+to education--that is, to intellectual results and the forming of a
+socialized disposition. What does this principle signify? In the first
+place, the principle rules out certain practices. Activities which
+follow definite prescription and dictation or which reproduce without
+modification ready-made models, may give muscular dexterity, but they
+do not require the perception and elaboration of ends, nor (what is
+the same thing in other words) do they permit the use of judgment in
+selecting and adapting means. Not merely manual training specifically
+so called but many traditional kindergarten exercises have erred here.
+Moreover, opportunity for making mistakes is an incidental requirement.
+Not because mistakes are ever desirable, but because overzeal to select
+material and appliances which forbid a chance for mistakes to occur,
+restricts initiative, reduces judgment to a minimum, and compels the use
+of methods which are so remote from the complex situations of life
+that the power gained is of little availability. It is quite true that
+children tend to exaggerate their powers of execution and to select
+projects that are beyond them. But limitation of capacity is one of the
+things which has to be learned; like other things, it is learned through
+the experience of consequences. The danger that children undertaking
+too complex projects will simply muddle and mess, and produce not merely
+crude results (which is a minor matter) but acquire crude standards
+(which is an important matter) is great. But it is the fault of the
+teacher if the pupil does not perceive in due season the inadequacy of
+his performances, and thereby receive a stimulus to attempt exercises
+which will perfect his powers. Meantime it is more important to keep
+alive a creative and constructive attitude than to secure an external
+perfection by engaging the pupil's action in too minute and too closely
+regulated pieces of work. Accuracy and finish of detail can be insisted
+upon in such portions of a complex work as are within the pupil's
+capacity.
+
+Unconscious suspicion of native experience and consequent overdoing of
+external control are shown quite as much in the material supplied as in
+the matter of the teacher's orders. The fear of raw material is shown
+in laboratory, manual training shop, Froebelian kindergarten, and
+Montessori house of childhood. The demand is for materials which have
+already been subjected to the perfecting work of mind: a demand which
+shows itself in the subject matter of active occupations quite as
+well as in academic book learning. That such material will control the
+pupil's operations so as to prevent errors is true. The notion that a
+pupil operating with such material will somehow absorb the intelligence
+that went originally to its shaping is fallacious. Only by starting with
+crude material and subjecting it to purposeful handling will he gain the
+intelligence embodied in finished material. In practice, overemphasis
+upon formed material leads to an exaggeration of mathematical qualities,
+since intellect finds its profit in physical things from matters of
+size, form, and proportion and the relations that flow from them. But
+these are known only when their perception is a fruit of acting upon
+purposes which require attention to them. The more human the purpose, or
+the more it approximates the ends which appeal in daily experience, the
+more real the knowledge. When the purpose of the activity is restricted
+to ascertaining these qualities, the resulting knowledge is only
+technical.
+
+To say that active occupations should be concerned primarily with wholes
+is another statement of the same principle. Wholes for purposes of
+education are not, however, physical affairs. Intellectually the
+existence of a whole depends upon a concern or interest; it is
+qualitative, the completeness of appeal made by a situation. Exaggerated
+devotion to formation of efficient skill irrespective of present purpose
+always shows itself in devising exercises isolated from a purpose.
+Laboratory work is made to consist of tasks of accurate measurement
+with a view to acquiring knowledge of the fundamental units of physics,
+irrespective of contact with the problems which make these units
+important; or of operations designed to afford facility in the
+manipulation of experimental apparatus. The technique is acquired
+independently of the purposes of discovery and testing which alone give
+it meaning. Kindergarten employments are calculated to give information
+regarding cubes, spheres, etc., and to form certain habits of
+manipulation of material (for everything must always be done "just so"),
+the absence of more vital purposes being supposedly compensated for by
+the alleged symbolism of the material used. Manual training is reduced
+to a series of ordered assignments calculated to secure the mastery of
+one tool after another and technical ability in the various elements of
+construction--like the different joints. It is argued that pupils must
+know how to use tools before they attack actual making,--assuming that
+pupils cannot learn how in the process of making. Pestalozzi's just
+insistence upon the active use of the senses, as a substitute for
+memorizing words, left behind it in practice schemes for "object
+lessons" intended to acquaint pupils with all the qualities of selected
+objects. The error is the same: in all these cases it is assumed that
+before objects can be intelligently used, their properties must
+be known. In fact, the senses are normally used in the course of
+intelligent (that is, purposeful) use of things, since the qualities
+perceived are factors to be reckoned with in accomplishment. Witness the
+different attitude of a boy in making, say, a kite, with respect to
+the grain and other properties of wood, the matter of size, angles, and
+proportion of parts, to the attitude of a pupil who has an object-lesson
+on a piece of wood, where the sole function of wood and its properties
+is to serve as subject matter for the lesson.
+
+The failure to realize that the functional development of a situation
+alone constitutes a "whole" for the purpose of mind is the cause of the
+false notions which have prevailed in instruction concerning the simple
+and the complex. For the person approaching a subject, the simple
+thing is his purpose--the use he desires to make of material, tool, or
+technical process, no matter how complicated the process of execution
+may be. The unity of the purpose, with the concentration upon details
+which it entails, confers simplicity upon the elements which have to be
+reckoned with in the course of action. It furnishes each with a single
+meaning according to its service in carrying on the whole enterprise.
+After one has gone through the process, the constituent qualities and
+relations are elements, each possessed with a definite meaning of its
+own. The false notion referred to takes the standpoint of the expert,
+the one for whom elements exist; isolates them from purposeful action,
+and presents them to beginners as the "simple" things. But it is time
+for a positive statement. Aside from the fact that active occupations
+represent things to do, not studies, their educational significance
+consists in the fact that they may typify social situations. Men's
+fundamental common concerns center about food, shelter, clothing,
+household furnishings, and the appliances connected with production,
+exchange, and consumption.
+
+Representing both the necessities of life and the adornments with which
+the necessities have been clothed, they tap instincts at a deep level;
+they are saturated with facts and principles having a social quality.
+
+To charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving,
+construction in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc., which carry
+over these fundamental human concerns into school resources, have a
+merely bread and butter value is to miss their point. If the mass of
+mankind has usually found in its industrial occupations nothing but
+evils which had to be endured for the sake of maintaining existence, the
+fault is not in the occupations, but in the conditions under which
+they are carried on. The continually increasing importance of economic
+factors in contemporary life makes it the more needed that education
+should reveal their scientific content and their social value. For in
+schools, occupations are not carried on for pecuniary gain but for their
+own content. Freed from extraneous associations and from the pressure
+of wage-earning, they supply modes of experience which are intrinsically
+valuable; they are truly liberalizing in quality.
+
+Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of
+preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time.
+It affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place farming and
+horticulture have had in the history of the race and which they
+occupy in present social organization. Carried on in an environment
+educationally controlled, they are means for making a study of the facts
+of growth, the chemistry of soil, the role of light, air, and moisture,
+injurious and helpful animal life, etc. There is nothing in the
+elementary study of botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in
+connection with caring for the growth of seeds. Instead of the subject
+matter belonging to a peculiar study called botany, it will then belong
+to life, and will find, moreover, its natural correlations with the
+facts of soil, animal life, and human relations. As students grow
+mature, they will perceive problems of interest which may be pursued for
+the sake of discovery, independent of the original direct interest in
+gardening--problems connected with the germination and nutrition of
+plants, the reproduction of fruits, etc., thus making a transition to
+deliberate intellectual investigations.
+
+The illustration is intended to apply, of course, to other school
+occupations,--wood-working, cooking, and on through the list. It is
+pertinent to note that in the history of the race the sciences grew
+gradually out from useful social occupations. Physics developed slowly
+out of the use of tools and machines; the important branch of physics
+known as mechanics testifies in its name to its original associations.
+The lever, wheel, inclined plane, etc., were among the first great
+intellectual discoveries of mankind, and they are none the less
+intellectual because they occurred in the course of seeking for means of
+accomplishing practical ends. The great advance of electrical science in
+the last generation was closely associated, as effect and as cause,
+with application of electric agencies to means of communication,
+transportation, lighting of cities and houses, and more economical
+production of goods. These are social ends, moreover, and if they are
+too closely associated with notions of private profit, it is not because
+of anything in them, but because they have been deflected to private
+uses:--a fact which puts upon the school the responsibility of restoring
+their connection, in the mind of the coming generation, with public
+scientific and social interests. In like ways, chemistry grew out of
+processes of dying, bleaching, metal working, etc., and in recent times
+has found innumerable new uses in industry.
+
+Mathematics is now a highly abstract science; geometry, however, means
+literally earth-measuring: the practical use of number in counting to
+keep track of things and in measuring is even more important to-day
+than in the times when it was invented for these purposes. Such
+considerations (which could be duplicated in the history of any science)
+are not arguments for a recapitulation of the history of the race or for
+dwelling long in the early rule of thumb stage. But they indicate
+the possibilities--greater to-day than ever before--of using active
+occupations as opportunities for scientific study. The opportunities
+are just as great on the social side, whether we look at the life of
+collective humanity in its past or in its future. The most direct
+road for elementary students into civics and economics is found in
+consideration of the place and office of industrial occupations in
+social life. Even for older students, the social sciences would be less
+abstract and formal if they were dealt with less as sciences (less as
+formulated bodies of knowledge) and more in their direct subject-matter
+as that is found in the daily life of the social groups in which the
+student shares.
+
+Connection of occupations with the method of science is at least as
+close as with its subject matter. The ages when scientific progress was
+slow were the ages when learned men had contempt for the material and
+processes of everyday life, especially for those concerned with manual
+pursuits. Consequently they strove to develop knowledge out of general
+principles--almost out of their heads--by logical reasons. It seems
+as absurd that learning should come from action on and with physical
+things, like dropping acid on a stone to see what would happen, as that
+it should come from sticking an awl with waxed thread through a piece of
+leather. But the rise of experimental methods proved that, given control
+of conditions, the latter operation is more typical of the right way of
+knowledge than isolated logical reasonings. Experiment developed in the
+seventeenth and succeeding centuries and became the authorized way of
+knowing when men's interests were centered in the question of control
+of nature for human uses. The active occupations in which appliances
+are brought to bear upon physical things with the intention of effecting
+useful changes is the most vital introduction to the experimental
+method.
+
+3. Work and Play. What has been termed active occupation includes both
+play and work. In their intrinsic meaning, play and industry are by
+no means so antithetical to one another as is often assumed, any sharp
+contrast being due to undesirable social conditions. Both involve ends
+consciously entertained and the selection and adaptations of materials
+and processes designed to effect the desired ends. The difference
+between them is largely one of time-span, influencing the directness
+of the connection of means and ends. In play, the interest is more
+direct--a fact frequently indicated by saying that in play the activity
+is its own end, instead of its having an ulterior result. The statement
+is correct, but it is falsely taken, if supposed to mean that play
+activity is momentary, having no element of looking ahead and none of
+pursuit. Hunting, for example, is one of the commonest forms of adult
+play, but the existence of foresight and the direction of present
+activity by what one is watching for are obvious. When an activity is
+its own end in the sense that the action of the moment is complete in
+itself, it is purely physical; it has no meaning (See p. 77). The
+person is either going through motions quite blindly, perhaps purely
+imitatively, or else is in a state of excitement which is exhausting to
+mind and nerves. Both results may be seen in some types of kindergarten
+games where the idea of play is so highly symbolic that only the adult
+is conscious of it. Unless the children succeed in reading in some quite
+different idea of their own, they move about either as if in a hypnotic
+daze, or they respond to a direct excitation.
+
+The point of these remarks is that play has an end in the sense of a
+directing idea which gives point to the successive acts. Persons who
+play are not just doing something (pure physical movement); they are
+trying to do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory
+forecasts which stimulate their present responses. The anticipated
+result, however, is rather a subsequent action than the production of
+a specific change in things. Consequently play is free, plastic. Where
+some definite external outcome is wanted, the end has to be held to with
+some persistence, which increases as the contemplated result is complex
+and requires a fairly long series of intermediate adaptations. When the
+intended act is another activity, it is not necessary to look far ahead
+and it is possible to alter it easily and frequently. If a child
+is making a toy boat, he must hold on to a single end and direct a
+considerable number of acts by that one idea. If he is just "playing
+boat" he may change the material that serves as a boat almost at will,
+and introduce new factors as fancy suggests. The imagination makes what
+it will of chairs, blocks, leaves, chips, if they serve the purpose of
+carrying activity forward.
+
+From a very early age, however, there is no distinction of exclusive
+periods of play activity and work activity, but only one of emphasis.
+There are definite results which even young children desire, and try
+to bring to pass. Their eager interest in sharing the occupations of
+others, if nothing else, accomplishes this. Children want to "help";
+they are anxious to engage in the pursuits of adults which effect
+external changes: setting the table, washing dishes, helping care for
+animals, etc. In their plays, they like to construct their own toys and
+appliances. With increasing maturity, activity which does not give back
+results of tangible and visible achievement loses its interest. Play
+then changes to fooling and if habitually indulged in is demoralizing.
+Observable results are necessary to enable persons to get a sense and
+a measure of their own powers. When make-believe is recognized to be
+make-believe, the device of making objects in fancy alone is too easy
+to stimulate intense action. One has only to observe the countenance of
+children really playing to note that their attitude is one of serious
+absorption; this attitude cannot be maintained when things cease to
+afford adequate stimulation.
+
+When fairly remote results of a definite character are foreseen and
+enlist persistent effort for their accomplishment, play passes into
+work. Like play, it signifies purposeful activity and differs not in
+that activity is subordinated to an external result, but in the fact
+that a longer course of activity is occasioned by the idea of a result.
+The demand for continuous attention is greater, and more intelligence
+must be shown in selecting and shaping means. To extend this account
+would be to repeat what has been said under the caption of aim,
+interest, and thinking. It is pertinent, however, to inquire why the
+idea is so current that work involves subordination of an activity to an
+ulterior material result. The extreme form of this subordination,
+namely drudgery, offers a clew. Activity carried on under conditions
+of external pressure or coercion is not carried on for any significance
+attached to the doing. The course of action is not intrinsically
+satisfying; it is a mere means for avoiding some penalty, or for gaining
+some reward at its conclusion. What is inherently repulsive is endured
+for the sake of averting something still more repulsive or of securing a
+gain hitched on by others. Under unfree economic conditions, this state
+of affairs is bound to exist. Work or industry offers little to engage
+the emotions and the imagination; it is a more or less mechanical series
+of strains. Only the hold which the completion of the work has upon
+a person will keep him going. But the end should be intrinsic to the
+action; it should be its end--a part of its own course. Then it affords
+a stimulus to effort very different from that arising from the thought
+of results which have nothing to do with the intervening action. As
+already mentioned, the absence of economic pressure in schools supplies
+an opportunity for reproducing industrial situations of mature life
+under conditions where the occupation can be carried on for its own
+sake. If in some cases, pecuniary recognition is also a result of an
+action, though not the chief motive for it, that fact may well increase
+the significance of the occupation. Where something approaching drudgery
+or the need of fulfilling externally imposed tasks exists, the demand
+for play persists, but tends to be perverted. The ordinary course of
+action fails to give adequate stimulus to emotion and imagination. So in
+leisure time, there is an imperious demand for their stimulation by any
+kind of means; gambling, drink, etc., may be resorted to. Or, in less
+extreme cases, there is recourse to idle amusement; to anything which
+passes time with immediate agreeableness. Recreation, as the word
+indicates, is recuperation of energy. No demand of human nature is more
+urgent or less to be escaped. The idea that the need can be suppressed
+is absolutely fallacious, and the Puritanic tradition which disallows
+the need has entailed an enormous crop of evils. If education does
+not afford opportunity for wholesome recreation and train capacity
+for seeking and finding it, the suppressed instincts find all sorts of
+illicit outlets, sometimes overt, sometimes confined to indulgence
+of the imagination. Education has no more serious responsibility than
+making adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure; not only
+for the sake of immediate health, but still more if possible for the
+sake of its lasting effect upon habits of mind. Art is again the answer
+to this demand.
+
+Summary. In the previous chapter we found that the primary subject
+matter of knowing is that contained in learning how to do things of a
+fairly direct sort. The educational equivalent of this principle is the
+consistent use of simple occupations which appeal to the powers of youth
+and which typify general modes of social activity. Skill and information
+about materials, tools, and laws of energy are acquired while activities
+are carried on for their own sake. The fact that they are socially
+representative gives a quality to the skill and knowledge gained which
+makes them transferable to out-of-school situations. It is important not
+to confuse the psychological distinction between play and work with the
+economic distinction. Psychologically, the defining characteristic of
+play is not amusement nor aimlessness. It is the fact that the aim
+is thought of as more activity in the same line, without defining
+continuity of action in reference to results produced. Activities as
+they grow more complicated gain added meaning by greater attention to
+specific results achieved. Thus they pass gradually into work. Both
+are equally free and intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic
+conditions which tend to make play into idle excitement for the well
+to do, and work into uncongenial labor for the poor. Work is
+psychologically simply an activity which consciously includes regard for
+consequences as a part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the
+consequences are outside of the activity as an end to which activity is
+merely a means. Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is
+art--in quality if not in conventional designation.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
+
+1. Extension of Meaning of Primary Activities. Nothing is more striking
+than the difference between an activity as merely physical and the
+wealth of meanings which the same activity may assume. From the outside,
+an astronomer gazing through a telescope is like a small boy looking
+through the same tube. In each case, there is an arrangement of glass
+and metal, an eye, and a little speck of light in the distance. Yet at
+a critical moment, the activity of an astronomer might be concerned
+with the birth of a world, and have whatever is known about the starry
+heavens as its significant content. Physically speaking, what man has
+effected on this globe in his progress from savagery is a mere scratch
+on its surface, not perceptible at a distance which is slight in
+comparison with the reaches even of the solar system. Yet in meaning
+what has been accomplished measures just the difference of civilization
+from savagery. Although the activities, physically viewed, have changed
+somewhat, this change is slight in comparison with the development
+of the meanings attaching to the activities. There is no limit to the
+meaning which an action may come to possess. It all depends upon the
+context of perceived connections in which it is placed; the reach of
+imagination in realizing connections is inexhaustible. The advantage
+which the activity of man has in appropriating and finding meanings
+makes his education something else than the manufacture of a tool or
+the training of an animal. The latter increase efficiency; they do
+not develop significance. The final educational importance of such
+occupations in play and work as were considered in the last chapter is
+that they afford the most direct instrumentalities for such extension
+of meaning. Set going under adequate conditions they are magnets for
+gathering and retaining an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual
+considerations. They provide vital centers for the reception and
+assimilation of information. When information is purveyed in chunks
+simply as information to be retained for its own sake, it tends to
+stratify over vital experience. Entering as a factor into an activity
+pursued for its own sake--whether as a means or as a widening of the
+content of the aim--it is informing. The insight directly gained fuses
+with what is told. Individual experience is then capable of taking up
+and holding in solution the net results of the experience of the group
+to which he belongs--including the results of sufferings and trials over
+long stretches of time. And such media have no fixed saturation point
+where further absorption is impossible. The more that is taken in, the
+greater capacity there is for further assimilation. New receptiveness
+follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon information gained.
+
+The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature
+and man. This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning when
+translated into educational equivalents. So translated, it signifies
+that geography and history supply subject matter which gives background
+and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow
+personal actions or mere forms of technical skill. With every increase
+of ability to place our own doings in their time and space connections,
+our doings gain in significant content. We realize that we are citizens
+of no mean city in discovering the scene in space of which we are
+denizens, and the continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which
+we are heirs and continuers. Thus our ordinary daily experiences cease
+to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance. Of course if
+geography and history are taught as ready-made studies which a person
+studies simply because he is sent to school, it easily happens that a
+large number of statements about things remote and alien to everyday
+experience are learned. Activity is divided, and two separate worlds are
+built up, occupying activity at divided periods. No transmutation takes
+place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in meaning by getting its
+connections; what is studied is not animated and made real by entering
+into immediate activity. Ordinary experience is not even left as it
+was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses something of its mobility and
+sensitiveness to suggestions. It is weighed down and pushed into
+a corner by a load of unassimilated information. It parts with its
+flexible responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning. Mere
+amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life makes
+mind wooden; elasticity disappears.
+
+Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out beyond
+its immediate self. It does not passively wait for information to be
+bestowed which will increase its meaning; it seeks it out. Curiosity is
+not an accidental isolated possession; it is a necessary consequence of
+the fact that an experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all
+kinds of connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency
+to make these conditions perceptible. It is the business of educators to
+supply an environment so that this reaching out of an experience may be
+fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously active. Within a certain kind
+of environment, an activity may be checked so that the only meaning
+which accrues is of its direct and tangible isolated outcome. One may
+cook, or hammer, or walk, and the resulting consequences may not take
+the mind any farther than the consequences of cooking, hammering,
+and walking in the literal--or physical--sense. But nevertheless
+the consequences of the act remain far-reaching. To walk involves a
+displacement and reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is felt
+wherever there is matter. It involves the structure of the limbs and the
+nervous system; the principles of mechanics. To cook is to utilize heat
+and moisture to change the chemical relations of food materials; it has
+a bearing upon the assimilation of food and the growth of the body. The
+utmost that the most learned men of science know in physics, chemistry,
+physiology is not enough to make all these consequences and connections
+perceptible. The task of education, once more, is to see to it that
+such activities are performed in such ways and under such conditions as
+render these conditions as perceptible as possible. To "learn geography"
+is to gain in power to perceive the spatial, the natural, connections of
+an ordinary act; to "learn history" is essentially to gain in power
+to recognize its human connections. For what is called geography as a
+formulated study is simply the body of facts and principles which have
+been discovered in other men's experience about the natural medium in
+which we live, and in connection with which the particular acts of our
+life have an explanation. So history as a formulated study is but the
+body of known facts about the activities and sufferings of the social
+groups with which our own lives are continuous, and through reference to
+which our own customs and institutions are illuminated.
+
+2. The Complementary Nature of History and Geography. History and
+geography--including in the latter, for reasons about to be mentioned,
+nature study--are the information studies par excellence of the schools.
+Examination of the materials and the method of their use will make clear
+that the difference between penetration of this information into living
+experience and its mere piling up in isolated heaps depends upon whether
+these studies are faithful to the interdependence of man and nature
+which affords these studies their justification. Nowhere, however, is
+there greater danger that subject matter will be accepted as appropriate
+educational material simply because it has become customary to teach
+and learn it. The idea of a philosophic reason for it, because of the
+function of the material in a worthy transformation of experience, is
+looked upon as a vain fancy, or as supplying a high-sounding phraseology
+in support of what is already done. The words "history" and "geography"
+suggest simply the matter which has been traditionally sanctioned in the
+schools. The mass and variety of this matter discourage an attempt to
+see what it really stands for, and how it can be so taught as to fulfill
+its mission in the experience of pupils. But unless the idea that there
+is a unifying and social direction in education is a farcical pretense,
+subjects that bulk as large in the curriculum as history and geography,
+must represent a general function in the development of a truly
+socialized and intellectualized experience. The discovery of this
+function must be employed as a criterion for trying and sifting the
+facts taught and the methods used.
+
+The function of historical and geographical subject matter has been
+stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal
+contacts of life by furnishing their context, their background and
+outlook. While geography emphasizes the physical side and history
+the social, these are only emphases in a common topic, namely, the
+associated life of men. For this associated life, with its experiments,
+its ways and means, its achievements and failures, does not go on in the
+sky nor yet in a vacuum. It takes place on the earth. This setting of
+nature does not bear to social activities the relation that the scenery
+of a theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation; it
+enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form history.
+Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It furnishes original
+stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources. Civilization is the
+progressive mastery of its varied energies. When this interdependence of
+the study of history, representing the human emphasis, with the study
+of geography, representing the natural, is ignored, history sinks to
+a listing of dates with an appended inventory of events, labeled
+"important"; or else it becomes a literary phantasy--for in purely
+literary history the natural environment is but stage scenery.
+
+Geography, of course, has its educative influence in a counterpart
+connection of natural facts with social events and their consequences.
+The classic definition of geography as an account of the earth as the
+home of man expresses the educational reality. But it is easier to give
+this definition than it is to present specific geographical subject
+matter in its vital human bearings. The residence, pursuits, successes,
+and failures of men are the things that give the geographic data their
+reason for inclusion in the material of instruction. But to hold the two
+together requires an informed and cultivated imagination. When the ties
+are broken, geography presents itself as that hodge-podge of unrelated
+fragments too often found. It appears as a veritable rag-bag of
+intellectual odds and ends: the height of a mountain here, the course
+of a river there, the quantity of shingles produced in this town, the
+tonnage of the shipping in that, the boundary of a county, the capital
+of a state. The earth as the home of man is humanizing and unified; the
+earth viewed as a miscellany of facts is scattering and imaginatively
+inert. Geography is a topic that originally appeals to imagination--even
+to the romantic imagination. It shares in the wonder and glory that
+attach to adventure, travel, and exploration. The variety of peoples and
+environments, their contrast with familiar scenes, furnishes infinite
+stimulation. The mind is moved from the monotony of the customary.
+And while local or home geography is the natural starting point in
+the reconstructive development of the natural environment, it is an
+intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown, not an end
+in itself. When not treated as a basis for getting at the large world
+beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as deadly as do object
+lessons which simply summarize the properties of familiar objects. The
+reason is the same. The imagination is not fed, but is held down to
+recapitulating, cataloguing, and refining what is already known. But
+when the familiar fences that mark the limits of the village proprietors
+are signs that introduce an understanding of the boundaries of great
+nations, even fences are lighted with meaning. Sunlight, air, running
+water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil officers
+and their duties--all these things are found in the local environment.
+Treated as if their meaning began and ended in those confines, they are
+curious facts to be laboriously learned. As instruments for extending
+the limits of experience, bringing within its scope peoples and things
+otherwise strange and unknown, they are transfigured by the use to which
+they are put. Sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political relations
+come from afar and lead the thoughts afar. To follow their course is to
+enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional information, but by
+remaking the meaning of what was previously a matter of course.
+
+The same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of geographical
+study which tend to become specialized and separate. Mathematical
+or astronomical, physiographic, topographic, political, commercial,
+geography, all make their claims. How are they to be adjusted? By an
+external compromise that crowds in so much of each? No other method is
+to be found unless it be constantly borne in mind that the educational
+center of gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject.
+From this center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is
+needed to help appreciate the significance of human activities and
+relations. The differences of civilization in cold and tropical regions,
+the special inventions, industrial and political, of peoples in the
+temperate regions, cannot be understood without appeal to the earth as a
+member of the solar system. Economic activities deeply influence social
+intercourse and political organization on one side, and reflect physical
+conditions on the other. The specializations of these topics are for the
+specialists; their interaction concerns man as a being whose experience
+is social.
+
+To include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced;
+verbally, it is. But in educational idea there is but one reality, and
+it is pity that in practice we have two names: for the diversity of
+names tends to conceal the identity of meaning. Nature and the earth
+should be equivalent terms, and so should earth study and nature
+study. Everybody knows that nature study has suffered in schools from
+scrappiness of subject matter, due to dealing with a large number of
+isolated points. The parts of a flower have been studied, for example,
+apart from the flower as an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the
+plant apart from the soil, air, and light in which and through which it
+lives. The result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which attention
+is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed imagination.
+The lack of interest is so great that it was seriously proposed to
+revive animism, to clothe natural facts and events with myths in order
+that they might attract and hold the mind. In numberless cases, more or
+less silly personifications were resorted to. The method was silly, but
+it expressed a real need for a human atmosphere. The facts had been torn
+to pieces by being taken out of their context. They no longer belonged
+to the earth; they had no abiding place anywhere. To compensate,
+recourse was had to artificial and sentimental associations. The real
+remedy is to make nature study a study of nature, not of fragments made
+meaningless through complete removal from the situations in which they
+are produced and in which they operate. When nature is treated as a
+whole, like the earth in its relations, its phenomena fall into their
+natural relations of sympathy and association with human life, and
+artificial substitutes are not needed.
+
+3. History and Present Social Life. The segregation which kills the
+vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social
+life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly
+gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward
+it. Let the dead bury their dead. But knowledge of the past is the key
+to understanding the present. History deals with the past, but this past
+is the history of the present. An intelligent study of the discovery,
+explorations, colonization of America, of the pioneer movement westward,
+of immigration, etc., should be a study of the United States as it
+is to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying it in process of
+formation makes much that is too complex to be directly grasped open
+to comprehension. Genetic method was perhaps the chief scientific
+achievement of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its principle
+is that the way to get insight into any complex product is to trace the
+process of its making,--to follow it through the successive stages of
+its growth. To apply this method to history as if it meant only the
+truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its past,
+is one-sided. It means equally that past events cannot be separated
+from the living present and retain meaning. The true starting point of
+history is always some present situation with its problems.
+
+This general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration of its
+bearing upon a number of points. The biographical method is generally
+recommended as the natural mode of approach to historical study. The
+lives of great men, of heroes and leaders, make concrete and vital
+historic episodes otherwise abstract and incomprehensible. They condense
+into vivid pictures complicated and tangled series of events spread over
+so much space and time that only a highly trained mind can follow and
+unravel them. There can be no doubt of the psychological soundness
+of this principle. But it is misused when employed to throw into
+exaggerated relief the doings of a few individuals without reference to
+the social situations which they represent. When a biography is related
+just as an account of the doings of a man isolated from the conditions
+that aroused him and to which his activities were a response, we do not
+have a study of history, for we have no study of social life, which is
+an affair of individuals in association. We get only a sugar coating
+which makes it easier to swallow certain fragments of information. Much
+attention has been given of late to primitive life as an introduction
+to learning history. Here also there is a right and a wrong way of
+conceiving its value. The seemingly ready-made character and the
+complexity of present conditions, their apparently hard and fast
+character, is an almost insuperable obstacle to gaining insight into
+their nature. Recourse to the primitive may furnish the fundamental
+elements of the present situation in immensely simplified form. It is
+like unraveling a cloth so complex and so close to the eyes that its
+scheme cannot be seen, until the larger coarser features of the
+pattern appear. We cannot simplify the present situations by deliberate
+experiment, but resort to primitive life presents us with the sort of
+results we should desire from an experiment. Social relationships and
+modes of organized action are reduced to their lowest terms. When this
+social aim is overlooked, however, the study of primitive life becomes
+simply a rehearsing of sensational and exciting features of savagery.
+Primitive history suggests industrial history. For one of the chief
+reasons for going to more primitive conditions to resolve the present
+into more easily perceived factors is that we may realize how the
+fundamental problems of procuring subsistence, shelter, and protection
+have been met; and by seeing how these were solved in the earlier days
+of the human race, form some conception of the long road which has had
+to be traveled, and of the successive inventions by which the race has
+been brought forward in culture. We do not need to go into disputes
+regarding the economic interpretation of history to realize that the
+industrial history of mankind gives insight into two important phases of
+social life in a way which no other phase of history can possibly do.
+It presents us with knowledge of the successive inventions by which
+theoretical science has been applied to the control of nature in the
+interests of security and prosperity of social life. It thus reveals the
+successive causes of social progress. Its other service is to put
+before us the things that fundamentally concern all men in common--the
+occupations and values connected with getting a living. Economic history
+deals with the activities, the career, and fortunes of the common man as
+does no other branch of history. The one thing every individual must do
+is to live; the one thing that society must do is to secure from each
+individual his fair contribution to the general well being and see to it
+that a just return is made to him.
+
+Economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more
+liberalizing than political history. It deals not with the rise and
+fall of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the effective
+liberties, through command of nature, of the common man for whom powers
+and principalities exist.
+
+Industrial history also offers a more direct avenue of approach to the
+realization of the intimate connection of man's struggles, successes,
+and failures with nature than does political history--to say nothing of
+the military history into which political history so easily runs when
+reduced to the level of youthful comprehension. For industrial history
+is essentially an account of the way in which man has learned to utilize
+natural energy from the time when men mostly exploited the muscular
+energies of other men to the time when, in promise if not in actuality,
+the resources of nature are so under command as to enable men to
+extend a common dominion over her. When the history of work, when
+the conditions of using the soil, forest, mine, of domesticating and
+cultivating grains and animals, of manufacture and distribution,
+are left out of account, history tends to become merely literary--a
+systematized romance of a mythical humanity living upon itself instead
+of upon the earth.
+
+Perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education is
+intellectual history. We are only just beginning to realize that the
+great heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its politicians,
+generals, and diplomatists, but the scientific discoverers and inventors
+who have put into man's hands the instrumentalities of an expanding and
+controlled experience, and the artists and poets who have celebrated his
+struggles, triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic,
+or written, that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to
+others. One of the advantages of industrial history as a history of
+man's progressive adaptation of natural forces to social uses is the
+opportunity which it affords for consideration of advance in the methods
+and results of knowledge. At present men are accustomed to eulogize
+intelligence and reason in general terms; their fundamental importance
+is urged. But pupils often come away from the conventional study of
+history, and think either that the human intellect is a static quantity
+which has not progressed by the invention of better methods, or else
+that intelligence, save as a display of personal shrewdness, is a
+negligible historic factor. Surely no better way could be devised of
+instilling a genuine sense of the part which mind has to play in life
+than a study of history which makes plain how the entire advance
+of humanity from savagery to civilization has been dependent upon
+intellectual discoveries and inventions, and the extent to which the
+things which ordinarily figure most largely in historical writings have
+been side issues, or even obstructions for intelligence to overcome.
+
+Pursued in this fashion, history would most naturally become of ethical
+value in teaching. Intelligent insight into present forms of associated
+life is necessary for a character whose morality is more than colorless
+innocence. Historical knowledge helps provide such insight. It is an
+organ for analysis of the warp and woof of the present social fabric, of
+making known the forces which have woven the pattern. The use of
+history for cultivating a socialized intelligence constitutes its moral
+significance. It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of
+anecdotes to be drawn on to inculcate special moral lessons on this
+virtue or that vice. But such teaching is not so much an ethical use of
+history as it is an effort to create moral impressions by means of more
+or less authentic material. At best, it produces a temporary emotional
+glow; at worst, callous indifference to moralizing. The assistance which
+may be given by history to a more intelligent sympathetic understanding
+of the social situations of the present in which individuals share is a
+permanent and constructive moral asset.
+
+Summary. It is the nature of an experience to have implications which
+go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. Bringing these
+connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the
+experience. Any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is
+capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending
+its range of perceived connections. Normal communication with others is
+the readiest way of effecting this development, for it links up the
+net results of the experience of the group and even the race with the
+immediate experience of an individual. By normal communication is meant
+that in which there is a joint interest, a common interest, so that one
+is eager to give and the other to take. It contrasts with telling or
+stating things simply for the sake of impressing them upon another,
+merely in order to test him to see how much he has retained and can
+literally reproduce.
+
+Geography and history are the two great school resources for bringing
+about the enlargement of the significance of a direct personal
+experience. The active occupations described in the previous chapter
+reach out in space and time with respect to both nature and man. Unless
+they are taught for external reasons or as mere modes of skill their
+chief educational value is that they provide the most direct and
+interesting roads out into the larger world of meanings stated in
+history and geography. While history makes human implications explicit
+and geography natural connections, these subjects are two phases of
+the same living whole, since the life of men in association goes on in
+nature, not as an accidental setting, but as the material and medium of
+development.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
+
+1. The Logical and the Psychological. By science is meant, as already
+stated, that knowledge which is the outcome of methods of observation,
+reflection, and testing which are deliberately adopted to secure
+a settled, assured subject matter. It involves an intelligent and
+persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is
+erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such
+shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may
+be as obvious as possible. It is, like all knowledge, an outcome of
+activity bringing about certain changes in the environment. But in its
+case, the quality of the resulting knowledge is the controlling factor
+and not an incident of the activity. Both logically and educationally,
+science is the perfecting of knowing, its last stage.
+
+Science, in short, signifies a realization of the logical implications
+of any knowledge. Logical order is not a form imposed upon what is
+known; it is the proper form of knowledge as perfected. For it means
+that the statement of subject matter is of a nature to exhibit to
+one who understands it the premises from which it follows and the
+conclusions to which it points (See ante, p. 190). As from a few bones
+the competent zoologist reconstructs an animal; so from the form of a
+statement in mathematics or physics the specialist in the subject can
+form an idea of the system of truths in which it has its place.
+
+To the non-expert, however, this perfected form is a stumbling block.
+Just because the material is stated with reference to the furtherance
+of knowledge as an end in itself, its connections with the material of
+everyday life are hidden. To the layman the bones are a mere curiosity.
+Until he had mastered the principles of zoology, his efforts to make
+anything out of them would be random and blind. From the standpoint of
+the learner scientific form is an ideal to be achieved, not a starting
+point from which to set out. It is, nevertheless, a frequent practice to
+start in instruction with the rudiments of science somewhat simplified.
+The necessary consequence is an isolation of science from significant
+experience. The pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning.
+He acquires a technical body of information without ability to trace
+its connections with the objects and operations with which he is
+familiar--often he acquires simply a peculiar vocabulary. There is
+a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its
+perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural
+than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be
+protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers
+have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education.
+Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject
+is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist.
+Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the
+outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few
+indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn
+a "science" instead of learning the scientific way of treating the
+familiar material of ordinary experience. The method of the advanced
+student dominates college teaching; the approach of the college is
+transferred into the high school, and so down the line, with such
+omissions as may make the subject easier.
+
+The chronological method which begins with the experience of the learner
+and develops from that the proper modes of scientific treatment is often
+called the "psychological" method in distinction from the logical method
+of the expert or specialist. The apparent loss of time involved is
+more than made up for by the superior understanding and vital interest
+secured. What the pupil learns he at least understands. Moreover by
+following, in connection with problems selected from the material of
+ordinary acquaintance, the methods by which scientific men have reached
+their perfected knowledge, he gains independent power to deal with
+material within his range, and avoids the mental confusion and
+intellectual distaste attendant upon studying matter whose meaning
+is only symbolic. Since the mass of pupils are never going to become
+scientific specialists, it is much more important that they should get
+some insight into what scientific method means than that they should
+copy at long range and second hand the results which scientific men have
+reached. Students will not go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered,"
+but they will be sure and intelligent as far as they do go. And it is
+safe to say that the few who go on to be scientific experts will have
+a better preparation than if they had been swamped with a large mass of
+purely technical and symbolically stated information. In fact, those
+who do become successful men of science are those who by their own power
+manage to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional scholastic introduction
+into it.
+
+The contrast between the expectations of the men who a generation or
+two ago strove, against great odds, to secure a place for science
+in education, and the result generally achieved is painful. Herbert
+Spencer, inquiring what knowledge is of most worth, concluded that
+from all points of view scientific knowledge is most valuable. But
+his argument unconsciously assumed that scientific knowledge could be
+communicated in a ready-made form. Passing over the methods by which the
+subject matter of our ordinary activities is transmuted into scientific
+form, it ignored the method by which alone science is science.
+Instruction has too often proceeded upon an analogous plan. But there is
+no magic attached to material stated in technically correct scientific
+form. When learned in this condition it remains a body of inert
+information. Moreover its form of statement removes it further from
+fruitful contact with everyday experiences than does the mode of
+statement proper to literature. Nevertheless that the claims made for
+instruction in science were unjustifiable does not follow. For material
+so taught is not science to the pupil.
+
+Contact with things and laboratory exercises, while a great improvement
+upon textbooks arranged upon the deductive plan, do not of themselves
+suffice to meet the need. While they are an indispensable portion
+of scientific method, they do not as a matter of course constitute
+scientific method. Physical materials may be manipulated with scientific
+apparatus, but the materials may be disassociated in themselves and in
+the ways in which they are handled, from the materials and processes
+used out of school. The problems dealt with may be only problems of
+science: problems, that is, which would occur to one already initiated
+in the science of the subject. Our attention may be devoted to getting
+skill in technical manipulation without reference to the connection of
+laboratory exercises with a problem belonging to subject matter. There
+is sometimes a ritual of laboratory instruction as well as of heathen
+religion. 1 It has been mentioned, incidentally, that scientific
+statements, or logical form, implies the use of signs or symbols.
+The statement applies, of course, to all use of language. But in the
+vernacular, the mind proceeds directly from the symbol to the thing
+signified. Association with familiar material is so close that the mind
+does not pause upon the sign. The signs are intended only to stand for
+things and acts. But scientific terminology has an additional use. It is
+designed, as we have seen, not to stand for the things directly in their
+practical use in experience, but for the things placed in a cognitive
+system. Ultimately, of course, they denote the things of our common
+sense acquaintance. But immediately they do not designate them in their
+common context, but translated into terms of scientific inquiry. Atoms,
+molecules, chemical formulae, the mathematical propositions in the study
+of physics--all these have primarily an intellectual value and only
+indirectly an empirical value. They represent instruments for
+the carrying on of science. As in the case of other tools, their
+significance can be learned only by use. We cannot procure understanding
+of their meaning by pointing to things, but only by pointing to their
+work when they are employed as part of the technique of knowledge. Even
+the circle, square, etc., of geometry exhibit a difference from the
+squares and circles of familiar acquaintance, and the further one
+proceeds in mathematical science the greater the remoteness from the
+everyday empirical thing. Qualities which do not count for the pursuit
+of knowledge about spatial relations are left out; those which are
+important for this purpose are accentuated. If one carries his study
+far enough, he will find even the properties which are significant for
+spatial knowledge giving way to those which facilitate knowledge of
+other things--perhaps a knowledge of the general relations of number.
+There will be nothing in the conceptual definitions even to suggest
+spatial form, size, or direction. This does not mean that they are
+unreal mental inventions, but it indicates that direct physical
+qualities have been transmuted into tools for a special end--the end
+of intellectual organization. In every machine the primary state of
+material has been modified by subordinating it to use for a purpose.
+Not the stuff in its original form but in its adaptation to an end
+is important. No one would have a knowledge of a machine who could
+enumerate all the materials entering into its structure, but only he
+who knew their uses and could tell why they are employed as they are. In
+like fashion one has a knowledge of mathematical conceptions only when
+he sees the problems in which they function and their specific utility
+in dealing with these problems. "Knowing" the definitions, rules,
+formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without
+knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or
+intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of
+which it is a member.
+
+2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the
+direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried
+to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in
+experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation
+of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the
+systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action.
+Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends
+already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires
+only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More
+important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in
+forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress
+mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture
+and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities
+of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new
+possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to
+search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the
+discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends.
+
+That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action
+is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual
+command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of
+production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the
+fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors,
+telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are
+conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none
+of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less
+sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been
+rendered tributary to our daily life.
+
+It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus
+procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means
+for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of
+human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is
+the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent
+to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men
+move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but
+their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific
+enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of
+using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination
+and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and
+legs.
+
+The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the
+purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of
+the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science
+taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers
+which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of
+intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an
+enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the
+possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus
+has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence
+of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere
+coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote
+antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence
+properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To
+subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of
+abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with
+the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual
+amelioration of the estate of our common humanity.
+
+
+The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an
+intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction
+of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through
+education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the
+routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its
+ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather
+crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the
+non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all
+the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational.
+Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of
+past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any
+of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not
+scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations
+of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of
+practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It
+lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically"
+controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends
+upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in
+the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past
+experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that
+reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an
+intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming
+rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the
+nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it
+changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something
+beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region
+that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found
+indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are
+purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance.
+
+The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used
+to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand,
+but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an
+indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do
+not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if
+they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the
+different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when
+the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the
+sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction
+deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that
+which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious
+transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one.
+It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of
+one experience available for guidance of another.
+
+Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large
+scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal
+and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with
+the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may
+be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social
+progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which,
+while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in
+the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint
+of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are
+widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since
+dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence
+of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is
+shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the
+value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction
+and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of
+individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one
+can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of
+science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools
+who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools
+are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other
+mechanical tools.
+
+Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning
+of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its
+extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these
+possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be
+fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization
+is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests
+exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations
+were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and
+free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a
+short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure
+of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are
+equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location
+in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and
+episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the
+"abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free
+range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions
+record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a
+given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a
+local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and
+body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is
+essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many
+things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical,
+direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be
+able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have
+their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and,
+as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience
+a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He
+must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others
+as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He
+talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes
+the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally
+significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another
+fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which
+any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals
+and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific
+formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences
+with transformed meanings.
+
+To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection
+and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally,
+and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole
+instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress.
+And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer
+upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very
+different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in
+permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached
+for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action.
+There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but
+genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its
+expansion and its direction to new possibilities.
+
+3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational
+tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the
+curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests
+is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a
+literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of
+learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had
+naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily
+surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from
+whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively
+humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import,
+is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both
+studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere
+stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's
+life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or
+defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of
+deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct
+natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon
+insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the
+specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions
+of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse
+goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development
+is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in
+quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of
+the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from
+superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically,
+to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of
+formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever
+information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of
+such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the
+antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a
+wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it
+functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic
+culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than
+"pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was
+performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by
+the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the
+highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from
+all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful
+arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them
+(See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after
+science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for
+the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking
+theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more
+significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world.
+In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture,
+aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational
+advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic
+disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate
+to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and
+industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural
+science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its
+educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure
+class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set
+in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce
+themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn
+tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For
+modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the
+ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the
+educational practices which have identified the "humanities"
+exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and
+institutions made such important contributions to our civilization
+that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their
+acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies
+involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter
+which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate
+a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the
+accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality
+not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what
+it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject
+matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter
+which does not accomplish it is not even educational.
+
+Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in
+experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of
+what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a
+statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of
+a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to
+the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical
+characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has
+reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from
+the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a
+cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this
+fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which
+however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information,
+being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which
+science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed
+for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of
+experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the
+accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of
+abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated
+with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context
+in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of
+the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men.
+Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general
+social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising
+in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p.
+200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply
+conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
+
+The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have
+already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests.
+
+The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide
+with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility,
+culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental
+discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of
+which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature
+of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an
+interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens,
+however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a
+consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the
+curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects
+by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from
+their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords
+an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests
+on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into
+connection with one another.
+
+1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is
+indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things
+and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is
+one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and
+hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language,
+all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical
+language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated."
+It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something
+in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through
+the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of
+personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not
+for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant
+affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the
+brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon
+the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate
+experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting
+it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is
+doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify
+an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on
+letters for effective representative or indirect experience.
+
+At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there
+is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger
+that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make
+it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation
+will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed
+to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere
+bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes
+with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used
+to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience
+in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of
+a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and
+"appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for
+the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas
+except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it
+in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct
+experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between
+reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between
+just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical
+equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious
+illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the
+tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach
+upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to
+assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations
+sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected
+by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or
+bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it
+must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic
+material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying
+facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide
+genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the
+import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the
+standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on
+their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also
+means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction
+involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern
+as to the material symbolically conveyed.
+
+In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the
+demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by
+the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical
+situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except
+to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the
+subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available
+background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies
+to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic
+function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in
+a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain
+range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them.
+Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing
+generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As
+regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that
+the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a
+minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results
+may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of
+experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual
+progress.
+
+The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out
+three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct
+from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in
+appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course
+of study.
+
+1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in
+the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of
+the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon
+qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral
+goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as
+aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain
+rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance,
+etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition,
+clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are
+so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that
+parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the
+young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely
+symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working
+as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has
+himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete
+situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics
+are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with
+some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that
+these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own
+past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most
+enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are
+fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own
+personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he
+has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition
+thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical
+experiences.
+
+Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it
+applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A
+youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value
+of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure
+of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital
+appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by
+others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot
+adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed;
+it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence,
+and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows
+up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones.
+A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his
+inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict
+between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will
+win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware;
+the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of
+disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some
+confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up
+obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity
+and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may
+be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and
+division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value
+of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow
+comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the
+significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an
+external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He
+may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal.
+
+It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were
+confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope
+is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation
+of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also
+tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of
+excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium
+so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and
+rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of
+attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas,
+principles, and problems is vitally brought home.
+
+2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or
+representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from
+the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response
+involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure
+"facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field.
+The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any
+activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to
+identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and
+intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an
+exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and
+something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and
+appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters,
+leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative
+acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information.
+Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to
+recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is
+still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of
+childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between
+play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a
+difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a
+difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The
+result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal"
+phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to
+a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results.
+Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned
+machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of
+education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the
+wayside. Meantime mind-wandering and wayward fancy are nothing but the
+unsuppressible imagination cut loose from concern with what is done.
+
+An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of
+realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct
+physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in
+teaching. The emphasis put in this book, in accord with many tendencies
+in contemporary education, upon activity, will be misleading if it is
+not recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral
+part of human activity as is muscular movement. The educative value
+of manual activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play,
+depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing
+of the meaning of what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are
+dramatizations. Their utilitarian value in forming habits of skill to be
+used for tangible results is important, but not when isolated from the
+appreciative side. Were it not for the accompanying play of imagination,
+there would be no road from a direct activity to representative
+knowledge; for it is by imagination that symbols are translated over
+into a direct meaning and integrated with a narrower activity so as to
+expand and enrich it. When the representative creative imagination is
+made merely literary and mythological, symbols are rendered mere means
+of directing physical reactions of the organs of speech.
+
+3. In the account previously given nothing was explicitly said about
+the place of literature and the fine arts in the course of study. The
+omission at that point was intentional. At the outset, there is no sharp
+demarcation of useful, or industrial, arts and fine arts. The activities
+mentioned in Chapter XV contain within themselves the factors later
+discriminated into fine and useful arts. As engaging the emotions and
+the imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts
+their quality. As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of tools
+to materials with constantly increasing perfection, they involve the
+element of technique indispensable to artistic production. From the
+standpoint of product, or the work of art, they are naturally defective,
+though even in this respect when they comprise genuine appreciation
+they often have a rudimentary charm. As experiences they have both an
+artistic and an esthetic quality. When they emerge into activities which
+are tested by their product and when the socially serviceable value of
+the product is emphasized, they pass into useful or industrial arts.
+When they develop in the direction of an enhanced appreciation of the
+immediate qualities which appeal to taste, they grow into fine arts.
+
+In one of its meanings, appreciation is opposed to depreciation. It
+denotes an enlarged, an intensified prizing, not merely a prizing,
+much less--like depreciation--a lowered and degraded prizing. This
+enhancement of the qualities which make any ordinary experience
+appealing, appropriable--capable of full assimilation--and enjoyable,
+constitutes the prime function of literature, music, drawing, painting,
+etc., in education. They are not the exclusive agencies of appreciation
+in the most general sense of that word; but they are the chief agencies
+of an intensified, enhanced appreciation. As such, they are not only
+intrinsically and directly enjoyable, but they serve a purpose
+beyond themselves. They have the office, in increased degree, of all
+appreciation in fixing taste, in forming standards for the worth of
+later experiences. They arouse discontent with conditions which fall
+below their measure; they create a demand for surroundings coming up to
+their own level. They reveal a depth and range of meaning in experiences
+which otherwise might be mediocre and trivial. They supply, that
+is, organs of vision. Moreover, in their fullness they represent the
+concentration and consummation of elements of good which are otherwise
+scattered and incomplete. They select and focus the elements of
+enjoyable worth which make any experience directly enjoyable. They are
+not luxuries of education, but emphatic expressions of that which makes
+any education worth while.
+
+2. The Valuation of Studies. The theory of educational values involves
+not only an account of the nature of appreciation as fixing the measure
+of subsequent valuations, but an account of the specific directions
+in which these valuations occur. To value means primarily to prize, to
+esteem; but secondarily it means to apprise, to estimate. It means, that
+is, the act of cherishing something, holding it dear, and also the act
+of passing judgment upon the nature and amount of its value as compared
+with something else. To value in the latter sense is to valuate or
+evaluate. The distinction coincides with that sometimes made between
+intrinsic and instrumental values. Intrinsic values are not objects of
+judgment, they cannot (as intrinsic) be compared, or regarded as greater
+and less, better or worse. They are invaluable; and if a thing is
+invaluable, it is neither more nor less so than any other invaluable.
+But occasions present themselves when it is necessary to choose, when
+we must let one thing go in order to take another. This establishes an
+order of preference, a greater and less, better and worse. Things judged
+or passed upon have to be estimated in relation to some third thing,
+some further end. With respect to that, they are means, or instrumental
+values.
+
+We may imagine a man who at one time thoroughly enjoys converse with his
+friends, at another the hearing of a symphony; at another the eating of
+his meals; at another the reading of a book; at another the earning of
+money, and so on. As an appreciative realization, each of these is an
+intrinsic value. It occupies a particular place in life; it serves its
+own end, which cannot be supplied by a substitute. There is no question
+of comparative value, and hence none of valuation. Each is the specific
+good which it is, and that is all that can be said. In its own place,
+none is a means to anything beyond itself. But there may arise a
+situation in which they compete or conflict, in which a choice has to be
+made. Now comparison comes in. Since a choice has to be made, we want
+to know the respective claims of each competitor. What is to be said
+for it? What does it offer in comparison with, as balanced over against,
+some other possibility? Raising these questions means that a particular
+good is no longer an end in itself, an intrinsic good. For if it were,
+its claims would be incomparable, imperative. The question is now as
+to its status as a means of realizing something else, which is then the
+invaluable of that situation. If a man has just eaten, or if he is well
+fed generally and the opportunity to hear music is a rarity, he will
+probably prefer the music to eating. In the given situation that will
+render the greater contribution. If he is starving, or if he is satiated
+with music for the time being, he will naturally judge food to have the
+greater worth. In the abstract or at large, apart from the needs of a
+particular situation in which choice has to be made, there is no such
+thing as degrees or order of value. Certain conclusions follow with
+respect to educational values. We cannot establish a hierarchy of values
+among studies. It is futile to attempt to arrange them in an order,
+beginning with one having least worth and going on to that of maximum
+value. In so far as any study has a unique or irreplaceable function in
+experience, in so far as it marks a characteristic enrichment of life,
+its worth is intrinsic or incomparable. Since education is not a means
+to living, but is identical with the operation of living a life which is
+fruitful and inherently significant, the only ultimate value which can
+be set up is just the process of living itself. And this is not an end
+to which studies and activities are subordinate means; it is the whole
+of which they are ingredients. And what has been said about appreciation
+means that every study in one of its aspects ought to have just such
+ultimate significance. It is true of arithmetic as it is of poetry that
+in some place and at some time it ought to be a good to be appreciated
+on its own account--just as an enjoyable experience, in short. If it is
+not, then when the time and place come for it to be used as a means or
+instrumentality, it will be in just that much handicapped. Never having
+been realized or appreciated for itself, one will miss something of its
+capacity as a resource for other ends.
+
+It equally follows that when we compare studies as to their values,
+that is, treat them as means to something beyond themselves, that which
+controls their proper valuation is found in the specific situation in
+which they are to be used. The way to enable a student to apprehend the
+instrumental value of arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit
+it will be to him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him
+discover that success in something he is interested in doing depends
+upon ability to use number.
+
+It also follows that the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of value
+among different studies is a misguided one, in spite of the amount of
+time recently devoted to the undertaking. Science for example may have
+any kind of value, depending upon the situation into which it enters
+as a means. To some the value of science may be military; it may be
+an instrument in strengthening means of offense or defense; it may be
+technological, a tool for engineering; or it may be commercial--an aid
+in the successful conduct of business; under other conditions, its
+worth may be philanthropic--the service it renders in relieving
+human suffering; or again it may be quite conventional--of value in
+establishing one's social status as an "educated" person. As matter of
+fact, science serves all these purposes, and it would be an arbitrary
+task to try to fix upon one of them as its "real" end. All that we can
+be sure of educationally is that science should be taught so as to be an
+end in itself in the lives of students--something worth while on account
+of its own unique intrinsic contribution to the experience of life.
+Primarily it must have "appreciation value." If we take something
+which seems to be at the opposite pole, like poetry, the same sort of
+statement applies. It may be that, at the present time, its chief value
+is the contribution it makes to the enjoyment of leisure. But that may
+represent a degenerate condition rather than anything necessary. Poetry
+has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the
+purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things. It has had an
+enormous patriotic value. Homer to the Greeks was a Bible, a textbook
+of morals, a history, and a national inspiration. In any case, it may
+be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry
+a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has
+something the matter with it--or else the poetry is artificial poetry.
+
+The same considerations apply to the value of a study or a topic of
+a study with reference to its motivating force. Those responsible
+for planning and teaching the course of study should have grounds
+for thinking that the studies and topics included furnish both direct
+increments to the enriching of lives of the pupils and also materials
+which they can put to use in other concerns of direct interest. Since
+the curriculum is always getting loaded down with purely inherited
+traditional matter and with subjects which represent mainly the energy
+of some influential person or group of persons in behalf of something
+dear to them, it requires constant inspection, criticism, and revision
+to make sure it is accomplishing its purpose. Then there is always the
+probability that it represents the values of adults rather than those
+of children and youth, or those of pupils a generation ago rather than
+those of the present day. Hence a further need for a critical outlook
+and survey. But these considerations do not mean that for a subject to
+have motivating value to a pupil (whether intrinsic or instrumental)
+is the same thing as for him to be aware of the value, or to be able to
+tell what the study is good for.
+
+In the first place, as long as any topic makes an immediate appeal, it
+is not necessary to ask what it is good for. This is a question which
+can be asked only about instrumental values. Some goods are not good for
+anything; they are just goods. Any other notion leads to an absurdity.
+For we cannot stop asking the question about an instrumental good, one
+whose value lies in its being good for something, unless there is at
+some point something intrinsically good, good for itself. To a hungry,
+healthy child, food is a good of the situation; we do not have to bring
+him to consciousness of the ends subserved by food in order to supply a
+motive to eat. The food in connection with his appetite is a motive. The
+same thing holds of mentally eager pupils with respect to many topics.
+Neither they nor the teacher could possibly foretell with any exactness
+the purposes learning is to accomplish in the future; nor as long as the
+eagerness continues is it advisable to try to specify particular goods
+which are to come of it. The proof of a good is found in the fact that
+the pupil responds; his response is use. His response to the material
+shows that the subject functions in his life. It is unsound to urge
+that, say, Latin has a value per se in the abstract, just as a study, as
+a sufficient justification for teaching it. But it is equally absurd
+to argue that unless teacher or pupil can point out some definite
+assignable future use to which it is to be put, it lacks justifying
+value. When pupils are genuinely concerned in learning Latin, that is of
+itself proof that it possesses value. The most which one is entitled to
+ask in such cases is whether in view of the shortness of time, there
+are not other things of intrinsic value which in addition have greater
+instrumental value.
+
+This brings us to the matter of instrumental values--topics studied
+because of some end beyond themselves. If a child is ill and his
+appetite does not lead him to eat when food is presented, or if his
+appetite is perverted so that he prefers candy to meat and vegetables,
+conscious reference to results is indicated. He needs to be made
+conscious of consequences as a justification of the positive or negative
+value of certain objects. Or the state of things may be normal enough,
+and yet an individual not be moved by some matter because he does not
+grasp how his attainment of some intrinsic good depends upon active
+concern with what is presented. In such cases, it is obviously the part
+of wisdom to establish consciousness of connection. In general what is
+desirable is that a topic be presented in such a way that it either have
+an immediate value, and require no justification, or else be perceived
+to be a means of achieving something of intrinsic value. An instrumental
+value then has the intrinsic value of being a means to an end. It may
+be questioned whether some of the present pedagogical interest in the
+matter of values of studies is not either excessive or else too narrow.
+Sometimes it appears to be a labored effort to furnish an apologetic for
+topics which no longer operate to any purpose, direct or indirect, in
+the lives of pupils. At other times, the reaction against useless lumber
+seems to have gone to the extent of supposing that no subject or topic
+should be taught unless some quite definite future utility can be
+pointed out by those making the course of study or by the pupil himself,
+unmindful of the fact that life is its own excuse for being; and that
+definite utilities which can be pointed out are themselves justified
+only because they increase the experienced content of life itself. 3.
+The Segregation and Organization of Values. It is of course possible to
+classify in a general way the various valuable phases of life. In order
+to get a survey of aims sufficiently wide (See ante, p. 110) to give
+breadth and flexibility to the enterprise of education, there is some
+advantage in such a classification. But it is a great mistake to regard
+these values as ultimate ends to which the concrete satisfactions of
+experience are subordinate. They are nothing but generalizations,
+more or less adequate, of concrete goods. Health, wealth, efficiency,
+sociability, utility, culture, happiness itself are only abstract
+terms which sum up a multitude of particulars. To regard such things as
+standards for the valuation of concrete topics and process of education
+is to subordinate to an abstraction the concrete facts from which the
+abstraction is derived. They are not in any true sense standards of
+valuation; these are found, as we have previously seen, in the specific
+realizations which form tastes and habits of preference. They are,
+however, of significance as points of view elevated above the details of
+life whence to survey the field and see how its constituent details are
+distributed, and whether they are well proportioned. No classification
+can have other than a provisional validity. The following may prove of
+some help. We may say that the kind of experience to which the work of
+the schools should contribute is one marked by executive competency in
+the management of resources and obstacles encountered (efficiency);
+by sociability, or interest in the direct companionship of others; by
+aesthetic taste or capacity to appreciate artistic excellence in at
+least some of its classic forms; by trained intellectual method, or
+interest in some mode of scientific achievement; and by sensitiveness
+to the rights and claims of others--conscientiousness. And while these
+considerations are not standards of value, they are useful criteria
+for survey, criticism, and better organization of existing methods and
+subject matter of instruction.
+
+The need of such general points of view is the greater because of a
+tendency to segregate educational values due to the isolation from one
+another of the various pursuits of life. The idea is prevalent that
+different studies represent separate kinds of values, and that the
+curriculum should, therefore, be constituted by gathering together
+various studies till a sufficient variety of independent values have
+been cared for. The following quotation does not use the word value,
+but it contains the notion of a curriculum constructed on the idea that
+there are a number of separate ends to be reached, and that various
+studies may be evaluated by referring each study to its respective end.
+"Memory is trained by most studies, but best by languages and history;
+taste is trained by the more advanced study of languages, and still
+better by English literature; imagination by all higher language
+teaching, but chiefly by Greek and Latin poetry; observation by science
+work in the laboratory, though some training is to be got from the
+earlier stages of Latin and Greek; for expression, Greek and Latin
+composition comes first and English composition next; for abstract
+reasoning, mathematics stands almost alone; for concrete reasoning,
+science comes first, then geometry; for social reasoning, the Greek and
+Roman historians and orators come first, and general history next. Hence
+the narrowest education which can claim to be at all complete includes
+Latin, one modern language, some history, some English literature, and
+one science." There is much in the wording of this passage which is
+irrelevant to our point and which must be discounted to make it clear.
+The phraseology betrays the particular provincial tradition within
+which the author is writing. There is the unquestioned assumption
+of "faculties" to be trained, and a dominant interest in the ancient
+languages; there is comparative disregard of the earth on which men
+happen to live and the bodies they happen to carry around with them.
+But with allowances made for these matters (even with their complete
+abandonment) we find much in contemporary educational philosophy which
+parallels the fundamental notion of parceling out special values to
+segregated studies. Even when some one end is set up as a standard of
+value, like social efficiency or culture, it will often be found to be
+but a verbal heading under which a variety of disconnected factors
+are comprised. And although the general tendency is to allow a greater
+variety of values to a given study than does the passage quoted, yet the
+attempt to inventory a number of values attaching to each study and
+to state the amount of each value which the given study possesses
+emphasizes an implied educational disintegration.
+
+As matter of fact, such schemes of values of studies are largely but
+unconscious justifications of the curriculum with which one is familiar.
+One accepts, for the most part, the studies of the existing course
+and then assigns values to them as a sufficient reason for their being
+taught. Mathematics is said to have, for example, disciplinary value
+in habituating the pupil to accuracy of statement and closeness of
+reasoning; it has utilitarian value in giving command of the arts
+of calculation involved in trade and the arts; culture value in
+its enlargement of the imagination in dealing with the most general
+relations of things; even religious value in its concept of the infinite
+and allied ideas. But clearly mathematics does not accomplish such
+results, because it is endowed with miraculous potencies called values;
+it has these values if and when it accomplishes these results, and not
+otherwise. The statements may help a teacher to a larger vision of the
+possible results to be effected by instruction in mathematical topics.
+But unfortunately, the tendency is to treat the statement as indicating
+powers inherently residing in the subject, whether they operate or not,
+and thus to give it a rigid justification. If they do not operate, the
+blame is put not on the subject as taught, but on the indifference and
+recalcitrancy of pupils.
+
+This attitude toward subjects is the obverse side of the conception of
+experience or life as a patchwork of independent interests which exist
+side by side and limit one another. Students of politics are familiar
+with a check and balance theory of the powers of government. There are
+supposed to be independent separate functions, like the legislative,
+executive, judicial, administrative, and all goes well if each of these
+checks all the others and thus creates an ideal balance. There is a
+philosophy which might well be called the check and balance theory of
+experience. Life presents a diversity of interests. Left to themselves,
+they tend to encroach on one another. The ideal is to prescribe a
+special territory for each till the whole ground of experience is
+covered, and then see to it each remains within its own boundaries.
+Politics, business, recreation, art, science, the learned professions,
+polite intercourse, leisure, represent such interests. Each of these
+ramifies into many branches: business into manual occupations, executive
+positions, bookkeeping, railroading, banking, agriculture, trade and
+commerce, etc., and so with each of the others. An ideal education
+would then supply the means of meeting these separate and pigeon-holed
+interests. And when we look at the schools, it is easy to get the
+impression that they accept this view of the nature of adult life, and
+set for themselves the task of meeting its demands. Each interest is
+acknowledged as a kind of fixed institution to which something in the
+course of study must correspond. The course of study must then have
+some civics and history politically and patriotically viewed: some
+utilitarian studies; some science; some art (mainly literature of
+course); some provision for recreation; some moral education; and so
+on. And it will be found that a large part of current agitation about
+schools is concerned with clamor and controversy about the due meed of
+recognition to be given to each of these interests, and with struggles
+to secure for each its due share in the course of study; or, if this
+does not seem feasible in the existing school system, then to secure a
+new and separate kind of schooling to meet the need. In the multitude of
+educations education is forgotten.
+
+The obvious outcome is congestion of the course of study, overpressure
+and distraction of pupils, and a narrow specialization fatal to the very
+idea of education. But these bad results usually lead to more of the
+same sort of thing as a remedy. When it is perceived that after all the
+requirements of a full life experience are not met, the deficiency is
+not laid to the isolation and narrowness of the teaching of the existing
+subjects, and this recognition made the basis of reorganization of the
+system. No, the lack is something to be made up for by the introduction
+of still another study, or, if necessary, another kind of school. And
+as a rule those who object to the resulting overcrowding and consequent
+superficiality and distraction usually also have recourse to a merely
+quantitative criterion: the remedy is to cut off a great many studies as
+fads and frills, and return to the good old curriculum of the three R's
+in elementary education and the equally good and equally old-fashioned
+curriculum of the classics and mathematics in higher education.
+
+The situation has, of course, its historic explanation. Various epochs
+of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests.
+Each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural
+deposit, like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way
+into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses
+of study, distinct types of schools. With the rapid change of political,
+scientific, and economic interests in the last century, provision had to
+be made for new values. Though the older courses resisted, they have had
+at least in this country to retire their pretensions to a monopoly. They
+have not, however, been reorganized in content and aim; they have only
+been reduced in amount. The new studies, representing the new interests,
+have not been used to transform the method and aim of all instruction;
+they have been injected and added on. The result is a conglomerate, the
+cement of which consists in the mechanics of the school program or time
+table. Thence arises the scheme of values and standards of value which
+we have mentioned.
+
+This situation in education represents the divisions and separations
+which obtain in social life. The variety of interests which should mark
+any rich and balanced experience have been torn asunder and deposited in
+separate institutions with diverse and independent purposes and methods.
+Business is business, science is science, art is art, politics is
+politics, social intercourse is social intercourse, morals is morals,
+recreation is recreation, and so on. Each possesses a separate and
+independent province with its own peculiar aims and ways of proceeding.
+Each contributes to the others only externally and accidentally. All of
+them together make up the whole of life by just apposition and addition.
+What does one expect from business save that it should furnish money,
+to be used in turn for making more money and for support of self and
+family, for buying books and pictures, tickets to concerts which may
+afford culture, and for paying taxes, charitable gifts and other things
+of social and ethical value? How unreasonable to expect that the pursuit
+of business should be itself a culture of the imagination, in breadth
+and refinement; that it should directly, and not through the money which
+it supplies, have social service for its animating principle and be
+conducted as an enterprise in behalf of social organization! The same
+thing is to be said, mutatis mutandis, of the pursuit of art or science
+or politics or religion. Each has become specialized not merely in
+its appliances and its demands upon time, but in its aim and animating
+spirit. Unconsciously, our course of studies and our theories of the
+educational values of studies reflect this division of interests. The
+point at issue in a theory of educational value is then the unity or
+integrity of experience. How shall it be full and varied without losing
+unity of spirit? How shall it be one and yet not narrow and monotonous
+in its unity? Ultimately, the question of values and a standard of
+values is the moral question of the organization of the interests of
+life. Educationally, the question concerns that organization of schools,
+materials, and methods which will operate to achieve breadth and
+richness of experience. How shall we secure breadth of outlook without
+sacrificing efficiency of execution? How shall we secure the diversity
+of interests, without paying the price of isolation? How shall the
+individual be rendered executive in his intelligence instead of at the
+cost of his intelligence? How shall art, science, and politics reinforce
+one another in an enriched temper of mind instead of constituting ends
+pursued at one another's expense? How can the interests of life and the
+studies which enforce them enrich the common experience of men instead
+of dividing men from one another? With the questions of reorganization
+thus suggested, we shall be concerned in the concluding chapters.
+
+Summary. Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value
+have been covered in the prior discussion of aims and interests. But
+since educational values are generally discussed in connection with the
+claims of the various studies of the curriculum, the consideration
+of aim and interest is here resumed from the point of view of special
+studies. The term "value" has two quite different meanings. On the one
+hand, it denotes the attitude of prizing a thing finding it worth
+while, for its own sake, or intrinsically. This is a name for a full
+or complete experience. To value in this sense is to appreciate. But
+to value also means a distinctively intellectual act--an operation
+of comparing and judging--to valuate. This occurs when direct full
+experience is lacking, and the question arises which of the various
+possibilities of a situation is to be preferred in order to reach a full
+realization, or vital experience.
+
+We must not, however, divide the studies of the curriculum into
+the appreciative, those concerned with intrinsic value, and the
+instrumental, concerned with those which are of value or ends beyond
+themselves. The formation of proper standards in any subject depends
+upon a realization of the contribution which it makes to the immediate
+significance of experience, upon a direct appreciation. Literature and
+the fine arts are of peculiar value because they represent appreciation
+at its best--a heightened realization of meaning through selection and
+concentration. But every subject at some phase of its development should
+possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic
+quality.
+
+Contribution to immediate intrinsic values in all their variety
+in experience is the only criterion for determining the worth of
+instrumental and derived values in studies. The tendency to assign
+separate values to each study and to regard the curriculum in its
+entirety as a kind of composite made by the aggregation of segregated
+values is a result of the isolation of social groups and classes. Hence
+it is the business of education in a democratic social group to struggle
+against this isolation in order that the various interests may reinforce
+and play into one another.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
+
+1. The Origin of the Opposition.
+
+The isolation of aims and values which we have been considering leads to
+opposition between them. Probably the most deep-seated antithesis which
+has shown itself in educational history is that between education in
+preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure. The
+bare terms "useful labor" and "leisure" confirm the statement already
+made that the segregation and conflict of values are not self-inclosed,
+but reflect a division within social life. Were the two functions
+of gaining a livelihood by work and enjoying in a cultivated way the
+opportunities of leisure, distributed equally among the different
+members of a community, it would not occur to any one that there was
+any conflict of educational agencies and aims involved. It would be
+self-evident that the question was how education could contribute most
+effectively to both. And while it might be found that some materials of
+instruction chiefly accomplished one result and other subject matter
+the other, it would be evident that care must be taken to secure as
+much overlapping as conditions permit; that is, the education which had
+leisure more directly in view should indirectly reinforce as much as
+possible the efficiency and the enjoyment of work, while that aiming at
+the latter should produce habits of emotion and intellect which would
+procure a worthy cultivation of leisure. These general considerations
+are amply borne out by the historical development of educational
+philosophy. The separation of liberal education from professional
+and industrial education goes back to the time of the Greeks, and was
+formulated expressly on the basis of a division of classes into those
+who had to labor for a living and those who were relieved from this
+necessity. The conception that liberal education, adapted to men in the
+latter class, is intrinsically higher than the servile training given
+to the latter class reflected the fact that one class was free and the
+other servile in its social status. The latter class labored not only
+for its own subsistence, but also for the means which enabled the
+superior class to live without personally engaging in occupations
+taking almost all the time and not of a nature to engage or reward
+intelligence.
+
+That a certain amount of labor must be engaged in goes without saying.
+Human beings have to live and it requires work to supply the resources
+of life. Even if we insist that the interests connected with getting
+a living are only material and hence intrinsically lower than those
+connected with enjoyment of time released from labor, and even if it
+were admitted that there is something engrossing and insubordinate
+in material interests which leads them to strive to usurp the place
+belonging to the higher ideal interests, this would not--barring
+the fact of socially divided classes--lead to neglect of the kind of
+education which trains men for the useful pursuits. It would rather lead
+to scrupulous care for them, so that men were trained to be efficient in
+them and yet to keep them in their place; education would see to it
+that we avoided the evil results which flow from their being allowed to
+flourish in obscure purlieus of neglect. Only when a division of these
+interests coincides with a division of an inferior and a superior social
+class will preparation for useful work be looked down upon with contempt
+as an unworthy thing: a fact which prepares one for the conclusion that
+the rigid identification of work with material interests, and leisure
+with ideal interests is itself a social product. The educational
+formulations of the social situation made over two thousand years ago
+have been so influential and give such a clear and logical recognition
+of the implications of the division into laboring and leisure classes,
+that they deserve especial note. According to them, man occupies the
+highest place in the scheme of animate existence. In part, he shares
+the constitution and functions of plants and animals--nutritive,
+reproductive, motor or practical. The distinctively human function is
+reason existing for the sake of beholding the spectacle of the universe.
+Hence the truly human end is the fullest possible of this distinctive
+human prerogative. The life of observation, meditation, cogitation, and
+speculation pursued as an end in itself is the proper life of man. From
+reason moreover proceeds the proper control of the lower elements
+of human nature--the appetites and the active, motor, impulses. In
+themselves greedy, insubordinate, lovers of excess, aiming only at their
+own satiety, they observe moderation--the law of the mean--and serve
+desirable ends as they are subjected to the rule of reason.
+
+Such is the situation as an affair of theoretical psychology and as most
+adequately stated by Aristotle. But this state of things is reflected
+in the constitution of classes of men and hence in the organization of
+society. Only in a comparatively small number is the function of reason
+capable of operating as a law of life. In the mass of people, vegetative
+and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble
+and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and
+passion. Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason
+constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they
+are means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves,
+although unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain
+discretion in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by
+nature, and not merely by social convention, there are those who are
+slaves--that is, means for the ends of others. 1 The great body of
+artisans are in one important respect worse off than even slaves.
+Like the latter they are given up to the service of ends external to
+themselves; but since they do not enjoy the intimate association with
+the free superior class experienced by domestic slaves they remain on a
+lower plane of excellence. Moreover, women are classed with slaves and
+craftsmen as factors among the animate instrumentalities of production
+and reproduction of the means for a free or rational life.
+
+Individually and collectively there is a gulf between merely living and
+living worthily. In order that one may live worthily he must first live,
+and so with collective society. The time and energy spent upon mere
+life, upon the gaining of subsistence, detracts from that available for
+activities that have an inherent rational meaning; they also unfit for
+the latter. Means are menial, the serviceable is servile. The true life
+is possible only in the degree in which the physical necessities are had
+without effort and without attention. Hence slaves, artisans, and
+women are employed in furnishing the means of subsistence in order that
+others, those adequately equipped with intelligence, may live the life
+of leisurely concern with things intrinsically worth while.
+
+To these two modes of occupation, with their distinction of servile and
+free activities (or "arts") correspond two types of education: the base
+or mechanical and the liberal or intellectual. Some persons are trained
+by suitable practical exercises for capacity in doing things, for
+ability to use the mechanical tools involved in turning out physical
+commodities and rendering personal service. This training is a
+mere matter of habituation and technical skill; it operates through
+repetition and assiduity in application, not through awakening and
+nurturing thought. Liberal education aims to train intelligence for its
+proper office: to know. The less this knowledge has to do with practical
+affairs, with making or producing, the more adequately it engages
+intelligence. So consistently does Aristotle draw the line between
+menial and liberal education that he puts what are now called the "fine"
+arts, music, painting, sculpture, in the same class with menial arts
+so far as their practice is concerned. They involve physical agencies,
+assiduity of practice, and external results. In discussing, for example,
+education in music he raises the question how far the young should
+be practiced in the playing of instruments. His answer is that such
+practice and proficiency may be tolerated as conduce to appreciation;
+that is, to understanding and enjoyment of music when played by slaves
+or professionals. When professional power is aimed at, music sinks from
+the liberal to the professional level. One might then as well teach
+cooking, says Aristotle. Even a liberal concern with the works of fine
+art depends upon the existence of a hireling class of practitioners who
+have subordinated the development of their own personality to attaining
+skill in mechanical execution. The higher the activity the more purely
+mental is it; the less does it have to do with physical things or
+with the body. The more purely mental it is, the more independent or
+self-sufficing is it.
+
+These last words remind us that Aristotle again makes a distinction of
+superior and inferior even within those living the life of reason. For
+there is a distinction in ends and in free action, according as one's
+life is merely accompanied by reason or as it makes reason its own
+medium. That is to say, the free citizen who devotes himself to the
+public life of his community, sharing in the management of its affairs
+and winning personal honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied
+by reason. But the thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific
+inquiry and philosophic speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not
+simply by *. Even the activity of the citizen in his civic relations,
+in other words, retains some of the taint of practice, of external or
+merely instrumental doing. This infection is shown by the fact that
+civic activity and civic excellence need the help of others; one cannot
+engage in public life all by himself. But all needs, all desires imply,
+in the philosophy of Aristotle, a material factor; they involve lack,
+privation; they are dependent upon something beyond themselves for
+completion. A purely intellectual life, however, one carries on by
+himself, in himself; such assistance as he may derive from others is
+accidental, rather than intrinsic. In knowing, in the life of theory,
+reason finds its own full manifestation; knowing for the sake of knowing
+irrespective of any application is alone independent, or self-sufficing.
+Hence only the education that makes for power to know as an end in
+itself, without reference to the practice of even civic duties, is
+truly liberal or free. 2. The Present Situation. If the Aristotelian
+conception represented just Aristotle's personal view, it would be a
+more or less interesting historical curiosity. It could be dismissed
+as an illustration of the lack of sympathy or the amount of academic
+pedantry which may coexist with extraordinary intellectual gifts.
+But Aristotle simply described without confusion and without that
+insincerity always attendant upon mental confusion, the life that was
+before him. That the actual social situation has greatly changed since
+his day there is no need to say. But in spite of these changes, in spite
+of the abolition of legal serfdom, and the spread of democracy, with
+the extension of science and of general education (in books, newspapers,
+travel, and general intercourse as well as in schools), there remains
+enough of a cleavage of society into a learned and an unlearned class,
+a leisure and a laboring class, to make his point of view a most
+enlightening one from which to criticize the separation between culture
+and utility in present education. Behind the intellectual and abstract
+distinction as it figures in pedagogical discussion, there looms a
+social distinction between those whose pursuits involve a minimum of
+self-directive thought and aesthetic appreciation, and those who are
+concerned more directly with things of the intelligence and with the
+control of the activities of others.
+
+Aristotle was certainly permanently right when he said that "any
+occupation or art or study deserves to be called mechanical if it
+renders the body or soul or intellect of free persons unfit for the
+exercise and practice of excellence." The force of the statement is
+almost infinitely increased when we hold, as we nominally do at present,
+that all persons, instead of a comparatively few, are free. For when the
+mass of men and all women were regarded as unfree by the very nature
+of their bodies and minds, there was neither intellectual confusion nor
+moral hypocrisy in giving them only the training which fitted them
+for mechanical skill, irrespective of its ulterior effect upon their
+capacity to share in a worthy life. He was permanently right also when
+he went on to say that "all mercenary employments as well as those which
+degrade the condition of the body are mechanical, since they deprive
+the intellect of leisure and dignity,"--permanently right, that is,
+if gainful pursuits as matter of fact deprive the intellect of the
+conditions of its exercise and so of its dignity. If his statements
+are false, it is because they identify a phase of social custom with
+a natural necessity. But a different view of the relations of mind and
+matter, mind and body, intelligence and social service, is better than
+Aristotle's conception only if it helps render the old idea obsolete
+in fact--in the actual conduct of life and education. Aristotle was
+permanently right in assuming the inferiority and subordination of
+mere skill in performance and mere accumulation of external products to
+understanding, sympathy of appreciation, and the free play of ideas. If
+there was an error, it lay in assuming the necessary separation of the
+two: in supposing that there is a natural divorce between efficiency in
+producing commodities and rendering service, and self-directive thought;
+between significant knowledge and practical achievement. We hardly
+better matters if we just correct his theoretical misapprehension, and
+tolerate the social state of affairs which generated and sanctioned
+his conception. We lose rather than gain in change from serfdom to
+free citizenship if the most prized result of the change is simply an
+increase in the mechanical efficiency of the human tools of production.
+So we lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence as an
+organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that an
+unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage directly in
+turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence which controls to be
+the exclusive possession of remote scientists and captains of industry.
+We are in a position honestly to criticize the division of life into
+separate functions and of society into separate classes only so far
+as we are free from responsibility for perpetuating the educational
+practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in
+production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a
+cultural embellishment. In short, ability to transcend the Greek
+philosophy of life and education is not secured by a mere shifting about
+of the theoretical symbols meaning free, rational, and worthy. It is not
+secured by a change of sentiment regarding the dignity of labor, and
+the superiority of a life of service to that of an aloof self-sufficing
+independence. Important as these theoretical and emotional changes
+are, their importance consists in their being turned to account in the
+development of a truly democratic society, a society in which all share
+in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure. It is not a mere
+change in the concepts of culture--or a liberal mind--and social service
+which requires an educational reorganization; but the educational
+transformation is needed to give full and explicit effect to the
+changes implied in social life. The increased political and economic
+emancipation of the "masses" has shown itself in education; it has
+effected the development of a common school system of education, public
+and free. It has destroyed the idea that learning is properly a monopoly
+of the few who are predestined by nature to govern social affairs. But
+the revolution is still incomplete. The idea still prevails that a truly
+cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly
+at least, with industrial affairs, and that the education which is fit
+for the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense which
+opposes useful and practical to nurture of appreciation and liberation
+of thought. As a consequence, our actual system is an inconsistent
+mixture. Certain studies and methods are retained on the supposition
+that they have the sanction of peculiar liberality, the chief content
+of the term liberal being uselessness for practical ends. This aspect
+is chiefly visible in what is termed the higher education--that of the
+college and of preparation for it. But it has filtered through into
+elementary education and largely controls its processes and aims. But,
+on the other hand, certain concessions have been made to the masses
+who must engage in getting a livelihood and to the increased role of
+economic activities in modern life. These concessions are exhibited in
+special schools and courses for the professions, for engineering, for
+manual training and commerce, in vocational and prevocational courses;
+and in the spirit in which certain elementary subjects, like the three
+R's, are taught. The result is a system in which both "cultural" and
+"utilitarian" subjects exist in an inorganic composite where the former
+are not by dominant purpose socially serviceable and the latter not
+liberative of imagination or thinking power.
+
+In the inherited situation, there is a curious intermingling, in even
+the same study, of concession to usefulness and a survival of traits
+once exclusively attributed to preparation for leisure. The "utility"
+element is found in the motives assigned for the study, the "liberal"
+element in methods of teaching. The outcome of the mixture is perhaps
+less satisfactory than if either principle were adhered to in its
+purity. The motive popularly assigned for making the studies of the
+first four or five years consist almost entirely of reading, spelling,
+writing, and arithmetic, is, for example, that ability to read, write,
+and figure accurately is indispensable to getting ahead. These studies
+are treated as mere instruments for entering upon a gainful employment
+or of later progress in the pursuit of learning, according as pupils do
+not or do remain in school. This attitude is reflected in the emphasis
+put upon drill and practice for the sake of gaining automatic skill.
+If we turn to Greek schooling, we find that from the earliest years the
+acquisition of skill was subordinated as much as possible to acquisition
+of literary content possessed of aesthetic and moral significance. Not
+getting a tool for subsequent use but present subject matter was the
+emphasized thing. Nevertheless the isolation of these studies from
+practical application, their reduction to purely symbolic devices,
+represents a survival of the idea of a liberal training divorced from
+utility. A thorough adoption of the idea of utility would have led to
+instruction which tied up the studies to situations in which they
+were directly needed and where they were rendered immediately and not
+remotely helpful. It would be hard to find a subject in the curriculum
+within which there are not found evil results of a compromise between
+the two opposed ideals. Natural science is recommended on the ground
+of its practical utility, but is taught as a special accomplishment in
+removal from application. On the other hand, music and literature are
+theoretically justified on the ground of their culture value and are
+then taught with chief emphasis upon forming technical modes of skill.
+
+If we had less compromise and resulting confusion, if we analyzed more
+carefully the respective meanings of culture and utility, we might find
+it easier to construct a course of study which should be useful and
+liberal at the same time. Only superstition makes us believe that the
+two are necessarily hostile so that a subject is illiberal because it
+is useful and cultural because it is useless. It will generally be found
+that instruction which, in aiming at utilitarian results, sacrifices the
+development of imagination, the refining of taste and the deepening of
+intellectual insight--surely cultural values--also in the same degree
+renders what is learned limited in its use. Not that it makes it
+wholly unavailable but that its applicability is restricted to routine
+activities carried on under the supervision of others. Narrow modes of
+skill cannot be made useful beyond themselves; any mode of skill which
+is achieved with deepening of knowledge and perfecting of judgment is
+readily put to use in new situations and is under personal control. It
+was not the bare fact of social and economic utility which made certain
+activities seem servile to the Greeks but the fact that the activities
+directly connected with getting a livelihood were not, in their days,
+the expression of a trained intelligence nor carried on because of a
+personal appreciation of their meaning. So far as farming and the trades
+were rule-of-thumb occupations and so far as they were engaged in for
+results external to the minds of agricultural laborers and mechanics,
+they were illiberal--but only so far. The intellectual and social
+context has now changed. The elements in industry due to mere custom and
+routine have become subordinate in most economic callings to elements
+derived from scientific inquiry. The most important occupations of today
+represent and depend upon applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
+The area of the human world influenced by economic production
+and influencing consumption has been so indefinitely widened that
+geographical and political considerations of an almost infinitely wide
+scope enter in. It was natural for Plato to deprecate the learning of
+geometry and arithmetic for practical ends, because as matter of fact
+the practical uses to which they were put were few, lacking in content
+and mostly mercenary in quality. But as their social uses have increased
+and enlarged, their liberalizing or "intellectual" value and their
+practical value approach the same limit.
+
+Doubtless the factor which chiefly prevents our full recognition and
+employment of this identification is the conditions under which so much
+work is still carried on. The invention of machines has extended the
+amount of leisure which is possible even while one is at work. It is a
+commonplace that the mastery of skill in the form of established habits
+frees the mind for a higher order of thinking. Something of the same
+kind is true of the introduction of mechanically automatic operations in
+industry. They may release the mind for thought upon other topics. But
+when we confine the education of those who work with their hands to a
+few years of schooling devoted for the most part to acquiring the use of
+rudimentary symbols at the expense of training in science, literature,
+and history, we fail to prepare the minds of workers to take advantage
+of this opportunity. More fundamental is the fact that the great
+majority of workers have no insight into the social aims of their
+pursuits and no direct personal interest in them. The results actually
+achieved are not the ends of their actions, but only of their employers.
+They do what they do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of
+the wage earned. It is this fact which makes the action illiberal, and
+which will make any education designed simply to give skill in such
+undertakings illiberal and immoral. The activity is not free because not
+freely participated in.
+
+Nevertheless, there is already an opportunity for an education which,
+keeping in mind the larger features of work, will reconcile liberal
+nurture with training in social serviceableness, with ability to share
+efficiently and happily in occupations which are productive. And such an
+education will of itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing
+economic situation. In the degree in which men have an active concern
+in the ends that control their activity, their activity becomes free or
+voluntary and loses its externally enforced and servile quality, even
+though the physical aspect of behavior remain the same. In what is
+termed politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this
+direct participation in control: in the economic region, control remains
+external and autocratic. Hence the split between inner mental action and
+outer physical action of which the traditional distinction between the
+liberal and the utilitarian is the reflex. An education which should
+unify the disposition of the members of society would do much to unify
+society itself.
+
+Summary. Of the segregations of educational values discussed in the
+last chapter, that between culture and utility is probably the most
+fundamental. While the distinction is often thought to be intrinsic and
+absolute, it is really historical and social. It originated, so far as
+conscious formulation is concerned, in Greece, and was based upon the
+fact that the truly human life was lived only by a few who subsisted
+upon the results of the labor of others. This fact affected the
+psychological doctrine of the relation of intelligence and desire,
+theory and practice. It was embodied in a political theory of a
+permanent division of human beings into those capable of a life of
+reason and hence having their own ends, and those capable only of desire
+and work, and needing to have their ends provided by others. The two
+distinctions, psychological and political, translated into educational
+terms, effected a division between a liberal education, having to do
+with the self-sufficing life of leisure devoted to knowing for its
+own sake, and a useful, practical training for mechanical occupations,
+devoid of intellectual and aesthetic content. While the present
+situation is radically diverse in theory and much changed in fact, the
+factors of the older historic situation still persist sufficiently to
+maintain the educational distinction, along with compromises which
+often reduce the efficacy of the educational measures. The problem of
+education in a democratic society is to do away with the dualism and
+to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of
+free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting
+responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.
+
+1 Aristotle does not hold that the class of actual slaves and of natural
+slaves necessarily coincide.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
+
+1. The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge. As livelihood
+and leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice, intelligence
+and execution, knowledge and activity. The latter set of oppositions
+doubtless springs from the same social conditions which produce the
+former conflict; but certain definite problems of education connected
+with them make it desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the
+relationship and alleged separation of knowing and doing.
+
+The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
+practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has
+a long history. The history so far as conscious statement is concerned
+takes us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated
+by Plato and Aristotle. Much as these thinkers differed in many
+respects, they agreed in identifying experience with purely practical
+concerns; and hence with material interests as to its purpose and with
+the body as to its organ. Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its
+own sake free from practical reference, and found its source and organ
+in a purely immaterial mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal
+interests. Again, experience always involved lack, need, desire; it was
+never self-sufficing. Rational knowing on the other hand, was complete
+and comprehensive within itself. Hence the practical life was in a
+condition of perpetual flux, while intellectual knowledge concerned
+eternal truth.
+
+This sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that Athenian
+philosophy began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of
+knowledge and conduct. In a search for something to replace them, it
+hit upon reason as the only adequate guide of belief and activity. Since
+custom and tradition were identified with experience, it followed at
+once that reason was superior to experience. Moreover, experience, not
+content with its proper position of subordination, was the great foe
+to the acknowledgment of the authority of reason. Since custom and
+traditionary beliefs held men in bondage, the struggle of reason for
+its legitimate supremacy could be won only by showing the inherently
+unstable and inadequate nature of experience. The statement of Plato
+that philosophers should be kings may best be understood as a statement
+that rational intelligence and not habit, appetite, impulse, and emotion
+should regulate human affairs. The former secures unity, order, and law;
+the latter signify multiplicity and discord, irrational fluctuations
+from one estate to another.
+
+The grounds for the identification of experience with the unsatisfactory
+condition of things, the state of affairs represented by rule of mere
+custom, are not far to seek. Increasing trade and travel, colonizations,
+migrations and wars, had broadened the intellectual horizon. The customs
+and beliefs of different communities were found to diverge sharply
+from one another. Civil disturbance had become a custom in Athens;
+the fortunes of the city seemed given over to strife of factions. The
+increase of leisure coinciding with the broadening of the horizon had
+brought into ken many new facts of nature and had stimulated curiosity
+and speculation. The situation tended to raise the question as to the
+existence of anything constant and universal in the realm of nature and
+society. Reason was the faculty by which the universal principle and
+essence is apprehended; while the senses were the organs of perceiving
+change,--the unstable and the diverse as against the permanent and
+uniform. The results of the work of the senses, preserved in memory
+and imagination, and applied in the skill given by habit, constituted
+experience.
+
+Experience at its best is thus represented in the various
+handicrafts--the arts of peace and war. The cobbler, the flute player,
+the soldier, have undergone the discipline of experience to acquire the
+skill they have. This means that the bodily organs, particularly the
+senses, have had repeated contact with things and that the result of
+these contacts has been preserved and consolidated till ability in
+foresight and in practice had been secured. Such was the essential
+meaning of the term "empirical." It suggested a knowledge and an ability
+not based upon insight into principles, but expressing the result of a
+large number of separate trials. It expressed the idea now conveyed by
+"method of trial and error," with especial emphasis upon the more or
+less accidental character of the trials. So far as ability of control,
+of management, was concerned, it amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure,
+to routine. If new circumstances resembled the past, it might work well
+enough; in the degree in which they deviated, failure was likely. Even
+to-day to speak of a physician as an empiricist is to imply that he
+lacks scientific training, and that he is proceeding simply on the basis
+of what he happens to have got out of the chance medley of his past
+practice. Just because of the lack of science or reason in "experience"
+it is hard to keep it at its poor best. The empiric easily degenerates
+into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves
+off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to
+pretend--to make claims for which there is no justification, and
+to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others--to "bluff."
+Moreover, he assumes that because he has learned one thing, he knows
+others--as the history of Athens showed that the common craftsmen
+thought they could manage household affairs, education, and politics,
+because they had learned to do the specific things of their trades.
+Experience is always hovering, then, on the edge of pretense, of sham,
+of seeming, and appearance, in distinction from the reality upon which
+reason lays hold.
+
+The philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this state
+of affairs. The senses are connected with the appetites, with wants and
+desires. They lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation
+which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of
+wants and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the
+life of the body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life.
+Experience thus has a definitely material character; it has to do
+with physical things in relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or
+science, lays hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is
+something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as sensual,
+carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure reason and
+spirit connote something morally praiseworthy. Moreover, ineradicable
+connection with the changing, the inexplicably shifting, and with the
+manifold, the diverse, clings to experience. Its material is inherently
+variable and untrustworthy. It is anarchic, because unstable. The man
+who trusts to experience does not know what he depends upon, since it
+changes from person to person, from day to day, to say nothing of
+from country to country. Its connection with the "many," with various
+particulars, has the same effect, and also carries conflict in its
+train.
+
+Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. Out of
+experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts within
+the individual and between individuals. From experience no standard
+of belief can issue, because it is the very nature of experience to
+instigate all kinds of contrary beliefs, as varieties of local custom
+proved. Its logical outcome is that anything is good and true to the
+particular individual which his experience leads him to believe true and
+good at a particular time and place. Finally practice falls of necessity
+within experience. Doing proceeds from needs and aims at change. To
+produce or to make is to alter something; to consume is to alter. All
+the obnoxious characters of change and diversity thus attach themselves
+to doing while knowing is as permanent as its object. To know, to grasp
+a thing intellectually or theoretically, is to be out of the region of
+vicissitude, chance, and diversity. Truth has no lack; it is untouched
+by the perturbations of the world of sense. It deals with the eternal
+and the universal. And the world of experience can be brought under
+control, can be steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law
+of reason.
+
+It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions persisted
+in full technical definiteness. But they all of them profoundly
+influenced men's subsequent thinking and their ideas about education.
+The contempt for physical as compared with mathematical and logical
+science, for the senses and sense observation; the feeling that
+knowledge is high and worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal
+symbols instead of with the concrete; the scorn of particulars except
+as they are deductively brought under a universal; the disregard for
+the body; the depreciation of arts and crafts as intellectual
+instrumentalities, all sought shelter and found sanction under this
+estimate of the respective values of experience and reason--or, what
+came to the same thing, of the practical and the intellectual. Medieval
+philosophy continued and reinforced the tradition. To know reality
+meant to be in relation to the supreme reality, or God, and to enjoy the
+eternal bliss of that relation. Contemplation of supreme reality was the
+ultimate end of man to which action is subordinate. Experience had to
+do with mundane, profane, and secular affairs, practically necessary
+indeed, but of little import in comparison with supernatural objects
+of knowledge. When we add to this motive the force derived from the
+literary character of the Roman education and the Greek philosophic
+tradition, and conjoin to them the preference for studies which
+obviously demarcated the aristocratic class from the lower classes, we
+can readily understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent
+preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply in
+educational philosophies but in the higher schools. 2. The Modern Theory
+of Experience and Knowledge. As we shall see later, the development of
+experimentation as a method of knowledge makes possible and necessitates
+a radical transformation of the view just set forth. But before
+coming to that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge
+developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, it
+presents us with an almost complete reversal of the classic doctrine
+of the relations of experience and reason. To Plato experience meant
+habituation, or the conservation of the net product of a lot of past
+chance trials. Reason meant the principle of reform, of progress, of
+increase of control. Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking
+through the limitations of custom and getting at things as they really
+were. To the modern reformers, the situation was the other way around.
+Reason, universal principles, a priori notions, meant either blank forms
+which had to be filled in by experience, by sense observations, in
+order to get significance and validity; or else were mere indurated
+prejudices, dogmas imposed by authority, which masqueraded and found
+protection under august names. The great need was to break way from
+captivity to conceptions which, as Bacon put it, "anticipated nature"
+and imposed merely human opinions upon her, and to resort to experience
+to find out what nature was like. Appeal to experience marked the breach
+with authority. It meant openness to new impressions; eagerness
+in discovery and invention instead of absorption in tabulating and
+systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of the
+relations they sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the
+mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over
+them by preconceived ideas.
+
+The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it
+had borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing
+and being done to, and became a name for something intellectual and
+cognitive. It meant the apprehension of material which should ballast
+and check the exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic
+empiricist and by his opponent, experience has been looked upon just as
+a way of knowing. The only question was how good a way it is. The
+result was an even greater "intellectualism" than is found in ancient
+philosophy, if that word be used to designate an emphatic and almost
+exclusive interest in knowledge in its isolation. Practice was not
+so much subordinated to knowledge as treated as a kind of tag-end or
+aftermath of knowledge. The educational result was only to confirm the
+exclusion of active pursuits from the school, save as they might be
+brought in for purely utilitarian ends--the acquisition by drill of
+certain habits. In the second place, the interest in experience as a
+means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the
+mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the more truly
+objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a hand, so
+to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate
+true knowledge--to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a maximum of
+receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by objects were
+generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a doctrine of
+sensationalism--that is to say, a doctrine which identified knowledge
+with the reception and association of sensory impressions. In
+John Locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we find this
+sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties,
+like discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction, and
+generalization which work up the material of sense into definite and
+organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own account,
+such as the fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics. (See
+ante, p. 61.) But some of his successors, especially in France in the
+latter part of the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the
+limit; they regarded discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations
+made in us by the conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held
+that the mind is a blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing
+engraved on it at birth (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of ideas
+were concerned, but had endowed it with activities to be exercised upon
+the material received. His French successors razed away the powers and
+derived them also from impressions received.
+
+As we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new interest
+in education as method of social reform. (See ante, p. 93.) The emptier
+the mind to begin with, the more it may be made anything we wish by
+bringing the right influences to bear upon it. Thus Helvetius, perhaps
+the most extreme and consistent sensationalist, proclaimed that
+education could do anything--that it was omnipotent. Within the sphere
+of school instruction, empiricism found its directly beneficial office
+in protesting against mere book learning. If knowledge comes from the
+impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure
+knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind. Words,
+all kinds of linguistic symbols, in the lack of prior presentations of
+objects with which they may be associated, convey nothing but sensations
+of their own shape and color--certainly not a very instructive kind of
+knowledge. Sensationalism was an extremely handy weapon with which
+to combat doctrines and opinions resting wholly upon tradition and
+authority. With respect to all of them, it set up a test: Where are the
+real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are received? If such
+objects could not be produced, ideas were explained as the result of
+false associations and combinations. Empiricism also insisted upon a
+first-hand element. The impression must be made upon me, upon my
+mind. The further we get away from this direct, first-hand source of
+knowledge, the more numerous the sources of error, and the vaguer the
+resulting idea.
+
+
+As might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the positive
+side. Of course, the value of natural objects and firsthand acquaintance
+was not dependent upon the truth of the theory. Introduced into the
+schools they would do their work, even if the sensational theory about
+the way in which they did it was quite wrong. So far, there is nothing
+to complain of. But the emphasis upon sensationalism also operated to
+influence the way in which natural objects were employed, and to prevent
+full good being got from them. "Object lessons" tended to isolate the
+mere sense-activity and make it an end in itself. The more isolated the
+object, the more isolated the sensory quality, the more distinct the
+sense-impression as a unit of knowledge. The theory worked not only
+in the direction of this mechanical isolation, which tended to reduce
+instruction to a kind of physical gymnastic of the sense-organs (good
+like any gymnastic of bodily organs, but not more so), but also to
+the neglect of thinking. According to the theory there was no need of
+thinking in connection with sense-observation; in fact, in strict
+theory such thinking would be impossible till afterwards, for thinking
+consisted simply in combining and separating sensory units which had
+been received without any participation of judgment.
+
+As a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education
+upon a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least
+after the early years of infancy. Its obvious deficiencies have caused
+it to be resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge
+(that is to say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and
+modes of application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for
+lending greater "interest" to barren symbols. There are at least
+three serious defects of sensationalistic empiricism as an educational
+philosophy of knowledge. (a) the historical value of the theory was
+critical; it was a dissolvent of current beliefs about the world and
+political institutions. It was a destructive organ of criticism of
+hard and fast dogmas. But the work of education is constructive, not
+critical. It assumes not old beliefs to be eliminated and revised, but
+the need of building up new experience into intellectual habitudes as
+correct as possible from the start. Sensationalism is highly unfitted
+for this constructive task. Mind, understanding, denotes responsiveness
+to meanings (ante, p. 29), not response to direct physical stimuli. And
+meaning exists only with reference to a context, which is excluded
+by any scheme which identifies knowledge with a combination of
+sense-impressions. The theory, so far as educationally applied, led
+either to a magnification of mere physical excitations or else to a mere
+heaping up of isolated objects and qualities.
+
+(b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it
+also has the disadvantage of being limited in range. Direct acquaintance
+with the natural surroundings of the home environment so as to give
+reality to ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of the
+senses, and as a means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one
+thing. As an end-all and be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally
+restricted. In precisely analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and
+counters may be helpful aids to a realization of numerical relations,
+but when employed except as aids to thought--the apprehension of
+meaning--they become an obstacle to the growth of arithmetical
+understanding. They arrest growth on a low plane, the plane of specific
+physical symbols. Just as the race developed especial symbols as tools
+of calculation and mathematical reasonings, because the use of the
+fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the individual must
+progress from concrete to abstract symbols--that is, symbols whose
+meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. And undue
+absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers this
+growth. (c) A thoroughly false psychology of mental development
+underlay sensationalistic empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter
+of activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with
+things. What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received
+quality impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of
+handling, throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the
+consequent effect of the object upon the direction of activities. (See
+ante, p. 140.) Fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the
+ancient notion of experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that
+the modern notion of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The
+neglect of the deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a
+fatal defect of the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more
+uninteresting and mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which
+ignores and as far as may be excludes the natural tendency to learn
+about the qualities of objects by the uses to which they are put through
+trying to do something with them.
+
+It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience
+represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical
+assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished
+a satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. Its educational
+influence was confined to injecting a new factor into the older
+curriculum, with incidental modifications of the older studies and
+methods. It introduced greater regard for observation of things directly
+and through pictures and graphic descriptions, and it reduced the
+importance attached to verbal symbolization. But its own scope was
+so meager that it required supplementation by information concerning
+matters outside of sense-perception and by matters which appealed
+more directly to thought. Consequently it left unimpaired the scope of
+informational and abstract, or "rationalistic" studies.
+
+3. Experience as Experimentation. It has already been intimated that
+sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience
+justified by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by
+modern scientific procedure. With respect to the former, it omits the
+primary position of active response which puts things to use and which
+learns about them through discovering the consequences that result from
+use. It would seem as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of
+the way an infant gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the
+notion that he is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated
+ready-made qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it would
+be seen that the infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling,
+reaching, etc., in order to see what results follow upon motor response
+to a sensory stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not
+isolated qualities, but the behavior which may be expected from a thing,
+and the changes in things and persons which an activity may be expected
+to produce. In other words, what he learns are connections. Even such
+qualities as red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated
+and identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
+consequences these activities effect. We learn what things are hard and
+what are soft by finding out through active experimentation what they
+respectively will do and what can be done and what cannot be done with
+them. In like fashion, children learn about persons by finding out what
+responsive activities these persons exact and what these persons will
+do in reply to the children's activities. And the combination of what
+things do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind) in
+modifying our actions, furthering some of them and resisting and
+checking others, and what we can do to them in producing new changes
+constitutes experience. The methods of science by which the revolution
+in our knowledge of the world dating from the seventeenth century, was
+brought about, teach the same lesson. For these methods are nothing but
+experimentation carried out under conditions of deliberate control. To
+the Greek, it seemed absurd that such an activity as, say, the cobbler
+punching holes in leather, or using wax and needle and thread, could
+give an adequate knowledge of the world. It seemed almost axiomatic
+that for true knowledge we must have recourse to concepts coming from a
+reason above experience. But the introduction of the experimental method
+signified precisely that such operations, carried on under conditions
+of control, are just the ways in which fruitful ideas about nature are
+obtained and tested. In other words, it is only needed to conduct such
+an operation as the pouring of an acid on a metal for the purpose of
+getting knowledge instead of for the purpose of getting a trade result,
+in order to lay hold of the principle upon which the science of nature
+was henceforth to depend. Sense perceptions were indeed indispensable,
+but there was less reliance upon sense perceptions in their natural or
+customary form than in the older science. They were no longer regarded
+as containing within themselves some "form" or "species" of universal
+kind in a disguised mask of sense which could be stripped off by
+rational thought. On the contrary, the first thing was to alter and
+extend the data of sense perception: to act upon the given objects of
+sense by the lens of the telescope and microscope, and by all sorts of
+experimental devices. To accomplish this in a way which would arouse
+new ideas (hypotheses, theories) required even more general ideas (like
+those of mathematics) than were at the command of ancient science. But
+these general conceptions were no longer taken to give knowledge
+in themselves. They were implements for instituting, conducting,
+interpreting experimental inquiries and formulating their results.
+
+The logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and knowledge,
+a philosophy which no longer puts experience in opposition to rational
+knowledge and explanation. Experience is no longer a mere summarizing
+of what has been done in a more or less chance way in the past; it is a
+deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens
+to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions
+(of suggested meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the
+suggestions. When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by
+impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure
+and method, it becomes reasonable--rational. When what we suffer from
+things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance
+circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior
+purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant--enlightening
+and instructive. The antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses the
+support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and relative
+justification.
+
+The bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely practical and
+purely intellectual studies is self-evident. The distinction is not
+intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions, and upon conditions which
+can be regulated. Practical activities may be intellectually narrow and
+trivial; they will be so in so far as they are routine, carried on
+under the dictates of authority, and having in view merely some external
+result. But childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just the
+time when it is possible to carry them on in a different spirit. It
+is inexpedient to repeat the discussions of our previous chapters on
+thinking and on the evolution of educative subject matter from childlike
+work and play to logically organized subject matter. The discussions of
+this chapter and the prior one should, however, give an added meaning to
+those results.
+
+(i) Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations
+subsisting between a human being and his natural and social
+surroundings. In some cases, the initiative in activity is on the
+side of the environment; the human being undergoes or suffers certain
+checkings and deflections of endeavors. In other cases, the behavior of
+surrounding things and persons carries to a successful issue the active
+tendencies of the individual, so that in the end what the individual
+undergoes are consequences which he has himself tried to produce.
+In just the degree in which connections are established between what
+happens to a person and what he does in response, and between what he
+does to his environment and what it does in response to him, his acts
+and the things about him acquire meaning. He learns to understand
+both himself and the world of men and things. Purposive education or
+schooling should present such an environment that this interaction will
+effect acquisition of those meanings which are so important that they
+become, in turn, instruments of further learnings. (ante, Ch. XI.) As
+has been repeatedly pointed out, activity out of school is carried on
+under conditions which have not been deliberately adapted to promoting
+the function of understanding and formation of effective intellectual
+dispositions. The results are vital and genuine as far as they go, but
+they are limited by all kinds of circumstances. Some powers are left
+quite undeveloped and undirected; others get only occasional and
+whimsical stimulations; others are formed into habits of a routine skill
+at the expense of aims and resourceful initiative and inventiveness. It
+is not the business of the school to transport youth from an environment
+of activity into one of cramped study of the records of other men's
+learning; but to transport them from an environment of relatively chance
+activities (accidental in the relation they bear to insight and thought)
+into one of activities selected with reference to guidance of learning.
+A slight inspection of the improved methods which have already shown
+themselves effective in education will reveal that they have laid hold,
+more or less consciously, upon the fact that "intellectual"
+studies instead of being opposed to active pursuits represent an
+intellectualizing of practical pursuits. It remains to grasp the
+principle with greater firmness.
+
+(ii) The changes which are taking place in the content of social life
+tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which will
+intellectualize the play and work of the school. When one bears in mind
+the social environment of the Greeks and the people of the Middle Ages,
+where such practical activities as could be successfully carried on were
+mostly of a routine and external sort and even servile in nature, one is
+not surprised that educators turned their backs upon them as unfitted
+to cultivate intelligence. But now that even the occupations of the
+household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as transportation
+and intercourse are instinct with applied science, the case stands
+otherwise. It is true that many of those who now engage in them are
+not aware of the intellectual content upon which their personal actions
+depend. But this fact only gives an added reason why schooling should
+use these pursuits so as to enable the coming generation to acquire
+a comprehension now too generally lacking, and thus enable persons to
+carry on their pursuits intelligently instead of blindly. (iii) The most
+direct blow at the traditional separation of doing and knowing and at
+the traditional prestige of purely "intellectual" studies, however, has
+been given by the progress of experimental science. If this progress
+has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no such thing as genuine
+knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing.
+The analysis and rearrangement of facts which is indispensable to the
+growth of knowledge and power of explanation and right classification
+cannot be attained purely mentally--just inside the head. Men have to do
+something to the things when they wish to find out something; they have
+to alter conditions. This is the lesson of the laboratory method,
+and the lesson which all education has to learn. The laboratory is a
+discovery of the condition under which labor may become intellectually
+fruitful and not merely externally productive. If, in too many cases
+at present, it results only in the acquisition of an additional mode
+of technical skill, that is because it still remains too largely but an
+isolated resource, not resorted to until pupils are mostly too old
+to get the full advantage of it, and even then is surrounded by other
+studies where traditional methods isolate intellect from activity.
+
+Summary. The Greeks were induced to philosophize by the increasing
+failure of their traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. Thus
+they were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other
+source of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational
+standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs
+which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat
+opposition of reason and experience. The more the former was exalted,
+the more the latter was depreciated. Since experience was identified
+with what men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of
+life, doing shared in the philosophic depreciation. This influence fell
+in with many others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods
+and topics which involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily
+activity. The modern age began with a revolt against this point of
+view, with an appeal to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely
+rational concepts on the ground that they either needed to be ballasted
+by the results of concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions
+of prejudice and institutionalized class interest, calling themselves
+rational for protection. But various circumstances led to considering
+experience as pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic
+active and emotional phases, and to identifying it with a passive
+reception of isolated "sensations." Hence the education reform effected
+by the new theory was confined mainly to doing away with some of
+the bookishness of prior methods; it did not accomplish a consistent
+reorganization.
+
+Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the
+experimental method in science makes another conception of experience
+explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of
+the ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive--a
+matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. But the
+ancient theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so
+as to take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as
+to result in securely tested knowledge. "Experience" then ceases to be
+empirical and becomes experimental. Reason ceases to be a remote and
+ideal faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made
+fruitful in meaning. Educationally, this change denotes such a plan
+for the studies and method of instruction as has been developed in the
+previous chapters.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and Humanism
+
+ALLUSION has already been made to the conflict of natural science with
+literary studies for a place in the curriculum. The solution thus far
+reached consists essentially in a somewhat mechanical compromise whereby
+the field is divided between studies having nature and studies having
+man as their theme. The situation thus presents us with another instance
+of the external adjustment of educational values, and focuses attention
+upon the philosophy of the connection of nature with human affairs. In
+general, it may be said that the educational division finds a reflection
+in the dualistic philosophies. Mind and the world are regarded as two
+independent realms of existence having certain points of contact with
+each other. From this point of view it is natural that each sphere of
+existence should have its own separate group of studies connected with
+it; it is even natural that the growth of scientific studies should be
+viewed with suspicion as marking a tendency of materialistic philosophy
+to encroach upon the domain of spirit. Any theory of education which
+contemplates a more unified scheme of education than now exists is under
+the necessity of facing the question of the relation of man to nature.
+
+1. The Historic Background of Humanistic Study. It is noteworthy that
+classic Greek philosophy does not present the problem in its modern
+form. Socrates indeed appears to have thought that science of nature was
+not attainable and not very important. The chief thing to know is the
+nature and end of man. Upon that knowledge hangs all that is of deep
+significance--all moral and social achievement. Plato, however,
+makes right knowledge of man and society depend upon knowledge of the
+essential features of nature. His chief treatise, entitled the Republic,
+is at once a treatise on morals, on social organization, and on the
+metaphysics and science of nature. Since he accepts the Socratic
+doctrine that right achievement in the former depends upon rational
+knowledge, he is compelled to discuss the nature of knowledge. Since he
+accepts the idea that the ultimate object of knowledge is the discovery
+of the good or end of man, and is discontented with the Socratic
+conviction that all we know is our own ignorance, he connects the
+discussion of the good of man with consideration of the essential good
+or end of nature itself. To attempt to determine the end of man apart
+from a knowledge of the ruling end which gives law and unity to nature
+is impossible. It is thus quite consistent with his philosophy that he
+subordinates literary studies (under the name of music) to mathematics
+and to physics as well as to logic and metaphysics. But on the other
+hand, knowledge of nature is not an end in itself; it is a necessary
+stage in bringing the mind to a realization of the supreme purpose of
+existence as the law of human action, corporate and individual. To use
+the modern phraseology, naturalistic studies are indispensable, but they
+are in the interests of humanistic and ideal ends.
+
+Aristotle goes even farther, if anything, in the direction of
+naturalistic studies. He subordinates (ante, p. 254) civic relations
+to the purely cognitive life. The highest end of man is not human but
+divine--participation in pure knowing which constitutes the divine life.
+Such knowing deals with what is universal and necessary, and finds,
+therefore, a more adequate subject matter in nature at its best than in
+the transient things of man. If we take what the philosophers stood
+for in Greek life, rather than the details of what they say, we might
+summarize by saying that the Greeks were too much interested in free
+inquiry into natural fact and in the aesthetic enjoyment of nature, and
+were too deeply conscious of the extent in which society is rooted in
+nature and subject to its laws, to think of bringing man and nature
+into conflict. Two factors conspire in the later period of ancient
+life, however, to exalt literary and humanistic studies. One is the
+increasingly reminiscent and borrowed character of culture; the other is
+the political and rhetorical bent of Roman life.
+
+Greek achievement in civilization was native; the civilization of the
+Alexandrians and Romans was inherited from alien sources. Consequently
+it looked back to the records upon which it drew, instead of looking
+out directly upon nature and society, for material and inspiration.
+We cannot do better than quote the words of Hatch to indicate the
+consequences for educational theory and practice. "Greece on one hand
+had lost political power, and on the other possessed in her splendid
+literature an inalienable heritage. It was natural that she should turn
+to letters. It was natural also that the study of letters should be
+reflected upon speech. The mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay
+stress on that acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations,
+and that habit of cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly
+spoken of as education. Our own comes by direct tradition from it. It
+set a fashion which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the
+entire civilized world. We study literature rather than nature because
+the Greeks did so, and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials
+resolved to educate their sons, they employed Greek teachers and
+followed in Greek paths." 1
+
+The so-called practical bent of the Romans worked in the same direction.
+In falling back upon the recorded ideas of the Greeks, they not only
+took the short path to attaining a cultural development, but they
+procured just the kind of material and method suited to their
+administrative talents. For their practical genius was not directed to
+the conquest and control of nature but to the conquest and control of
+men.
+
+Mr. Hatch, in the passage quoted, takes a good deal of history for
+granted in saying that we have studied literature rather than nature
+because the Greeks, and the Romans whom they taught, did so. What is the
+link that spans the intervening centuries? The question suggests that
+barbarian Europe but repeated on a larger scale and with increased
+intensity the Roman situation. It had to go to school to Greco-Roman
+civilization; it also borrowed rather than evolved its culture. Not
+merely for its general ideas and their artistic presentation but for
+its models of law it went to the records of alien peoples. And its
+dependence upon tradition was increased by the dominant theological
+interests of the period. For the authorities to which the Church
+appealed were literatures composed in foreign tongues. Everything
+converged to identify learning with linguistic training and to make
+the language of the learned a literary language instead of the mother
+speech.
+
+The full scope of this fact escapes us, moreover, until we recognize
+that this subject matter compelled recourse to a dialectical method.
+Scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of
+learning as a term of reproach. But all that it means is the method of
+The Schools, or of the School Men. In its essence, it is nothing but a
+highly effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning
+which are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths.
+Where literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes
+material of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and
+interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery,
+and invention. And at bottom what is called Scholasticism is the
+whole-hearted and consistent formulation and application of the methods
+which are suited to instruction when the material of instruction is
+taken ready-made, rather than as something which students are to find
+out for themselves. So far as schools still teach from textbooks and
+rely upon the principle of authority and acquisition rather than upon
+that of discovery and inquiry, their methods are Scholastic--minus the
+logical accuracy and system of Scholasticism at its best. Aside from
+laxity of method and statement, the only difference is that geographies
+and histories and botanies and astronomies are now part of the
+authoritative literature which is to be mastered.
+
+As a consequence, the Greek tradition was lost in which a humanistic
+interest was used as a basis of interest in nature, and a knowledge of
+nature used to support the distinctively human aims of man. Life found
+its support in authority, not in nature. The latter was moreover an
+object of considerable suspicion. Contemplation of it was dangerous, for
+it tended to draw man away from reliance upon the documents in which the
+rules of living were already contained. Moreover nature could be known
+only through observation; it appealed to the senses--which were merely
+material as opposed to a purely immaterial mind. Furthermore, the
+utilities of a knowledge of nature were purely physical and secular;
+they connected with the bodily and temporal welfare of man, while the
+literary tradition concerned his spiritual and eternal well-being.
+
+2. The Modern Scientific Interest in Nature. The movement of the
+fifteenth century which is variously termed the revival of learning
+and the renascence was characterized by a new interest in man's present
+life, and accordingly by a new interest in his relationships with
+nature. It was naturalistic, in the sense that it turned against the
+dominant supernaturalistic interest. It is possible that the influence
+of a return to classic Greek pagan literature in bringing about this
+changed mind has been overestimated. Undoubtedly the change was mainly
+a product of contemporary conditions. But there can be no doubt that
+educated men, filled with the new point of view, turned eagerly to
+Greek literature for congenial sustenance and reinforcement. And to
+a considerable extent, this interest in Greek thought was not in
+literature for its own sake, but in the spirit it expressed. The mental
+freedom, the sense of the order and beauty of nature, which animated
+Greek expression, aroused men to think and observe in a similar
+untrammeled fashion. The history of science in the sixteenth century
+shows that the dawning sciences of physical nature largely borrowed
+their points of departure from the new interest in Greek literature.
+As Windelband has said, the new science of nature was the daughter of
+humanism. The favorite notion of the time was that man was in microcosm
+that which the universe was in macrocosm.
+
+This fact raises anew the question of how it was that nature and man
+were later separated and a sharp division made between language and
+literature and the physical sciences. Four reasons may be suggested. (a)
+The old tradition was firmly entrenched in institutions. Politics,
+law, and diplomacy remained of necessity branches of authoritative
+literature, for the social sciences did not develop until the methods of
+the sciences of physics and chemistry, to say nothing of biology, were
+much further advanced. The same is largely true of history. Moreover,
+the methods used for effective teaching of the languages were well
+developed; the inertia of academic custom was on their side. Just as the
+new interest in literature, especially Greek, had not been allowed at
+first to find lodgment in the scholastically organized universities, so
+when it found its way into them it joined hands with the older learning
+to minimize the influence of experimental science. The men who taught
+were rarely trained in science; the men who were scientifically
+competent worked in private laboratories and through the medium of
+academies which promoted research, but which were not organized as
+teaching bodies. Finally, the aristocratic tradition which looked down
+upon material things and upon the senses and the hands was still mighty.
+
+(b) The Protestant revolt brought with it an immense increase of
+interest in theological discussion and controversies. The appeal on both
+sides was to literary documents. Each side had to train men in ability
+to study and expound the records which were relied upon. The demand for
+training men who could defend the chosen faith against the other side,
+who were able to propagandize and to prevent the encroachments of the
+other side, was such that it is not too much to say that by the middle
+of the seventeenth century the linguistic training of gymnasia and
+universities had been captured by the revived theological interest, and
+used as a tool of religious education and ecclesiastical controversy.
+Thus the educational descent of the languages as they are found in
+education to-day is not direct from the revival of learning, but from
+its adaptation to theological ends.
+
+(c) The natural sciences were themselves conceived in a way which
+sharpened the opposition of man and nature. Francis Bacon presents
+an almost perfect example of the union of naturalistic and
+humanistic interest. Science, adopting the methods of observation and
+experimentation, was to give up the attempt to "anticipate" nature--to
+impose preconceived notions upon her--and was to become her humble
+interpreter. In obeying nature intellectually, man would learn to
+command her practically. "Knowledge is power." This aphorism meant that
+through science man is to control nature and turn her energies to the
+execution of his own ends. Bacon attacked the old learning and logic as
+purely controversial, having to do with victory in argument, not with
+discovery of the unknown. Through the new method of thought which
+was set forth in his new logic an era of expansive discoveries was to
+emerge, and these discoveries were to bear fruit in inventions for the
+service of man. Men were to give up their futile, never-finished effort
+to dominate one another to engage in the cooperative task of dominating
+nature in the interests of humanity.
+
+In the main, Bacon prophesied the direction of subsequent progress. But
+he "anticipated" the advance. He did not see that the new science
+was for a long time to be worked in the interest of old ends of human
+exploitation. He thought that it would rapidly give man new ends.
+Instead, it put at the disposal of a class the means to secure their old
+ends of aggrandizement at the expense of another class. The industrial
+revolution followed, as he foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific
+method. But it is taking the revolution many centuries to produce a new
+mind. Feudalism was doomed by the applications of the new science, for
+they transferred power from the landed nobility to the manufacturing
+centers. But capitalism rather than a social humanism took its place.
+Production and commerce were carried on as if the new science had no
+moral lesson, but only technical lessons as to economies in production
+and utilization of saving in self-interest. Naturally, this application
+of physical science (which was the most conspicuously perceptible
+one) strengthened the claims of professed humanists that science
+was materialistic in its tendencies. It left a void as to man's
+distinctively human interests which go beyond making, saving, and
+expending money; and languages and literature put in their claim to
+represent the moral and ideal interests of humanity.
+
+(d) Moreover, the philosophy which professed itself based upon science,
+which gave itself out as the accredited representative of the net
+significance of science, was either dualistic in character, marked by
+a sharp division between mind (characterizing man) and matter,
+constituting nature; or else it was openly mechanical, reducing the
+signal features of human life to illusion. In the former case, it
+allowed the claims of certain studies to be peculiar consignees of
+mental values, and indirectly strengthened their claim to superiority,
+since human beings would incline to regard human affairs as of chief
+importance at least to themselves. In the latter case, it called out
+a reaction which threw doubt and suspicion upon the value of physical
+science, giving occasion for treating it as an enemy to man's higher
+interests.
+
+Greek and medieval knowledge accepted the world in its qualitative
+variety, and regarded nature's processes as having ends, or in technical
+phrase as teleological. New science was expounded so as to deny the
+reality of all qualities in real, or objective, existence. Sounds,
+colors, ends, as well as goods and bads, were regarded as purely
+subjective--as mere impressions in the mind. Objective existence was
+then treated as having only quantitative aspects--as so much mass in
+motion, its only differences being that at one point in space there was
+a larger aggregate mass than at another, and that in some spots there
+were greater rates of motion than at others. Lacking qualitative
+distinctions, nature lacked significant variety. Uniformities were
+emphasized, not diversities; the ideal was supposed to be the discovery
+of a single mathematical formula applying to the whole universe at once
+from which all the seeming variety of phenomena could be derived. This
+is what a mechanical philosophy means.
+
+Such a philosophy does not represent the genuine purport of science.
+It takes the technique for the thing itself; the apparatus and the
+terminology for reality, the method for its subject matter. Science
+does confine its statements to conditions which enable us to predict and
+control the happening of events, ignoring the qualities of the events.
+Hence its mechanical and quantitative character. But in leaving them out
+of account, it does not exclude them from reality, nor relegate them
+to a purely mental region; it only furnishes means utilizable for ends.
+Thus while in fact the progress of science was increasing man's power
+over nature, enabling him to place his cherished ends on a firmer basis
+than ever before, and also to diversify his activities almost at will,
+the philosophy which professed to formulate its accomplishments reduced
+the world to a barren and monotonous redistribution of matter in space.
+Thus the immediate effect of modern science was to accentuate the
+dualism of matter and mind, and thereby to establish the physical and
+the humanistic studies as two disconnected groups. Since the difference
+between better and worse is bound up with the qualities of experience,
+any philosophy of science which excludes them from the genuine content
+of reality is bound to leave out what is most interesting and most
+important to mankind.
+
+3. The Present Educational Problem. In truth, experience knows no
+division between human concerns and a purely mechanical physical world.
+Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution
+upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become
+empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy. From the standpoint of human
+experience, and hence of educational endeavor, any distinction which
+can be justly made between nature and man is a distinction between the
+conditions which have to be reckoned with in the formation and execution
+of our practical aims, and the aims themselves. This philosophy is
+vouched for by the doctrine of biological development which shows that
+man is continuous with nature, not an alien entering her processes from
+without. It is reinforced by the experimental method of science which
+shows that knowledge accrues in virtue of an attempt to direct physical
+energies in accord with ideas suggested in dealing with natural objects
+in behalf of social uses. Every step forward in the social sciences--the
+studies termed history, economics, politics, sociology--shows that
+social questions are capable of being intelligently coped with only
+in the degree in which we employ the method of collected data, forming
+hypotheses, and testing them in action which is characteristic of
+natural science, and in the degree in which we utilize in behalf of
+the promotion of social welfare the technical knowledge ascertained by
+physics and chemistry. Advanced methods of dealing with such perplexing
+problems as insanity, intemperance, poverty, public sanitation, city
+planning, the conservation of natural resources, the constructive use of
+governmental agencies for furthering the public good without weakening
+personal initiative, all illustrate the direct dependence of our
+important social concerns upon the methods and results of natural
+science.
+
+With respect then to both humanistic and naturalistic studies, education
+should take its departure from this close interdependence. It should aim
+not at keeping science as a study of nature apart from literature as
+a record of human interests, but at cross-fertilizing both the natural
+sciences and the various human disciplines such as history, literature,
+economics, and politics. Pedagogically, the problem is simpler than the
+attempt to teach the sciences as mere technical bodies of information
+and technical forms of physical manipulation, on one side; and to teach
+humanistic studies as isolated subjects, on the other. For the latter
+procedure institutes an artificial separation in the pupils' experience.
+Outside of school pupils meet with natural facts and principles in
+connection with various modes of human action. (See ante, p. 30.) In
+all the social activities in which they have shared they have had to
+understand the material and processes involved. To start them in school
+with a rupture of this intimate association breaks the continuity of
+mental development, makes the student feel an indescribable unreality in
+his studies, and deprives him of the normal motive for interest in them.
+
+There is no doubt, of course, that the opportunities of education
+should be such that all should have a chance who have the disposition to
+advance to specialized ability in science, and thus devote themselves to
+its pursuit as their particular occupation in life. But at present, the
+pupil too often has a choice only between beginning with a study of the
+results of prior specialization where the material is isolated from his
+daily experiences, or with miscellaneous nature study, where material
+is presented at haphazard and does not lead anywhere in particular. The
+habit of introducing college pupils into segregated scientific subject
+matter, such as is appropriate to the man who wishes to become an expert
+in a given field, is carried back into the high schools. Pupils in the
+latter simply get a more elementary treatment of the same thing, with
+difficulties smoothed over and topics reduced to the level of their
+supposed ability. The cause of this procedure lies in following
+tradition, rather than in conscious adherence to a dualistic philosophy.
+But the effect is the same as if the purpose were to inculcate an idea
+that the sciences which deal with nature have nothing to do with man,
+and vice versa. A large part of the comparative ineffectiveness of
+the teaching of the sciences, for those who never become scientific
+specialists, is the result of a separation which is unavoidable when one
+begins with technically organized subject matter. Even if all students
+were embryonic scientific specialists, it is questionable whether this
+is the most effective procedure. Considering that the great majority
+are concerned with the study of sciences only for its effect upon
+their mental habits--in making them more alert, more open-minded, more
+inclined to tentative acceptance and to testing of ideas propounded
+or suggested,--and for achieving a better understanding of their daily
+environment, it is certainly ill-advised. Too often the pupil comes
+out with a smattering which is too superficial to be scientific and too
+technical to be applicable to ordinary affairs.
+
+The utilization of ordinary experience to secure an advance into
+scientific material and method, while keeping the latter connected with
+familiar human interests, is easier to-day than it ever was before.
+The usual experience of all persons in civilized communities to-day is
+intimately associated with industrial processes and results. These in
+turn are so many cases of science in action. The stationary and traction
+steam engine, gasoline engine, automobile, telegraph and telephone, the
+electric motor enter directly into the lives of most individuals. Pupils
+at an early age are practically acquainted with these things. Not only
+does the business occupation of their parents depend upon scientific
+applications, but household pursuits, the maintenance of health,
+the sights seen upon the streets, embody scientific achievements and
+stimulate interest in the connected scientific principles. The obvious
+pedagogical starting point of scientific instruction is not to teach
+things labeled science, but to utilize the familiar occupations and
+appliances to direct observation and experiment, until pupils have
+arrived at a knowledge of some fundamental principles by understanding
+them in their familiar practical workings.
+
+The opinion sometimes advanced that it is a derogation from the
+"purity" of science to study it in its active incarnation, instead of
+in theoretical abstraction, rests upon a misunderstanding. AS matter of
+fact, any subject is cultural in the degree in which it is apprehended
+in its widest possible range of meanings. Perception of meanings depends
+upon perception of connections, of context. To see a scientific fact or
+law in its human as well as in its physical and technical context is
+to enlarge its significance and give it increased cultural value. Its
+direct economic application, if by economic is meant something having
+money worth, is incidental and secondary, but a part of its actual
+connections. The important thing is that the fact be grasped in its
+social connections--its function in life.
+
+On the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with an
+intelligent sense of human interests. The social interest, identical in
+its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is necessarily supreme with
+man. Knowledge about man, information as to his past, familiarity with
+his documented records of literature, may be as technical a possession
+as the accumulation of physical details. Men may keep busy in a variety
+of ways, making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or
+in amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the chronology
+of literary productions. Unless such activity reacts to enlarge the
+imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with the busy work of
+children. It has the letter without the spirit of activity. It readily
+degenerates itself into a miser's accumulation, and a man prides himself
+on what he has, and not on the meaning he finds in the affairs of life.
+Any study so pursued that it increases concern for the values of life,
+any study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and
+greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study. The
+humanistic spirit of the Greeks was native and intense but it was narrow
+in scope. Everybody outside the Hellenic circle was a barbarian,
+and negligible save as a possible enemy. Acute as were the social
+observations and speculations of Greek thinkers, there is not a word in
+their writings to indicate that Greek civilization was not self-inclosed
+and self-sufficient. There was, apparently, no suspicion that its future
+was at the mercy of the despised outsider. Within the Greek community,
+the intense social spirit was limited by the fact that higher culture
+was based on a substratum of slavery and economic serfdom--classes
+necessary to the existence of the state, as Aristotle declared, and
+yet not genuine parts of it. The development of science has produced an
+industrial revolution which has brought different peoples in such close
+contact with one another through colonization and commerce that no
+matter how some nations may still look down upon others, no country can
+harbor the illusion that its career is decided wholly within itself. The
+same revolution has abolished agricultural serfdom, and created a class
+of more or less organized factory laborers with recognized political
+rights, and who make claims for a responsible role in the control of
+industry--claims which receive sympathetic attention from many among the
+well-to-do, since they have been brought into closer connections with
+the less fortunate classes through the breaking down of class barriers.
+
+This state of affairs may be formulated by saying that the older
+humanism omitted economic and industrial conditions from its purview.
+Consequently, it was one sided. Culture, under such circumstances,
+inevitably represented the intellectual and moral outlook of the class
+which was in direct social control. Such a tradition as to culture is,
+as we have seen (ante, p. 260), aristocratic; it emphasizes what marks
+off one class from another, rather than fundamental common interests.
+Its standards are in the past; for the aim is to preserve what has been
+gained rather than widely to extend the range of culture.
+
+The modifications which spring from taking greater account of industry
+and of whatever has to do with making a living are frequently condemned
+as attacks upon the culture derived from the past. But a wider
+educational outlook would conceive industrial activities as agencies for
+making intellectual resources more accessible to the masses, and giving
+greater solidity to the culture of those having superior resources.
+In short, when we consider the close connection between science and
+industrial development on the one hand, and between literary and
+aesthetic cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the
+other, we get light on the opposition between technical scientific
+studies and refining literary studies. We have before us the need
+of overcoming this separation in education if society is to be truly
+democratic.
+
+Summary. The philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected in
+the division of studies between the naturalistic and the humanistic with
+a tendency to reduce the latter to the literary records of the past.
+This dualism is not characteristic (as were the others which we have
+noted) of Greek thought. It arose partly because of the fact that the
+culture of Rome and of barbarian Europe was not a native product,
+being borrowed directly or indirectly from Greece, and partly because
+political and ecclesiastic conditions emphasized dependence upon
+the authority of past knowledge as that was transmitted in literary
+documents.
+
+At the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a restoration of
+the intimate connection of nature and humanity, for it viewed knowledge
+of nature as the means of securing human progress and well-being. But
+the more immediate applications of science were in the interests of
+a class rather than of men in common; and the received philosophic
+formulations of scientific doctrine tended either to mark it off as
+merely material from man as spiritual and immaterial, or else to reduce
+mind to a subjective illusion. In education, accordingly, the tendency
+was to treat the sciences as a separate body of studies, consisting of
+technical information regarding the physical world, and to reserve
+the older literary studies as distinctively humanistic. The account
+previously given of the evolution of knowledge, and of the educational
+scheme of studies based upon it, are designed to overcome the
+separation, and to secure recognition of the place occupied by the
+subject matter of the natural sciences in human affairs.
+
+1 The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church. pp.
+43-44.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
+
+1. Mind as Purely Individual. We have been concerned with the influences
+which have effected a division between work and leisure, knowing and
+doing, man and nature. These influences have resulted in splitting up
+the subject matter of education into separate studies. They have also
+found formulation in various philosophies which have opposed to each
+other body and mind, theoretical knowledge and practice, physical
+mechanism and ideal purpose. Upon the philosophical side, these various
+dualisms culminate in a sharp demarcation of individual minds from
+the world, and hence from one another. While the connection of this
+philosophical position with educational procedure is not so obvious as
+is that of the points considered in the last three chapters, there are
+certain educational considerations which correspond to it; such as the
+antithesis supposed to exist between subject matter (the counterpart of
+the world) and method (the counterpart of mind); such as the tendency to
+treat interest as something purely private, without intrinsic connection
+with the material studied. Aside from incidental educational bearings,
+it will be shown in this chapter that the dualistic philosophy of
+mind and the world implies an erroneous conception of the relationship
+between knowledge and social interests, and between individuality or
+freedom, and social control and authority. The identification of the
+mind with the individual self and of the latter with a private psychic
+consciousness is comparatively modern. In both the Greek and medieval
+periods, the rule was to regard the individual as a channel through
+which a universal and divine intelligence operated. The individual was
+in no true sense the knower; the knower was the "Reason" which operated
+through him. The individual interfered at his peril, and only to the
+detriment of the truth. In the degree in which the individual rather
+than reason "knew," conceit, error, and opinion were substituted for
+true knowledge. In Greek life, observation was acute and alert; and
+thinking was free almost to the point of irresponsible speculations.
+Accordingly the consequences of the theory were only such as were
+consequent upon the lack of an experimental method. Without such a
+method individuals could not engage in knowing, and be checked up by the
+results of the inquiries of others. Without such liability to test
+by others, the minds of men could not be intellectually responsible;
+results were to be accepted because of their aesthetic consistency,
+agreeable quality, or the prestige of their authors. In the barbarian
+period, individuals were in a still more humble attitude to truth;
+important knowledge was supposed to be divinely revealed, and nothing
+remained for the minds of individuals except to work it over after
+it had been received on authority. Aside from the more consciously
+philosophic aspects of these movements, it never occurs to any one to
+identify mind and the personal self wherever beliefs are transmitted by
+custom.
+
+In the medieval period there was a religious individualism. The deepest
+concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul. In the later
+Middle Ages, this latent individualism found conscious formulation in
+the nominalistic philosophies, which treated the structure of knowledge
+as something built up within the individual through his own acts, and
+mental states. With the rise of economic and political individualism
+after the sixteenth century, and with the development of Protestantism,
+the times were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the
+individual in achieving knowledge for himself. This led to the view that
+knowledge is won wholly through personal and private experiences. As a
+consequence, mind, the source and possessor of knowledge, was thought
+of as wholly individual. Thus upon the educational side, we find
+educational reformers, like Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, henceforth
+vehemently denouncing all learning which is acquired on hearsay, and
+asserting that even if beliefs happen to be true, they do not constitute
+knowledge unless they have grown up in and been tested by personal
+experience. The reaction against authority in all spheres of life, and
+the intensity of the struggle, against great odds, for freedom of action
+and inquiry, led to such an emphasis upon personal observations and
+ideas as in effect to isolate mind, and set it apart from the world to
+be known.
+
+This isolation is reflected in the great development of that branch
+of philosophy known as epistemology--the theory of knowledge. The
+identification of mind with the self, and the setting up of the self as
+something independent and self-sufficient, created such a gulf between
+the knowing mind and the world that it became a question how knowledge
+was possible at all. Given a subject--the knower--and an object--the
+thing to be known--wholly separate from one another, it is necessary to
+frame a theory to explain how they get into connection with each other
+so that valid knowledge may result. This problem, with the allied one
+of the possibility of the world acting upon the mind and the mind acting
+upon the world, became almost the exclusive preoccupation of philosophic
+thought.
+
+The theories that we cannot know the world as it really is but only the
+impressions made upon the mind, or that there is no world beyond the
+individual mind, or that knowledge is only a certain association of
+the mind's own states, were products of this preoccupation. We are not
+directly concerned with their truth; but the fact that such desperate
+solutions were widely accepted is evidence of the extent to which mind
+had been set over the world of realities. The increasing use of the term
+"consciousness" as an equivalent for mind, in the supposition that there
+is an inner world of conscious states and processes, independent of
+any relationship to nature and society, an inner world more truly and
+immediately known than anything else, is evidence of the same fact.
+In short, practical individualism, or struggle for greater freedom of
+thought in action, was translated into philosophic subjectivism.
+
+2. Individual Mind as the Agent of Reorganization. It should be obvious
+that this philosophic movement misconceived the significance of
+the practical movement. Instead of being its transcript, it was a
+perversion. Men were not actually engaged in the absurdity of striving
+to be free from connection with nature and one another. They were
+striving for greater freedom in nature and society. They wanted greater
+power to initiate changes in the world of things and fellow beings;
+greater scope of movement and consequently greater freedom in
+observations and ideas implied in movement. They wanted not isolation
+from the world, but a more intimate connection with it. They wanted to
+form their beliefs about it at first hand, instead of through tradition.
+They wanted closer union with their fellows so that they might influence
+one another more effectively and might combine their respective actions
+for mutual aims.
+
+So far as their beliefs were concerned, they felt that a great deal
+which passed for knowledge was merely the accumulated opinions of the
+past, much of it absurd and its correct portions not understood when
+accepted on authority. Men must observe for themselves, and form their
+own theories and personally test them. Such a method was the only
+alternative to the imposition of dogma as truth, a procedure which
+reduced mind to the formal act of acquiescing in truth. Such is the
+meaning of what is sometimes called the substitution of inductive
+experimental methods of knowing for deductive. In some sense, men
+had always used an inductive method in dealing with their immediate
+practical concerns. Architecture, agriculture, manufacture, etc., had
+to be based upon observation of the activities of natural objects, and
+ideas about such affairs had to be checked, to some extent, by results.
+But even in such things there was an undue reliance upon mere
+custom, followed blindly rather than understandingly. And this
+observational-experimental method was restricted to these "practical"
+matters, and a sharp distinction maintained between practice and
+theoretical knowledge or truth. (See Ch. XX.) The rise of free cities,
+the development of travel, exploration, and commerce, the evolution
+of new methods of producing commodities and doing business, threw men
+definitely upon their own resources. The reformers of science like
+Galileo, Descartes, and their successors, carried analogous methods into
+ascertaining the facts about nature. An interest in discovery took the
+place of an interest in systematizing and "proving" received beliefs.
+
+A just philosophic interpretation of these movements would, indeed, have
+emphasized the rights and responsibilities of the individual in gaining
+knowledge and personally testing beliefs, no matter by what authorities
+they were vouched for. But it would not have isolated the individual
+from the world, and consequently isolated individuals--in theory--from
+one another. It would have perceived that such disconnection, such
+rupture of continuity, denied in advance the possibility of success in
+their endeavors. As matter of fact every individual has grown up, and
+always must grow up, in a social medium. His responses grow intelligent,
+or gain meaning, simply because he lives and acts in a medium of
+accepted meanings and values. (See ante, p. 30.) Through social
+intercourse, through sharing in the activities embodying beliefs, he
+gradually acquires a mind of his own. The conception of mind as a purely
+isolated possession of the self is at the very antipodes of the truth.
+The self achieves mind in the degree in which knowledge of things
+is incarnate in the life about him; the self is not a separate mind
+building up knowledge anew on its own account.
+
+Yet there is a valid distinction between knowledge which is objective
+and impersonal, and thinking which is subjective and personal. In one
+sense, knowledge is that which we take for granted. It is that which is
+settled, disposed of, established, under control. What we fully know,
+we do not need to think about. In common phrase, it is certain, assured.
+And this does not mean a mere feeling of certainty. It denotes not a
+sentiment, but a practical attitude, a readiness to act without
+reserve or quibble. Of course we may be mistaken. What is taken for
+knowledge--for fact and truth--at a given time may not be such. But
+everything which is assumed without question, which is taken for granted
+in our intercourse with one another and nature is what, at the given
+time, is called knowledge. Thinking on the contrary, starts, as we
+have seen, from doubt or uncertainty. It marks an inquiring, hunting,
+searching attitude, instead of one of mastery and possession. Through
+its critical process true knowledge is revised and extended, and our
+convictions as to the state of things reorganized. Clearly the last few
+centuries have been typically a period of revision and reorganization
+of beliefs. Men did not really throw away all transmitted beliefs
+concerning the realities of existence, and start afresh upon the basis
+of their private, exclusive sensations and ideas. They could not have
+done so if they had wished to, and if it had been possible general
+imbecility would have been the only outcome. Men set out from what had
+passed as knowledge, and critically investigated the grounds upon which
+it rested; they noted exceptions; they used new mechanical appliances to
+bring to light data inconsistent with what had been believed; they used
+their imaginations to conceive a world different from that in which
+their forefathers had put their trust. The work was a piecemeal, a
+retail, business. One problem was tackled at a time. The net results
+of all the revisions amounted, however, to a revolution of prior
+conceptions of the world. What occurred was a reorganization of prior
+intellectual habitudes, infinitely more efficient than a cutting loose
+from all connections would have been.
+
+This state of affairs suggests a definition of the role of the
+individual, or the self, in knowledge; namely, the redirection, or
+reconstruction of accepted beliefs. Every new idea, every conception of
+things differing from that authorized by current belief, must have its
+origin in an individual. New ideas are doubtless always sprouting, but a
+society governed by custom does not encourage their development. On the
+contrary, it tends to suppress them, just because they are deviations
+from what is current. The man who looks at things differently from
+others is in such a community a suspect character; for him to persist
+is generally fatal. Even when social censorship of beliefs is not so
+strict, social conditions may fail to provide the appliances which are
+requisite if new ideas are to be adequately elaborated; or they may fail
+to provide any material support and reward to those who entertain them.
+Hence they remain mere fancies, romantic castles in the air, or aimless
+speculations. The freedom of observation and imagination involved in
+the modern scientific revolution were not easily secured; they had to be
+fought for; many suffered for their intellectual independence. But, upon
+the whole, modern European society first permitted, and then, in some
+fields at least, deliberately encouraged the individual reactions which
+deviate from what custom prescribes. Discovery, research, inquiry in new
+lines, inventions, finally came to be either the social fashion, or in
+some degree tolerable. However, as we have already noted, philosophic
+theories of knowledge were not content to conceive mind in the
+individual as the pivot upon which reconstruction of beliefs turned,
+thus maintaining the continuity of the individual with the world of
+nature and fellow men. They regarded the individual mind as a separate
+entity, complete in each person, and isolated from nature and hence from
+other minds. Thus a legitimate intellectual individualism, the attitude
+of critical revision of former beliefs which is indispensable to
+progress, was explicitly formulated as a moral and social individualism.
+When the activities of mind set out from customary beliefs and strive
+to effect transformations of them which will in turn win general
+conviction, there is no opposition between the individual and the
+social. The intellectual variations of the individual in observation,
+imagination, judgment, and invention are simply the agencies of
+social progress, just as conformity to habit is the agency of social
+conservation. But when knowledge is regarded as originating and
+developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of
+one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied.
+
+When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied,
+it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual
+with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious
+separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion
+that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed
+continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of
+everybody else. But when men act, they act in a common and public world.
+This is the problem to which the theory of isolated and independent
+conscious minds gave rise: Given feelings, ideas, desires, which have
+nothing to do with one another, how can actions proceeding from them
+be controlled in a social or public interest? Given an egoistic
+consciousness, how can action which has regard for others take place?
+
+Moral philosophies which have started from such premises have developed
+four typical ways of dealing with the question. (i) One method
+represents the survival of the older authoritative position, with
+such concessions and compromises as the progress of events has made
+absolutely inevitable. The deviations and departures characterizing an
+individual are still looked upon with suspicion; in principle they are
+evidences of the disturbances, revolts, and corruptions inhering in
+an individual apart from external authoritative guidance. In fact, as
+distinct from principle, intellectual individualism is tolerated in
+certain technical regions--in subjects like mathematics and physics and
+astronomy, and in the technical inventions resulting therefrom. But
+the applicability of a similar method to morals, social, legal, and
+political matters, is denied. In such matters, dogma is still to be
+supreme; certain eternal truths made known by revelation, intuition,
+or the wisdom of our forefathers set unpassable limits to individual
+observation and speculation. The evils from which society suffers are
+set down to the efforts of misguided individuals to transgress
+these boundaries. Between the physical and the moral sciences, lie
+intermediate sciences of life, where the territory is only grudgingly
+yielded to freedom of inquiry under the pressure of accomplished fact.
+Although past history has demonstrated that the possibilities of human
+good are widened and made more secure by trusting to a responsibility
+built up within the very process of inquiry, the "authority" theory sets
+apart a sacred domain of truth which must be protected from the inroads
+of variation of beliefs. Educationally, emphasis may not be put on
+eternal truth, but it is put on the authority of book and teacher, and
+individual variation is discouraged.
+
+(ii) Another method is sometimes termed rationalism or abstract
+intellectualism. A formal logical faculty is set up in distinction from
+tradition and history and all concrete subject matter. This faculty of
+reason is endowed with power to influence conduct directly. Since it
+deals wholly with general and impersonal forms, when different persons
+act in accord with logical findings, their activities will be externally
+consistent. There is no doubt of the services rendered by this
+philosophy. It was a powerful factor in the negative and dissolving
+criticism of doctrines having nothing but tradition and class interest
+behind them; it accustomed men to freedom of discussion and to the
+notion that beliefs had to be submitted to criteria of reasonableness.
+It undermined the power of prejudice, superstition, and brute force, by
+habituating men to reliance upon argument, discussion, and persuasion.
+It made for clarity and order of exposition. But its influence was
+greater in destruction of old falsities than in the construction of new
+ties and associations among men. Its formal and empty nature, due to
+conceiving reason as something complete in itself apart from subject
+matter, its hostile attitude toward historical institutions, its
+disregard of the influence of habit, instinct, and emotion, as operative
+factors in life, left it impotent in the suggestion of specific aims
+and methods. Bare logic, however important in arranging and criticizing
+existing subject matter, cannot spin new subject matter out of itself.
+In education, the correlative is trust in general ready-made rules and
+principles to secure agreement, irrespective of seeing to it that the
+pupil's ideas really agree with one another.
+
+(iii) While this rationalistic philosophy was developing in France,
+English thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest of individuals
+in order to secure outer unity in the acts which issued from isolated
+streams of consciousness. Legal arrangements, especially penal
+administration, and governmental regulations, were to be such as to
+prevent the acts which proceeded from regard for one's own private
+sensations from interfering with the feelings of others. Education was
+to instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others
+and some degree of positive regard for their welfare were necessary for
+security in the pursuit of one's own happiness. Chief emphasis was
+put, however, upon trade as a means of bringing the conduct of one into
+harmony with that of others. In commerce, each aims at the satisfaction
+of his own wants, but can gain his own profit only by furnishing some
+commodity or service to another. Thus in aiming at the increase of his
+own private pleasurable states of consciousness, he contributes to
+the consciousness of others. Again there is no doubt that this view
+expressed and furthered a heightened perception of the values of
+conscious life, and a recognition that institutional arrangements
+are ultimately to be judged by the contributions which they make to
+intensifying and enlarging the scope of conscious experience. It also
+did much to rescue work, industry, and mechanical devices from the
+contempt in which they had been held in communities founded upon the
+control of a leisure class. In both ways, this philosophy promoted a
+wider and more democratic social concern. But it was tainted by
+the narrowness of its fundamental premise: the doctrine that every
+individual acts only from regard for his own pleasures and pains, and
+that so-called generous and sympathetic acts are only indirect ways
+of procuring and assuring one's own comfort. In other words, it made
+explicit the consequences inhering in any doctrine which makes mental
+life a self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt to redirect and
+readapt common concerns. It made union among men a matter of calculation
+of externals. It lent itself to the contemptuous assertions of Carlyle
+that it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a constable, and recognized only
+a "cash nexus" among men. The educational equivalents of this doctrine
+in the uses made of pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only
+too obvious. (iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path.
+It started from what was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of
+Descartes and his French successors. But while French thought upon
+the whole developed the idea of reason in opposition to the religious
+conception of a divine mind residing in individuals, German thought (as
+in Hegel) made a synthesis of the two. Reason is absolute. Nature is
+incarnate reason. History is reason in its progressive unfolding in
+man. An individual becomes rational only as he absorbs into himself
+the content of rationality in nature and in social institutions. For an
+absolute reason is not, like the reason of rationalism, purely formal
+and empty; as absolute it must include all content within itself. Thus
+the real problem is not that of controlling individual freedom so that
+some measure of social order and concord may result, but of achieving
+individual freedom through developing individual convictions in accord
+with the universal law found in the organization of the state as
+objective Reason. While this philosophy is usually termed absolute or
+objective idealism, it might better be termed, for educational purposes
+at least, institutional idealism. (See ante, p. 59.) It idealized
+historical institutions by conceiving them as incarnations of an
+immanent absolute mind. There can be no doubt that this philosophy was
+a powerful influence in rescuing philosophy in the beginning of the
+nineteenth century from the isolated individualism into which it had
+fallen in France and England. It served also to make the organization of
+the state more constructively interested in matters of public concern.
+It left less to chance, less to mere individual logical conviction, less
+to the workings of private self-interest. It brought intelligence to
+bear upon the conduct of affairs; it accentuated the need of nationally
+organized education in the interests of the corporate state. It
+sanctioned and promoted freedom of inquiry in all technical details of
+natural and historical phenomena. But in all ultimate moral matters, it
+tended to reinstate the principle of authority. It made for efficiency
+of organization more than did any of the types of philosophy previously
+mentioned, but it made no provision for free experimental modification
+of this organization. Political democracy, with its belief in the right
+of individual desire and purpose to take part in readapting even the
+fundamental constitution of society, was foreign to it.
+
+3. Educational Equivalents. It is not necessary to consider in detail
+the educational counterparts of the various defects found in these
+various types of philosophy. It suffices to say that in general the
+school has been the institution which exhibited with greatest clearness
+the assumed antithesis between purely individualistic methods of
+learning and social action, and between freedom and social control. The
+antithesis is reflected in the absence of a social atmosphere and motive
+for learning, and the consequent separation, in the conduct of the
+school, between method of instruction and methods of government; and in
+the slight opportunity afforded individual variations. When learning
+is a phase of active undertakings which involve mutual exchange, social
+control enters into the very process of learning. When the social factor
+is absent, learning becomes a carrying over of some presented material
+into a purely individual consciousness, and there is no inherent reason
+why it should give a more socialized direction to mental and emotional
+disposition. There is tendency on the part of both the upholders and
+the opponents of freedom in school to identify it with absence of social
+direction, or, sometimes, with merely physical unconstraint of movement.
+But the essence of the demand for freedom is the need of conditions
+which will enable an individual to make his own special contribution
+to a group interest, and to partake of its activities in such ways that
+social guidance shall be a matter of his own mental attitude, and not a
+mere authoritative dictation of his acts. Because what is often called
+discipline and "government" has to do with the external side of conduct
+alone, a similar meaning is attached, by reaction, to freedom. But when
+it is perceived that each idea signifies the quality of mind expressed
+in action, the supposed opposition between them falls away. Freedom
+means essentially the part played by thinking--which is personal--in
+learning:--it means intellectual initiative, independence in
+observation, judicious invention, foresight of consequences, and
+ingenuity of adaptation to them.
+
+But because these are the mental phase of behavior, the needed play of
+individuality--or freedom--cannot be separated from opportunity for
+free play of physical movements. Enforced physical quietude may be
+unfavorable to realization of a problem, to undertaking the observations
+needed to define it, and to performance of the experiments which
+test the ideas suggested. Much has been said about the importance of
+"self-activity" in education, but the conception has too frequently been
+restricted to something merely internal--something excluding the free
+use of sensory and motor organs. Those who are at the stage of learning
+from symbols, or who are engaged in elaborating the implications of a
+problem or idea preliminary to more carefully thought-out activity,
+may need little perceptible overt activity. But the whole cycle
+of self-activity demands an opportunity for investigation and
+experimentation, for trying out one's ideas upon things, discovering
+what can be done with materials and appliances. And this is incompatible
+with closely restricted physical activity. Individual activity has
+sometimes been taken as meaning leaving a pupil to work by himself or
+alone. Relief from need of attending to what any one else is doing is
+truly required to secure calm and concentration. Children, like grown
+persons, require a judicious amount of being let alone. But the time,
+place, and amount of such separate work is a matter of detail, not of
+principle. There is no inherent opposition between working with others
+and working as an individual. On the contrary, certain capacities of an
+individual are not brought out except under the stimulus of associating
+with others. That a child must work alone and not engage in group
+activities in order to be free and let his individuality develop, is
+a notion which measures individuality by spatial distance and makes a
+physical thing of it.
+
+Individuality as a factor to be respected in education has a double
+meaning. In the first place, one is mentally an individual only as he
+has his own purpose and problem, and does his own thinking. The phrase
+"think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self,
+it isn't thinking. Only by a pupil's own observations, reflections,
+framing and testing of suggestions can what he already knows be
+amplified and rectified. Thinking is as much an individual matter as
+is the digestion of food. In the second place, there are variations of
+point of view, of appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from person
+to person. When these variations are suppressed in the alleged interests
+of uniformity, and an attempt is made to have a single mold of method
+of study and recitation, mental confusion and artificiality inevitably
+result. Originality is gradually destroyed, confidence in one's own
+quality of mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to
+the opinion of others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild. The harm
+is greater now than when the whole community was governed by customary
+beliefs, because the contrast between methods of learning in school and
+those relied upon outside the school is greater. That systematic advance
+in scientific discovery began when individuals were allowed, and then
+encouraged, to utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject
+matter, no one will deny. If it is said in objection, that pupils
+in school are not capable of any such originality, and hence must be
+confined to appropriating and reproducing things already known by
+the better informed, the reply is twofold. (i) We are concerned with
+originality of attitude which is equivalent to the unforced response of
+one's own individuality, not with originality as measured by product.
+No one expects the young to make original discoveries of just the same
+facts and principles as are embodied in the sciences of nature and man.
+But it is not unreasonable to expect that learning may take place under
+such conditions that from the standpoint of the learner there is genuine
+discovery. While immature students will not make discoveries from
+the standpoint of advanced students, they make them from their own
+standpoint, whenever there is genuine learning. (ii) In the normal
+process of becoming acquainted with subject matter already known to
+others, even young pupils react in unexpected ways. There is something
+fresh, something not capable of being fully anticipated by even the
+most experienced teacher, in the ways they go at the topic, and in
+the particular ways in which things strike them. Too often all this is
+brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are deliberately held to rehearsing
+material in the exact form in which the older person conceives it. The
+result is that what is instinctively original in individuality, that
+which marks off one from another, goes unused and undirected. Teaching
+then ceases to be an educative process for the teacher. At most he
+learns simply to improve his existing technique; he does not get new
+points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual companionship.
+Hence both teaching and learning tend to become conventional and
+mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides therein implied.
+
+As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background of
+familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or
+less random physical experimentation is reduced. Activity is defined or
+specialized in certain channels. To the eyes of others, the student may
+be in a position of complete physical quietude, because his energies are
+confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes
+and vocal organs. But because this attitude is evidence of intense
+mental concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not
+follow that it should be set up as a model for students who still have
+to find their intellectual way about. And even with the adult, it does
+not cover the whole circuit of mental energy. It marks an intermediate
+period, capable of being lengthened with increased mastery of a
+subject, but always coming between an earlier period of more general and
+conspicuous organic action and a later time of putting to use what has
+been apprehended.
+
+When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and body
+in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the need of
+obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to identify the freedom
+which is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking by which
+what a person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. If
+attention is centered upon the conditions which have to be met in order
+to secure a situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take
+care of itself. The individual who has a question which being really a
+question to him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his eagerness for
+information that will help him cope with it, and who has at command
+an equipment which will permit these interests to take effect, is
+intellectually free. Whatever initiative and imaginative vision he
+possesses will be called into play and control his impulses and habits.
+His own purposes will direct his actions. Otherwise, his seeming
+attention, his docility, his memorizings and reproductions, will partake
+of intellectual servility. Such a condition of intellectual subjection
+is needed for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not
+expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders from the
+few set in authority. It is not adapted to a society which intends to be
+democratic.
+
+Summary. True individualism is a product of the relaxation of the grip
+of the authority of custom and traditions as standards of belief. Aside
+from sporadic instances, like the height of Greek thought, it is a
+comparatively modern manifestation. Not but that there have always been
+individual diversities, but that a society dominated by conservative
+custom represses them or at least does not utilize them and promote
+them. For various reasons, however, the new individualism was
+interpreted philosophically not as meaning development of agencies
+for revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an
+assertion that each individual's mind was complete in isolation from
+everything else. In the theoretical phase of philosophy, this produced
+the epistemological problem: the question as to the possibility of any
+cognitive relationship of the individual to the world. In its practical
+phase, it generated the problem of the possibility of a purely
+individual consciousness acting on behalf of general or social
+interests,--the problem of social direction. While the philosophies
+which have been elaborated to deal with these questions have not
+affected education directly, the assumptions underlying them have
+found expression in the separation frequently made between study and
+government and between freedom of individuality and control by others.
+Regarding freedom, the important thing to bear in mind is that it
+designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of
+movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair
+leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc. A
+society based on custom will utilize individual variations only up to
+a limit of conformity with usage; uniformity is the chief ideal within
+each class. A progressive society counts individual variations as
+precious since it finds in them the means of its own growth. Hence
+a democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for
+intellectual freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in its
+educational measures.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
+
+1. The Meaning of Vocation. At the present time the conflict of
+philosophic theories focuses in discussion of the proper place and
+function of vocational factors in education. The bald statement that
+significant differences in fundamental philosophical conceptions find
+their chief issue in connection with this point may arouse incredulity:
+there seems to be too great a gap between the remote and general terms
+in which philosophic ideas are formulated and the practical and concrete
+details of vocational education. But a mental review of the intellectual
+presuppositions underlying the oppositions in education of labor and
+leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the
+world, will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and
+cultural education. Traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to
+the notions of leisure, purely contemplative knowledge and a spiritual
+activity not involving the active use of bodily organs. Culture has also
+tended, latterly, to be associated with a purely private refinement, a
+cultivation of certain states and attitudes of consciousness, separate
+from either social direction or service. It has been an escape from the
+former, and a solace for the necessity of the latter.
+
+So deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole
+subject of vocational education, that it is necessary to define the
+meaning of vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the impression
+that an education which centers about it is narrowly practical, if not
+merely pecuniary. A vocation means nothing but such a direction of life
+activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because
+of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates.
+The opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture, but
+aimlessness, capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in
+experience, on the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence
+upon the others, on the social side. Occupation is a concrete term for
+continuity. It includes the development of artistic capacity of any
+kind, of special scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well
+as professional and business occupations, to say nothing of mechanical
+labor or engagement in gainful pursuits.
+
+We must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to the
+occupations where immediately tangible commodities are produced, but
+also the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one
+and only one to each person. Such restricted specialism is impossible;
+nothing could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an
+eye to only one line of activity. In the first place, each individual
+has of necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be
+intelligently effective; and in the second place any one occupation
+loses its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy at something in the
+degree in which it is isolated from other interests. (i) No one is
+just an artist and nothing else, and in so far as one approximates that
+condition, he is so much the less developed human being; he is a kind
+of monstrosity. He must, at some period of his life, be a member of
+a family; he must have friends and companions; he must either support
+himself or be supported by others, and thus he has a business career.
+He is a member of some organized political unit, and so on. We naturally
+name his vocation from that one of the callings which distinguishes him,
+rather than from those which he has in common with all others. But we
+should not allow ourselves to be so subject to words as to ignore and
+virtually deny his other callings when it comes to a consideration of
+the vocational phases of education.
+
+(ii) As a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized
+phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his
+efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by
+its association with other callings. A person must have experience,
+he must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical
+accomplishment. He cannot find the subject matter of his artistic
+activity within his art; this must be an expression of what he suffers
+and enjoys in other relationships--a thing which depends in turn upon
+the alertness and sympathy of his interests. What is true of an artist
+is true of any other special calling. There is doubtless--in general
+accord with the principle of habit--a tendency for every distinctive
+vocation to become too dominant, too exclusive and absorbing in its
+specialized aspect. This means emphasis upon skill or technical method
+at the expense of meaning. Hence it is not the business of education to
+foster this tendency, but rather to safeguard against it, so that the
+scientific inquirer shall not be merely the scientist, the teacher
+merely the pedagogue, the clergyman merely one who wears the cloth, and
+so on.
+
+2. The Place of Vocational Aims in Education. Bearing in mind the varied
+and connected content of the vocation, and the broad background upon
+which a particular calling is projected, we shall now consider education
+for the more distinctive activity of an individual.
+
+1. An occupation is the only thing which balances the distinctive
+capacity of an individual with his social service. To find out what
+one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to
+happiness. Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true
+business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by
+circumstance into an uncongenial calling. A right occupation means
+simply that the aptitudes of a person are in adequate play, working with
+the minimum of friction and the maximum of satisfaction. With reference
+to other members of a community, this adequacy of action signifies, of
+course, that they are getting the best service the person can render.
+It is generally believed, for example, that slave labor was ultimately
+wasteful even from the purely economic point of view--that there was not
+sufficient stimulus to direct the energies of slaves, and that there
+was consequent wastage. Moreover, since slaves were confined to certain
+prescribed callings, much talent must have remained unavailable to the
+community, and hence there was a dead loss. Slavery only illustrates on
+an obvious scale what happens in some degree whenever an individual does
+not find himself in his work. And he cannot completely find himself when
+vocations are looked upon with contempt, and a conventional ideal of
+a culture which is essentially the same for all is maintained. Plato
+(ante, p. 88) laid down the fundamental principle of a philosophy of
+education when he asserted that it was the business of education to
+discover what each person is good for, and to train him to mastery of
+that mode of excellence, because such development would also secure the
+fulfillment of social needs in the most harmonious way. His error was
+not in qualitative principle, but in his limited conception of the scope
+of vocations socially needed; a limitation of vision which reacted to
+obscure his perception of the infinite variety of capacities found in
+different individuals.
+
+2. An occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose. Education
+through occupations consequently combines within itself more of the
+factors conducive to learning than any other method. It calls instincts
+and habits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. It has an end
+in view; results are to be accomplished. Hence it appeals to thought; it
+demands that an idea of an end be steadily maintained, so that activity
+cannot be either routine or capricious. Since the movement of activity
+must be progressive, leading from one stage to another, observation
+and ingenuity are required at each stage to overcome obstacles and
+to discover and readapt means of execution. In short, an occupation,
+pursued under conditions where the realization of the activity rather
+than merely the external product is the aim, fulfills the requirements
+which were laid down earlier in connection with the discussion of aims,
+interest, and thinking. (See Chapters VIII, X, XII.)
+
+A calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for information
+and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth. It provides an axis
+which runs through an immense diversity of detail; it causes different
+experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with one
+another. The lawyer, the physician, the laboratory investigator in
+some branch of chemistry, the parent, the citizen interested in his own
+locality, has a constant working stimulus to note and relate whatever
+has to do with his concern. He unconsciously, from the motivation of his
+occupation, reaches out for all relevant information, and holds to it.
+The vocation acts as both magnet to attract and as glue to hold. Such
+organization of knowledge is vital, because it has reference to needs;
+it is so expressed and readjusted in action that it never becomes
+stagnant. No classification, no selection and arrangement of facts,
+which is consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever
+compare in solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of
+an occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal, superficial, and
+cold.
+
+3. The only adequate training for occupations is training through
+occupations. The principle stated early in this book (see Chapter VI)
+that the educative process is its own end, and that the only sufficient
+preparation for later responsibilities comes by making the most of
+immediately present life, applies in full force to the vocational phases
+of education. The dominant vocation of all human beings at all times
+is living--intellectual and moral growth. In childhood and youth, with
+their relative freedom from economic stress, this fact is naked and
+unconcealed. To predetermine some future occupation for which education
+is to be a strict preparation is to injure the possibilities of present
+development and thereby to reduce the adequacy of preparation for a
+future right employment. To repeat the principle we have had occasion
+to appeal to so often, such training may develop a machine-like skill in
+routine lines (it is far from being sure to do so, since it may develop
+distaste, aversion, and carelessness), but it will be at the expense of
+those qualities of alert observation and coherent and ingenious planning
+which make an occupation intellectually rewarding. In an autocratically
+managed society, it is often a conscious object to prevent the
+development of freedom and responsibility, a few do the planning and
+ordering, the others follow directions and are deliberately confined to
+narrow and prescribed channels of endeavor. However much such a scheme
+may inure to the prestige and profit of a class, it is evident that it
+limits the development of the subject class; hardens and confines the
+opportunities for learning through experience of the master class, and
+in both ways hampers the life of the society as a whole. (See ante, p.
+260.)
+
+The only alternative is that all the earlier preparation for vocations
+be indirect rather than direct; namely, through engaging in those active
+occupations which are indicated by the needs and interests of the pupil
+at the time. Only in this way can there be on the part of the educator
+and of the one educated a genuine discovery of personal aptitudes so
+that the proper choice of a specialized pursuit in later life may be
+indicated. Moreover, the discovery of capacity and aptitude will be a
+constant process as long as growth continues. It is a conventional and
+arbitrary view which assumes that discovery of the work to be chosen
+for adult life is made once for all at some particular date. One has
+discovered in himself, say, an interest, intellectual and social, in the
+things which have to do with engineering and has decided to make that
+his calling. At most, this only blocks out in outline the field in which
+further growth is to be directed. It is a sort of rough sketch for use
+in direction of further activities. It is the discovery of a profession
+in the sense in which Columbus discovered America when he touched
+its shores. Future explorations of an indefinitely more detailed and
+extensive sort remain to be made. When educators conceive vocational
+guidance as something which leads up to a definitive, irretrievable, and
+complete choice, both education and the chosen vocation are likely to be
+rigid, hampering further growth. In so far, the calling chosen will
+be such as to leave the person concerned in a permanently subordinate
+position, executing the intelligence of others who have a calling which
+permits more flexible play and readjustment. And while ordinary usages
+of language may not justify terming a flexible attitude of readjustment
+a choice of a new and further calling, it is such in effect. If even
+adults have to be on the lookout to see that their calling does not shut
+down on them and fossilize them, educators must certainly be careful
+that the vocational preparation of youth is such as to engage them in a
+continuous reorganization of aims and methods.
+
+3. Present Opportunities and Dangers. In the past, education has been
+much more vocational in fact than in name. (i) The education of the
+masses was distinctly utilitarian. It was called apprenticeship rather
+than education, or else just learning from experience. The schools
+devoted themselves to the three R's in the degree in which ability to go
+through the forms of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements
+in all kinds of labor. Taking part in some special line of work, under
+the direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education.
+The two supplemented each other; the school work in its narrow and
+formal character was as much a part of apprenticeship to a calling as
+that explicitly so termed.
+
+(ii) To a considerable extent, the education of the dominant classes was
+essentially vocational--it only happened that their pursuits of ruling
+and of enjoying were not called professions. For only those things were
+named vocations or employments which involved manual labor, laboring for
+a reward in keep, or its commuted money equivalent, or the rendering of
+personal services to specific persons. For a long time, for example, the
+profession of the surgeon and physician ranked almost with that of the
+valet or barber--partly because it had so much to do with the body,
+and partly because it involved rendering direct service for pay to some
+definite person. But if we go behind words, the business of directing
+social concerns, whether politically or economically, whether in war or
+peace, is as much a calling as anything else; and where education has
+not been completely under the thumb of tradition, higher schools in the
+past have been upon the whole calculated to give preparation for this
+business. Moreover, display, the adornment of person, the kind of social
+companionship and entertainment which give prestige, and the spending
+of money, have been made into definite callings. Unconsciously to
+themselves the higher institutions of learning have been made to
+contribute to preparation for these employments. Even at present, what
+is called higher education is for a certain class (much smaller than it
+once was) mainly preparation for engaging effectively in these pursuits.
+
+In other respects, it is largely, especially in the most advanced work,
+training for the calling of teaching and special research. By a peculiar
+superstition, education which has to do chiefly with preparation for
+the pursuit of conspicuous idleness, for teaching, and for literary
+callings, and for leadership, has been regarded as non-vocational and
+even as peculiarly cultural. The literary training which indirectly
+fits for authorship, whether of books, newspaper editorials, or magazine
+articles, is especially subject to this superstition: many a teacher and
+author writes and argues in behalf of a cultural and humane education
+against the encroachments of a specialized practical education, without
+recognizing that his own education, which he calls liberal, has been
+mainly training for his own particular calling. He has simply got into
+the habit of regarding his own business as essentially cultural and
+of overlooking the cultural possibilities of other employments. At
+the bottom of these distinctions is undoubtedly the tradition which
+recognizes as employment only those pursuits where one is responsible
+for his work to a specific employer, rather than to the ultimate
+employer, the community.
+
+There are, however, obvious causes for the present conscious emphasis
+upon vocational education--for the disposition to make explicit and
+deliberate vocational implications previously tacit. (i) In the first
+place, there is an increased esteem, in democratic communities, of
+whatever has to do with manual labor, commercial occupations, and the
+rendering of tangible services to society. In theory, men and women are
+now expected to do something in return for their support--intellectual
+and economic--by society. Labor is extolled; service is a much-lauded
+moral ideal. While there is still much admiration and envy of those who
+can pursue lives of idle conspicuous display, better moral sentiment
+condemns such lives. Social responsibility for the use of time and
+personal capacity is more generally recognized than it used to be.
+
+(ii) In the second place, those vocations which are specifically
+industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last century
+and a half. Manufacturing and commerce are no longer domestic and local,
+and consequently more or less incidental, but are world-wide. They
+engage the best energies of an increasingly large number of persons. The
+manufacturer, banker, and captain of industry have practically displaced
+a hereditary landed gentry as the immediate directors of social affairs.
+The problem of social readjustment is openly industrial, having to
+do with the relations of capital and labor. The great increase in the
+social importance of conspicuous industrial processes has inevitably
+brought to the front questions having to do with the relationship of
+schooling to industrial life. No such vast social readjustment could
+occur without offering a challenge to an education inherited from
+different social conditions, and without putting up to education new
+problems.
+
+(iii) In the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly
+mentioned: Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical,
+rule-of-thumb procedure, handed down by custom. Its technique is now
+technological: that is to say, based upon machinery resulting from
+discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, bacteriology, etc.
+The economic revolution has stimulated science by setting problems
+for solution, by producing greater intellectual respect for mechanical
+appliances. And industry received back payment from science with
+compound interest. As a consequence, industrial occupations have
+infinitely greater intellectual content and infinitely larger cultural
+possibilities than they used to possess. The demand for such education
+as will acquaint workers with the scientific and social bases and
+bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative, since those who are
+without it inevitably sink to the role of appendages to the machines
+they operate. Under the old regime all workers in a craft were
+approximately equals in their knowledge and outlook. Personal knowledge
+and ingenuity were developed within at least a narrow range, because
+work was done with tools under the direct command of the worker. Now the
+operator has to adjust himself to his machine, instead of his tool to
+his own purposes. While the intellectual possibilities of industry
+have multiplied, industrial conditions tend to make industry, for great
+masses, less of an educative resource than it was in the days of hand
+production for local markets. The burden of realizing the intellectual
+possibilities inhering in work is thus thrown back on the school.
+
+(iv) In the fourth place, the pursuit of knowledge has become, in
+science, more experimental, less dependent upon literary tradition, and
+less associated with dialectical methods of reasoning, and with symbols.
+As a result, the subject matter of industrial occupation presents
+not only more of the content of science than it used to, but greater
+opportunity for familiarity with the method by which knowledge is made.
+The ordinary worker in the factory is of course under too immediate
+economic pressure to have a chance to produce a knowledge like that of
+the worker in the laboratory. But in schools, association with machines
+and industrial processes may be had under conditions where the chief
+conscious concern of the students is insight. The separation of shop
+and laboratory, where these conditions are fulfilled, is largely
+conventional, the laboratory having the advantage of permitting the
+following up of any intellectual interest a problem may suggest; the
+shop the advantage of emphasizing the social bearings of the scientific
+principle, as well as, with many pupils, of stimulating a livelier
+interest.
+
+(v) Finally, the advances which have been made in the psychology of
+learning in general and of childhood in particular fall into line with
+the increased importance of industry in life. For modern psychology
+emphasizes the radical importance of primitive unlearned instincts of
+exploring, experimentation, and "trying on." It reveals that learning is
+not the work of something ready-made called mind, but that mind itself
+is an organization of original capacities into activities having
+significance. As we have already seen (ante, p. 204), in older pupils
+work is to educative development of raw native activities what play is
+for younger pupils. Moreover, the passage from play to work should be
+gradual, not involving a radical change of attitude but carrying into
+work the elements of play, plus continuous reorganization in behalf
+of greater control. The reader will remark that these five points
+practically resume the main contentions of the previous part of the
+work. Both practically and philosophically, the key to the present
+educational situation lies in a gradual reconstruction of school
+materials and methods so as to utilize various forms of occupation
+typifying social callings, and to bring out their intellectual and
+moral content. This reconstruction must relegate purely literary
+methods--including textbooks--and dialectical methods to the position of
+necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent development of consecutive
+and cumulative activities.
+
+But our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational
+reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a
+technical preparation for industries and professions as they now
+operate, much less by merely reproducing existing industrial conditions
+in the school. The problem is not that of making the schools an adjunct
+to manufacture and commerce, but of utilizing the factors of industry
+to make school life more active, more full of immediate meaning, more
+connected with out-of-school experience. The problem is not easy of
+solution. There is a standing danger that education will perpetuate
+the older traditions for a select few, and effect its adjustment to the
+newer economic conditions more or less on the basis of acquiescence
+in the untransformed, unrationalized, and unsocialized phases of our
+defective industrial regime. Put in concrete terms, there is danger that
+vocational education will be interpreted in theory and practice as trade
+education: as a means of securing technical efficiency in specialized
+future pursuits. Education would then become an instrument of
+perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society,
+instead of operating as a means of its transformation. The desired
+transformation is not difficult to define in a formal way. It signifies
+a society in which every person shall be occupied in something which
+makes the lives of others better worth living, and which accordingly
+makes the ties which bind persons together more perceptible--which
+breaks down the barriers of distance between them. It denotes a state
+of affairs in which the interest of each in his work is uncoerced and
+intelligent: based upon its congeniality to his own aptitudes. It goes
+without saying that we are far from such a social state; in a literal
+and quantitative sense, we may never arrive at it. But in principle, the
+quality of social changes already accomplished lies in this direction.
+There are more ample resources for its achievement now than ever there
+have been before. No insuperable obstacles, given the intelligent will
+for its realization, stand in the way.
+
+Success or failure in its realization depends more upon the adoption of
+educational methods calculated to effect the change than upon anything
+else. For the change is essentially a change in the quality of mental
+disposition--an educative change. This does not mean that we can change
+character and mind by direct instruction and exhortation, apart from
+a change in industrial and political conditions. Such a conception
+contradicts our basic idea that character and mind are attitudes of
+participative response in social affairs. But it does mean that we may
+produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like
+to realize, and by forming minds in accord with it gradually modify the
+larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society. Sentimentally,
+it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present regime is
+not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the
+fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them,
+which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such
+callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire
+to slight and evade. Neither men's hearts nor their minds are in their
+work. On the other hand, those who are not only much better off in
+worldly goods, but who are in excessive, if not monopolistic, control of
+the activities of the many are shut off from equality and generality of
+social intercourse. They are stimulated to pursuits of indulgence and
+display; they try to make up for the distance which separates them from
+others by the impression of force and superior possession and enjoyment
+which they can make upon others.
+
+It would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational
+education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form. Taking its
+stand upon a dogma of social predestination, it would assume that some
+are to continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like
+the present, and would aim simply to give them what is termed a trade
+education--that is, greater technical efficiency. Technical proficiency
+is often sadly lacking, and is surely desirable on all accounts--not
+merely for the sake of the production of better goods at less cost, but
+for the greater happiness found in work. For no one cares for what one
+cannot half do. But there is a great difference between a proficiency
+limited to immediate work, and a competency extended to insight into its
+social bearings; between efficiency in carrying out the plans of others
+and in one forming one's own. At present, intellectual and emotional
+limitation characterizes both the employing and the employed class.
+While the latter often have no concern with their occupation beyond the
+money return it brings, the former's outlook may be confined to
+profit and power. The latter interest generally involves much greater
+intellectual initiation and larger survey of conditions. For it involves
+the direction and combination of a large number of diverse factors,
+while the interest in wages is restricted to certain direct muscular
+movements. But none the less there is a limitation of intelligence to
+technical and non-humane, non-liberal channels, so far as the work does
+not take in its social bearings. And when the animating motive is desire
+for private profit or personal power, this limitation is inevitable. In
+fact, the advantage in immediate social sympathy and humane disposition
+often lies with the economically unfortunate, who have not experienced
+the hardening effects of a one-sided control of the affairs of others.
+
+Any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of departure
+from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely to assume and
+to perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and thus to become an
+instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.
+Those who are in a position to make their wishes good, will demand a
+liberal, a cultural occupation, and one which fits for directive power
+the youth in whom they are directly interested. To split the system, and
+give to others, less fortunately situated, an education conceived mainly
+as specific trade preparation, is to treat the schools as an agency
+for transferring the older division of labor and leisure, culture and
+service, mind and body, directed and directive class, into a society
+nominally democratic. Such a vocational education inevitably discounts
+the scientific and historic human connections of the materials and
+processes dealt with. To include such things in narrow trade education
+would be to waste time; concern for them would not be "practical." They
+are reserved for those who have leisure at command--the leisure due to
+superior economic resources. Such things might even be dangerous to the
+interests of the controlling class, arousing discontent or ambitions
+"beyond the station" of those working under the direction of others. But
+an education which acknowledges the full intellectual and social meaning
+of a vocation would include instruction in the historic background
+of present conditions; training in science to give intelligence and
+initiative in dealing with material and agencies of production; and
+study of economics, civics, and politics, to bring the future worker
+into touch with the problems of the day and the various methods proposed
+for its improvement. Above all, it would train power of readaptation
+to changing conditions so that future workers would not become blindly
+subject to a fate imposed upon them. This ideal has to contend not only
+with the inertia of existing educational traditions, but also with the
+opposition of those who are entrenched in command of the industrial
+machinery, and who realize that such an educational system if made
+general would threaten their ability to use others for their own ends.
+But this very fact is the presage of a more equitable and enlightened
+social order, for it gives evidence of the dependence of social
+reorganization upon educational reconstruction. It is accordingly an
+encouragement to those believing in a better order to undertake the
+promotion of a vocational education which does not subject youth to
+the demands and standards of the present system, but which utilizes its
+scientific and social factors to develop a courageous intelligence, and
+to make intelligence practical and executive.
+
+Summary. A vocation signifies any form of continuous activity which
+renders service to others and engages personal powers in behalf of the
+accomplishment of results. The question of the relation of vocation to
+education brings to a focus the various problems previously discussed
+regarding the connection of thought with bodily activity; of individual
+conscious development with associated life; of theoretical culture with
+practical behavior having definite results; of making a livelihood
+with the worthy enjoyment of leisure. In general, the opposition to
+recognition of the vocational phases of life in education (except for
+the utilitarian three R's in elementary schooling) accompanies the
+conservation of aristocratic ideals of the past. But, at the present
+juncture, there is a movement in behalf of something called vocational
+training which, if carried into effect, would harden these ideas into
+a form adapted to the existing industrial regime. This movement would
+continue the traditional liberal or cultural education for the few
+economically able to enjoy it, and would give to the masses a narrow
+technical trade education for specialized callings, carried on under the
+control of others. This scheme denotes, of course, simply a perpetuation
+of the older social division, with its counterpart intellectual and
+moral dualisms. But it means its continuation under conditions where it
+has much less justification for existence. For industrial life is now
+so dependent upon science and so intimately affects all forms of social
+intercourse, that there is an opportunity to utilize it for development
+of mind and character. Moreover, a right educational use of it would
+react upon intelligence and interest so as to modify, in connection with
+legislation and administration, the socially obnoxious features of the
+present industrial and commercial order. It would turn the increasing
+fund of social sympathy to constructive account, instead of leaving it a
+somewhat blind philanthropic sentiment.
+
+It would give those who engage in industrial callings desire and ability
+to share in social control, and ability to become masters of their
+industrial fate. It would enable them to saturate with meaning the
+technical and mechanical features which are so marked a feature of our
+machine system of production and distribution. So much for those who now
+have the poorer economic opportunities. With the representatives of the
+more privileged portion of the community, it would increase sympathy
+for labor, create a disposition of mind which can discover the
+culturing elements in useful activity, and increase a sense of social
+responsibility. The crucial position of the question of vocational
+education at present is due, in other words, to the fact that it
+concentrates in a specific issue two fundamental questions:--Whether
+intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity which puts
+nature to human use, and whether individual culture is best secured
+under egoistic or social conditions. No discussion of details is
+undertaken in this chapter, because this conclusion but summarizes the
+discussion of the previous chapters, XV to XXII, inclusive.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
+
+1. A Critical Review. Although we are dealing with the philosophy of
+education, DO definition of philosophy has yet been given; nor has
+there been an explicit consideration of the nature of a philosophy of
+education. This topic is now introduced by a summary account of the
+logical order implied in the previous discussions, for the purpose
+of bringing out the philosophic issues involved. Afterwards we shall
+undertake a brief discussion, in more specifically philosophical
+terms, of the theories of knowledge and of morals implied in different
+educational ideals as they operate in practice. The prior chapters fall
+logically into three parts.
+
+I. The first chapters deal with education as a social need and function.
+Their purpose is to outline the general features of education as the
+process by which social groups maintain their continuous existence.
+Education was shown to be a process of renewal of the meanings of
+experience through a process of transmission, partly incidental to
+the ordinary companionship or intercourse of adults and youth, partly
+deliberately instituted to effect social continuity. This process was
+seen to involve control and growth of both the immature individual and
+the group in which he lives.
+
+This consideration was formal in that it took no specific account of the
+quality of the social group concerned--the kind of society aiming at
+its own perpetuation through education. The general discussion was
+then specified by application to social groups which are intentionally
+progressive, and which aim at a greater variety of mutually shared
+interests in distinction from those which aim simply at the preservation
+of established customs. Such societies were found to be democratic in
+quality, because of the greater freedom allowed the constituent
+members, and the conscious need of securing in individuals a consciously
+socialized interest, instead of trusting mainly to the force of customs
+operating under the control of a superior class. The sort of education
+appropriate to the development of a democratic community was then
+explicitly taken as the criterion of the further, more detailed analysis
+of education.
+
+II. This analysis, based upon the democratic criterion, was seen to
+imply the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing of
+experience, of such a nature as to increase its recognized meaning or
+social content, and as to increase the capacity of individuals to act as
+directive guardians of this reorganization. (See Chapters VI-VII.)
+This distinction was then used to outline the respective characters of
+subject matter and method. It also defined their unity, since method
+in study and learning upon this basis is just the consciously directed
+movement of reorganization of the subject matter of experience. From
+this point of view the main principles of method and subject matter of
+learning were developed (Chapters XIII-XIV.)
+
+III. Save for incidental criticisms designed to illustrate principles
+by force of contrast, this phase of the discussion took for granted the
+democratic criterion and its application in present social life. In the
+subsequent chapters (XVIII-XXII) we considered the present limitation of
+its actual realization. They were found to spring from the notion that
+experience consists of a variety of segregated domains, or interests,
+each having its own independent value, material, and method, each
+checking every other, and, when each is kept properly bounded by the
+others, forming a kind of "balance of powers" in education. We then
+proceeded to an analysis of the various assumptions underlying this
+segregation. On the practical side, they were found to have their cause
+in the divisions of society into more or less rigidly marked-off classes
+and groups--in other words, in obstruction to full and flexible social
+interaction and intercourse. These social ruptures of continuity were
+seen to have their intellectual formulation in various dualisms
+or antitheses--such as that of labor and leisure, practical and
+intellectual activity, man and nature, individuality and association,
+culture and vocation. In this discussion, we found that these different
+issues have their counterparts in formulations which have been made in
+classic philosophic systems; and that they involve the chief problems of
+philosophy--such as mind (or spirit) and matter, body and mind, the
+mind and the world, the individual and his relationships to others, etc.
+Underlying these various separations we found the fundamental assumption
+to be an isolation of mind from activity involving physical conditions,
+bodily organs, material appliances, and natural objects. Consequently,
+there was indicated a philosophy which recognizes the origin, place, and
+function of mind in an activity which controls the environment. Thus we
+have completed the circuit and returned to the conceptions of the
+first portion of this book: such as the biological continuity of human
+impulses and instincts with natural energies; the dependence of the
+growth of mind upon participation in conjoint activities having a common
+purpose; the influence of the physical environment through the uses made
+of it in the social medium; the necessity of utilization of individual
+variations in desire and thinking for a progressively developing
+society; the essential unity of method and subject matter; the intrinsic
+continuity of ends and means; the recognition of mind as thinking which
+perceives and tests the meanings of behavior. These conceptions are
+consistent with the philosophy which sees intelligence to be the
+purposive reorganization, through action, of the material of experience;
+and they are inconsistent with each of the dualistic philosophies
+mentioned.
+
+2. The Nature of Philosophy. Our further task is to extract and make
+explicit the idea of philosophy implicit in these considerations. We
+have already virtually described, though not defined, philosophy in
+terms of the problems with which it deals; and we have pointed out that
+these problems originate in the conflicts and difficulties of social
+life. The problems are such things as the relations of mind and matter;
+body and soul; humanity and physical nature; the individual and the
+social; theory--or knowing, and practice--or doing. The philosophical
+systems which formulate these problems record the main lineaments and
+difficulties of contemporary social practice. They bring to explicit
+consciousness what men have come to think, in virtue of the quality of
+their current experience, about nature, themselves, and the reality they
+conceive to include or to govern both.
+
+As we might expect, then, philosophy has generally been defined in ways
+which imply a certain totality, generality, and ultimateness of both
+subject matter and method. With respect to subject matter, philosophy
+is an attempt to _comprehend_--that is, to gather together the varied
+details of the world and of life into a single inclusive whole, which
+shall either be a unity, or, as in the dualistic systems, shall reduce
+the plural details to a small number of ultimate principles. On the
+side of the attitude of the philosopher and of those who accept his
+conclusions, there is the endeavor to attain as unified, consistent,
+and complete an outlook upon experience as is possible. This aspect is
+expressed in the word 'philosophy'--love of wisdom. Whenever philosophy
+has been taken seriously, it has always been assumed that it signified
+achieving a wisdom which would influence the conduct of life. Witness
+the fact that almost all ancient schools of philosophy were also
+organized ways of living, those who accepted their tenets being
+committed to certain distinctive modes of conduct; witness the intimate
+connection of philosophy with the theology of the Roman church in the
+middle ages, its frequent association with religious interests, and, at
+national crises, its association with political struggles.
+
+This direct and intimate connection of philosophy with an outlook upon
+life obviously differentiates philosophy from science. Particular facts
+and laws of science evidently influence conduct. They suggest things to
+do and not do, and provide means of execution. When science denotes not
+simply a report of the particular facts discovered about the world but
+a _general attitude_ toward it--as distinct from special things to do
+--it merges into philosophy. For an underlying disposition represents an
+attitude not to this and that thing nor even to the aggregate of known
+things, but to the considerations which govern conduct.
+
+Hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of subject
+matter. For this reason, the definition of such conceptions as
+generality, totality, and ultimateness is most readily reached from
+the side of the disposition toward the world which they connote. In any
+literal and quantitative sense, these terms do not apply to the subject
+matter of knowledge, for completeness and finality are out of the
+question. The very nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process
+forbids. In a less rigid sense, they apply to science rather than to
+philosophy. For obviously it is to mathematics, physics, chemistry,
+biology, anthropology, history, etc. that we must go, not to philosophy,
+to find out the facts of the world. It is for the sciences to say what
+generalizations are tenable about the world and what they specifically
+are. But when we ask what sort of permanent disposition of action
+toward the world the scientific disclosures exact of us we are raising a
+philosophic question.
+
+
+From this point of view, "totality" does not mean the hopeless task of a
+quantitative summation. It means rather consistency of mode of response
+in reference to the plurality of events which occur. Consistency does
+not mean literal identity; for since the same thing does not happen
+twice, an exact repetition of a reaction involves some maladjustment.
+Totality means continuity--the carrying on of a former habit of action
+with the readaptation necessary to keep it alive and growing. Instead of
+signifying a ready-made complete scheme of action, it means keeping
+the balance in a multitude of diverse actions, so that each borrows and
+gives significance to every other. Any person who is open-minded
+and sensitive to new perceptions, and who has concentration and
+responsibility in connecting them has, in so far, a philosophic
+disposition. One of the popular senses of philosophy is calm and
+endurance in the face of difficulty and loss; it is even supposed to be
+a power to bear pain without complaint. This meaning is a tribute to the
+influence of the Stoic philosophy rather than an attribute of
+philosophy in general. But in so far as it suggests that the wholeness
+characteristic of philosophy is a power to learn, or to extract meaning,
+from even the unpleasant vicissitudes of experience and to embody what
+is learned in an ability to go on learning, it is justified in any
+scheme. An analogous interpretation applies to the generality
+and ultimateness of philosophy. Taken literally, they are absurd
+pretensions; they indicate insanity. Finality does not mean, however,
+that experience is ended and exhausted, but means the disposition to
+penetrate to deeper levels of meaning--to go below the surface and find
+out the connections of any event or object, and to keep at it. In like
+manner the philosophic attitude is general in the sense that it is
+averse to taking anything as isolated; it tries to place an act in its
+context--which constitutes its significance. It is of assistance to
+connect philosophy with thinking in its distinction from knowledge.
+Knowledge, grounded knowledge, is science; it represents objects which
+have been settled, ordered, disposed of rationally. Thinking, on
+the other hand, is prospective in reference. It is occasioned by an
+unsettlement and it aims at overcoming a disturbance. Philosophy is
+thinking what the known demands of us--what responsive attitude it
+exacts. It is an idea of what is possible, not a record of accomplished
+fact. Hence it is hypothetical, like all thinking. It presents an
+assignment of something to be done--something to be tried. Its value
+lies not in furnishing solutions (which can be achieved only in action)
+but in defining difficulties and suggesting methods for dealing with
+them. Philosophy might almost be described as thinking which has become
+conscious of itself--which has generalized its place, function, and
+value in experience.
+
+More specifically, the demand for a "total" attitude arises because
+there is the need of integration in action of the conflicting various
+interests in life. Where interests are so superficial that they glide
+readily into one another, or where they are not sufficiently organized
+to come into conflict with one another, the need for philosophy is not
+perceptible. But when the scientific interest conflicts with, say, the
+religious, or the economic with the scientific or aesthetic, or when the
+conservative concern for order is at odds with the progressive interest
+in freedom, or when institutionalism clashes with individuality, there
+is a stimulus to discover some more comprehensive point of view from
+which the divergencies may be brought together, and consistency or
+continuity of experience recovered. Often these clashes may be settled
+by an individual for himself; the area of the struggle of aims is
+limited and a person works out his own rough accommodations. Such
+homespun philosophies are genuine and often adequate. But they do not
+result in systems of philosophy. These arise when the discrepant claims
+of different ideals of conduct affect the community as a whole, and the
+need for readjustment is general. These traits explain some things which
+are often brought as objections against philosophies, such as the
+part played in them by individual speculation, and their controversial
+diversity, as well as the fact that philosophy seems to be repeatedly
+occupied with much the same questions differently stated. Without doubt,
+all these things characterize historic philosophies more or less. But
+they are not objections to philosophy so much as they are to human
+nature, and even to the world in which human nature is set. If there
+are genuine uncertainties in life, philosophies must reflect that
+uncertainty. If there are different diagnoses of the cause of a
+difficulty, and different proposals for dealing with it; if, that is,
+the conflict of interests is more or less embodied in different sets of
+persons, there must be divergent competing philosophies. With respect
+to what has happened, sufficient evidence is all that is needed to bring
+agreement and certainty. The thing itself is sure. But with reference
+to what it is wise to do in a complicated situation, discussion is
+inevitable precisely because the thing itself is still indeterminate.
+One would not expect a ruling class living at ease to have the same
+philosophy of life as those who were having a hard struggle for
+existence. If the possessing and the dispossessed had the same
+fundamental disposition toward the world, it would argue either
+insincerity or lack of seriousness. A community devoted to industrial
+pursuits, active in business and commerce, is not likely to see the
+needs and possibilities of life in the same way as a country with high
+aesthetic culture and little enterprise in turning the energies of
+nature to mechanical account. A social group with a fairly continuous
+history will respond mentally to a crisis in a very different way from
+one which has felt the shock of abrupt breaks. Even if the same data
+were present, they would be evaluated differently. But the different
+sorts of experience attending different types of life prevent just the
+same data from presenting themselves, as well as lead to a different
+scheme of values. As for the similarity of problems, this is often
+more a matter of appearance than of fact, due to old discussions being
+translated into the terms of contemporary perplexities. But in certain
+fundamental respects the same predicaments of life recur from time to
+time with only such changes as are due to change of social context,
+including the growth of the sciences.
+
+The fact that philosophic problems arise because of widespread and
+widely felt difficulties in social practice is disguised because
+philosophers become a specialized class which uses a technical language,
+unlike the vocabulary in which the direct difficulties are stated. But
+where a system becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of
+interests calling for some program of social adjustment may always be
+discovered. At this point, the intimate connection between philosophy
+and education appears. In fact, education offers a vantage ground
+from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical,
+significance of philosophic discussions. The student of philosophy "in
+itself" is always in danger of taking it as so much nimble or severe
+intellectual exercise--as something said by philosophers and concerning
+them alone. But when philosophic issues are approached from the side
+of the kind of mental disposition to which they correspond, or the
+differences in educational practice they make when acted upon, the
+life-situations which they formulate can never be far from view. If
+a theory makes no difference in educational endeavor, it must be
+artificial. The educational point of view enables one to envisage the
+philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at
+home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice.
+If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming
+fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature
+and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of
+education. Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic--or verbal--or
+a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its
+auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect
+in conduct. Public agitation, propaganda, legislative and administrative
+action are effective in producing the change of disposition which a
+philosophy indicates as desirable, but only in the degree in which they
+are educative--that is to say, in the degree in which they modify mental
+and moral attitudes. And at the best, such methods are compromised by
+the fact they are used with those whose habits are already largely set,
+while education of youth has a fairer and freer field of operation.
+On the other side, the business of schooling tends to become a routine
+empirical affair unless its aims and methods are animated by such a
+broad and sympathetic survey of its place in contemporary life as it is
+the business of philosophy to provide. Positive science always implies
+practically the ends which the community is concerned to achieve.
+Isolated from such ends, it is matter of indifference whether its
+disclosures are used to cure disease or to spread it; to increase the
+means of sustenance of life or to manufacture war material to wipe
+life out. If society is interested in one of these things rather than
+another, science shows the way of attainment. Philosophy thus has a
+double task: that of criticizing existing aims with respect to the
+existing state of science, pointing out values which have become
+obsolete with the command of new resources, showing what values are
+merely sentimental because there are no means for their realization; and
+also that of interpreting the results of specialized science in their
+bearing on future social endeavor. It is impossible that it should have
+any success in these tasks without educational equivalents as to what to
+do and what not to do. For philosophic theory has no Aladdin's lamp
+to summon into immediate existence the values which it intellectually
+constructs. In the mechanical arts, the sciences become methods of
+managing things so as to utilize their energies for recognized aims.
+By the educative arts philosophy may generate methods of utilizing
+the energies of human beings in accord with serious and thoughtful
+conceptions of life. Education is the laboratory in which philosophic
+distinctions become concrete and are tested.
+
+It is suggestive that European philosophy originated (among the
+Athenians) under the direct pressure of educational questions. The
+earlier history of philosophy, developed by the Greeks in Asia Minor and
+Italy, so far as its range of topics is concerned, is mainly a chapter
+in the history of science rather than of philosophy as that word is
+understood to-day. It had nature for its subject, and speculated as to
+how things are made and changed. Later the traveling teachers, known as
+the Sophists, began to apply the results and the methods of the natural
+philosophers to human conduct.
+
+When the Sophists, the first body of professional educators in Europe,
+instructed the youth in virtue, the political arts, and the management
+of city and household, philosophy began to deal with the relation of
+the individual to the universal, to some comprehensive class, or to some
+group; the relation of man and nature, of tradition and reflection, of
+knowledge and action. Can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be
+learned, they asked? What is learning? It has to do with knowledge.
+What, then, is knowledge? How is it achieved? Through the senses, or by
+apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has undergone
+a preliminary logical discipline? Since learning is coming to know, it
+involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom, from privation to fullness
+from defect to perfection, from non-being to being, in the Greek way
+of putting it. How is such a transition possible? Is change, becoming,
+development really possible and if so, how? And supposing such questions
+answered, what is the relation of instruction, of knowledge, to virtue?
+This last question led to opening the problem of the relation of reason
+to action, of theory to practice, since virtue clearly dwelt in action.
+Was not knowing, the activity of reason, the noblest attribute of man?
+And consequently was not purely intellectual activity itself the highest
+of all excellences, compared with which the virtues of neighborliness
+and the citizen's life were secondary? Or, on the other hand, was
+the vaunted intellectual knowledge more than empty and vain pretense,
+demoralizing to character and destructive of the social ties that bound
+men together in their community life? Was not the only true, because the
+only moral, life gained through obedient habituation to the customary
+practices of the community? And was not the new education an enemy to
+good citizenship, because it set up a rival standard to the established
+traditions of the community?
+
+In the course of two or three generations such questions were cut loose
+from their original practical bearing upon education and were
+discussed on their own account; that is, as matters of philosophy as an
+independent branch of inquiry. But the fact that the stream of European
+philosophical thought arose as a theory of educational procedure
+remains an eloquent witness to the intimate connection of philosophy and
+education. "Philosophy of education" is not an external application of
+ready-made ideas to a system of practice having a radically different
+origin and purpose: it is only an explicit formulation of the problems
+of the formation of right mental and moral habitudes in respect to
+the difficulties of contemporary social life. The most penetrating
+definition of philosophy which can be given is, then, that it is the
+theory of education in its most general phases.
+
+The reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social ideals and
+methods thus go hand in hand. If there is especial need of educational
+reconstruction at the present time, if this need makes urgent a
+reconsideration of the basic ideas of traditional philosophic systems,
+it is because of the thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying
+the advance of science, the industrial revolution, and the development
+of democracy. Such practical changes cannot take place without demanding
+an educational reformation to meet them, and without leading men to ask
+what ideas and ideals are implicit in these social changes, and what
+revisions they require of the ideas and ideals which are inherited
+from older and unlike cultures. Incidentally throughout the whole book,
+explicitly in the last few chapters, we have been dealing with just
+these questions as they affect the relationship of mind and body, theory
+and practice, man and nature, the individual and social, etc. In our
+concluding chapters we shall sum up the prior discussions with respect
+first to the philosophy of knowledge, and then to the philosophy of
+morals.
+
+Summary. After a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues
+implicit in the previous discussions, philosophy was defined as the
+generalized theory of education. Philosophy was stated to be a form
+of thinking, which, like all thinking, finds its origin in what is
+uncertain in the subject matter of experience, which aims to locate the
+nature of the perplexity and to frame hypotheses for its clearing up to
+be tested in action. Philosophic thinking has for its differentia the
+fact that the uncertainties with which it deals are found in widespread
+social conditions and aims, consisting in a conflict of organized
+interests and institutional claims. Since the only way of bringing
+about a harmonious readjustment of the opposed tendencies is through a
+modification of emotional and intellectual disposition, philosophy is
+at once an explicit formulation of the various interests of life and a
+propounding of points of view and methods through which a better balance
+of interests may be effected. Since education is the process through
+which the needed transformation may be accomplished and not remain a
+mere hypothesis as to what is desirable, we reach a justification of the
+statement that philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately
+conducted practice.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
+
+1. Continuity versus Dualism. A number of theories of knowing have been
+criticized in the previous pages. In spite of their differences from one
+another, they all agree in one fundamental respect which contrasts
+with the theory which has been positively advanced. The latter
+assumes continuity; the former state or imply certain basic divisions,
+separations, or antitheses, technically called dualisms. The origin of
+these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walls which mark off
+social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and
+poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers
+mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent
+to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with
+isolated subject matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social
+condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is
+to be a sincere account of experience. When it gets beyond dualism--as
+many philosophies do in form--it can only be by appeal to something
+higher than anything found in experience, by a flight to some
+transcendental realm. And in denying duality in name such theories
+restore it in fact, for they end in a division between things of this
+world as mere appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality.
+
+So far as these divisions persist and others are added to them, each
+leaves its mark upon the educational system, until the scheme of
+education, taken as a whole, is a deposit of various purposes and
+procedures. The outcome is that kind of check and balance of segregated
+factors and values which has been described. (See Chapter XVIII.)
+The present discussion is simply a formulation, in the terminology of
+philosophy, of various antithetical conceptions involved in the theory
+of knowing. In the first place, there is the opposition of empirical and
+higher rational knowing. The first is connected with everyday affairs,
+serves the purposes of the ordinary individual who has no specialized
+intellectual
+
+pursuit, and brings his wants into some kind of working connection with
+the immediate environment. Such knowing is depreciated, if not despised,
+as purely utilitarian, lacking in cultural significance. Rational
+knowledge is supposed to be something which touches reality in ultimate,
+intellectual fashion; to be pursued for its own sake and properly to
+terminate in purely theoretical insight, not debased by application
+in behavior. Socially, the distinction corresponds to that of the
+intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a learned
+class remote from concern with the means of living. Philosophically, the
+difference turns about the distinction of the particular and universal.
+Experience is an aggregate of more or less isolated particulars,
+acquaintance with each of which must be separately made. Reason deals
+with universals, with general principles, with laws, which lie above the
+welter of concrete details. In the educational precipitate, the pupil
+is supposed to have to learn, on one hand, a lot of items of specific
+information, each standing by itself, and upon the other hand, to
+become familiar with a certain number of laws and general relationships.
+Geography, as often taught, illustrates the former; mathematics, beyond
+the rudiments of figuring, the latter. For all practical purposes, they
+represent two independent worlds.
+
+Another antithesis is suggested by the two senses of the word
+"learning." On the one hand, learning is the sum total of what is
+known, as that is handed down by books and learned men. It is something
+external, an accumulation of cognitions as one might store material
+commodities in a warehouse. Truth exists ready-made somewhere. Study is
+then the process by which an individual draws on what is in storage. On
+the other hand, learning means something which the individual does when
+he studies. It is an active, personally conducted affair. The dualism
+here is between knowledge as something external, or, as it is often
+called, objective, and knowing as something purely internal, subjective,
+psychical. There is, on one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on
+the other, a ready-made mind equipped with a faculty of knowing--if it
+only wills to exercise it, which it is often strangely loath to do. The
+separation, often touched upon, between subject matter and method is the
+educational equivalent of this dualism. Socially the distinction has
+to do with the part of life which is dependent upon authority and
+that where individuals are free to advance. Another dualism is that of
+activity and passivity in knowing. Purely empirical and physical things
+are often supposed to be known by receiving impressions. Physical
+things somehow stamp themselves upon the mind or convey themselves
+into consciousness by means of the sense organs. Rational knowledge and
+knowledge of spiritual things is supposed, on the contrary, to spring
+from activity initiated within the mind, an activity carried on better
+if it is kept remote from all sullying touch of the senses and external
+objects. The distinction between sense training and object lessons
+and laboratory exercises, and pure ideas contained in books, and
+appropriated--so it is thought--by some miraculous output of mental
+energy, is a fair expression in education of this distinction. Socially,
+it reflects a division between those who are controlled by direct
+concern with things and those who are free to cultivate themselves.
+
+Another current opposition is that said to exist between the intellect
+and the emotions. The emotions are conceived to be purely private and
+personal, having nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in
+apprehending facts and truths,--except perhaps the single emotion of
+intellectual curiosity. The intellect is a pure light; the emotions are
+a disturbing heat. The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions
+turn inward to considerations of personal advantage and loss. Thus in
+education we have that systematic depreciation of interest which
+has been noted, plus the necessity in practice, with most pupils, of
+recourse to extraneous and irrelevant rewards and penalties in order to
+induce the person who has a mind (much as his clothes have a pocket) to
+apply that mind to the truths to be known. Thus we have the spectacle
+of professional educators decrying appeal to interest while they uphold
+with great dignity the need of reliance upon examinations, marks,
+promotions and emotions, prizes, and the time-honored paraphernalia of
+rewards and punishments. The effect of this situation in crippling
+the teacher's sense of humor has not received the attention which it
+deserves.
+
+All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and doing,
+theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of action and
+the body as its organ and means. We shall not repeat what has been said
+about the source of this dualism in the division of society into a class
+laboring with their muscles for material sustenance and a class
+which, relieved from economic pressure, devotes itself to the arts of
+expression and social direction. Nor is it necessary to speak again
+of the educational evils which spring from the separation. We shall be
+content to summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of
+this conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity.
+(i) The advance of physiology and the psychology associated with it have
+shown the connection of mental activity with that of the nervous system.
+Too often recognition of connection has stopped short at this point; the
+older dualism of soul and body has been replaced by that of the brain
+and the rest of the body. But in fact the nervous system is only
+a specialized mechanism for keeping all bodily activities working
+together. Instead of being isolated from them, as an organ of knowing
+from organs of motor response, it is the organ by which they interact
+responsively with one another. The brain is essentially an organ
+for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli
+received from the environment and responses directed upon it. Note that
+the adjusting is reciprocal; the brain not only enables organic activity
+to be brought to bear upon any object of the environment in response to
+a sensory stimulation, but this response also determines what the next
+stimulus will be. See what happens, for example, when a carpenter is
+at work upon a board, or an etcher upon his plate--or in any case of a
+consecutive activity. While each motor response is adjusted to the
+state of affairs indicated through the sense organs, that motor response
+shapes the next sensory stimulus. Generalizing this illustration, the
+brain is the machinery for a constant reorganizing of activity so as to
+maintain its continuity; that is to say, to make such modifications in
+future action as are required because of what has already been done. The
+continuity of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it from a routine
+repetition of identically the same motion, and from a random
+activity where there is nothing cumulative. What makes it continuous,
+consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act prepares the way
+for later acts, while these take account of or reckon with the results
+already attained--the basis of all responsibility. No one who has
+realized the full force of the facts of the connection of knowing with
+the nervous system and of the nervous system with the readjusting of
+activity continuously to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing
+has to do with reorganizing activity, instead of being something
+isolated from all activity, complete on its own account.
+
+(ii) The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its discovery
+of evolution. For the philosophic significance of the doctrine of
+evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon continuity of simpler
+and more complex organic forms until we reach man. The development of
+organic forms begins with structures where the adjustment of environment
+and organism is obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is
+at a minimum. As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a greater
+number of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a more and more
+marked role, for it has a larger span of the future to forecast and plan
+for. The effect upon the theory of knowing is to displace the notion
+that it is the activity of a mere onlooker or spectator of the world,
+the notion which goes with the idea of knowing as something complete in
+itself. For the doctrine of organic development means that the living
+creature is a part of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes,
+and making itself secure in its precarious dependence only as it
+intellectually identifies itself with the things about it, and,
+forecasting the future consequences of what is going on, shapes its own
+activities accordingly. If the living, experiencing being is an intimate
+participant in the activities of the world to which it belongs, then
+knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable in the degree in which it
+is effective. It cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned spectator.
+
+(iii) The development of the experimental method as the method of
+getting knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not mere
+opinion--the method of both discovery and proof--is the remaining great
+force in bringing about a transformation in the theory of knowledge.
+The experimental method has two sides. (i) On one hand, it means that we
+have no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has
+actually produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with
+and confirm the conception entertained. Short of such specific changes,
+our beliefs are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and
+are to be entertained tentatively and to be utilized as indications of
+experiments to be tried. (ii) On the other hand, the experimental method
+of thinking signifies that thinking is of avail; that it is of avail in
+just the degree in which the anticipation of future consequences is
+made on the basis of thorough observation of present conditions.
+Experimentation, in other words, is not equivalent to blind reacting.
+Such surplus activity--a surplus with reference to what has been
+observed and is now anticipated--is indeed an unescapable factor in all
+our behavior, but it is not experiment save as consequences are noted
+and are used to make predictions and plans in similar situations in the
+future. The more the meaning of the experimental method is perceived,
+the more our trying out of a certain way of treating the material
+resources and obstacles which confront us embodies a prior use of
+intelligence. What we call magic was with respect to many things the
+experimental method of the savage; but for him to try was to try his
+luck, not his ideas. The scientific experimental method is, on
+the contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even when practically--or
+immediately--unsuccessful, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we learn
+from our failures when our endeavors are seriously thoughtful.
+
+The experimental method is new as a scientific resource--as a
+systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as
+a practical device. Hence it is not surprising that men have not
+recognized its full scope. For the most part, its significance is
+regarded as belonging to certain technical and merely physical matters.
+It will doubtless take a long time to secure the perception that it
+holds equally as to the forming and testing of ideas in social and
+moral matters. Men still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed
+by authority, to relieve them of the trouble of thinking and the
+responsibility of directing their activity by thought. They tend to
+confine their own thinking to a consideration of which one among the
+rival systems of dogma they will accept. Hence the schools are better
+adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers. But
+every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to
+aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative methods
+of forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the past, and to
+transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active concern
+with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing temporal reach
+and deploying greater range of things in space. In time the theory of
+knowing must be derived from the practice which is most successful in
+making knowledge; and then that theory will be employed to improve the
+methods which are less successful.
+
+2. Schools of Method. There are various systems of philosophy with
+characteristically different conceptions of the method of knowing. Some
+of them are named scholasticism, sensationalism, rationalism, idealism,
+realism, empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, etc. Many of
+them have been criticized in connection with the discussion of some
+educational problem. We are here concerned with them as involving
+deviations from that method which has proved most effective in achieving
+knowledge, for a consideration of the deviations may render clearer
+the true place of knowledge in experience. In brief, the function
+of knowledge is to make one experience freely available in other
+experiences. The word "freely" marks the difference between the
+principle of knowledge and that of habit. Habit means that an individual
+undergoes a modification through an experience, which modification forms
+a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction
+in the future. Thus it also has the function of making one experience
+available in subsequent experiences. Within certain limits, it performs
+this function successfully. But habit, apart from knowledge, does not
+make allowance for change of conditions, for novelty. Prevision of
+change is not part of its scope, for habit assumes the essential
+likeness of the new situation with the old. Consequently it often leads
+astray, or comes between a person and the successful performance of
+his task, just as the skill, based on habit alone, of the mechanic
+will desert him when something unexpected occurs in the running of the
+machine. But a man who understands the machine is the man who knows what
+he is about. He knows the conditions under which a given habit works,
+and is in a position to introduce the changes which will readapt it to
+new conditions.
+
+In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an
+object which determine its applicability in a given situation. To
+take an extreme example; savages react to a flaming comet as they are
+accustomed to react to other events which threaten the security of
+their life. Since they try to frighten wild animals or their enemies by
+shrieks, beating of gongs, brandishing of weapons, etc., they use the
+same methods to scare away the comet. To us, the method is plainly
+absurd--so absurd that we fail to note that savages are simply falling
+back upon habit in a way which exhibits its limitations. The only reason
+we do not act in some analogous fashion is because we do not take
+the comet as an isolated, disconnected event, but apprehend it in
+its connections with other events. We place it, as we say, in the
+astronomical system. We respond to its connections and not simply to
+the immediate occurrence. Thus our attitude to it is much freer. We may
+approach it, so to speak, from any one of the angles provided by its
+connections. We can bring into play, as we deem wise, any one of the
+habits appropriate to any one of the connected objects. Thus we get at
+a new event indirectly instead of immediately--by invention, ingenuity,
+resourcefulness. An ideally perfect knowledge would represent such a
+network of interconnections that any past experience would offer a
+point of advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new
+experience. In fine, while a habit apart from knowledge supplies us with
+a single fixed method of attack, knowledge means that selection may be
+made from a much wider range of habits.
+
+Two aspects of this more general and freer availability of former
+experiences for subsequent ones may be distinguished. (See ante, p. 77.)
+(i) One, the more tangible, is increased power of control. What cannot
+be managed directly may be handled indirectly; or we can interpose
+barriers between us and undesirable consequences; or we may evade them
+if we cannot overcome them. Genuine knowledge has all the practical
+value attaching to efficient habits in any case. (ii) But it also
+increases the meaning, the experienced significance, attaching to an
+experience. A situation to which we respond capriciously or by routine
+has only a minimum of conscious significance; we get nothing mentally
+from it. But wherever knowledge comes into play in determining a new
+experience there is mental reward; even if we fail practically in
+getting the needed control we have the satisfaction of experiencing a
+meaning instead of merely reacting physically.
+
+While the content of knowledge is what has happened, what is taken
+as finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of knowledge
+is future or prospective. For knowledge furnishes the means of
+understanding or giving meaning to what is still going on and what is
+to be done. The knowledge of a physician is what he has found out by
+personal acquaintance and by study of what others have ascertained and
+recorded. But it is knowledge to him because it supplies the resources
+by which he interprets the unknown things which confront him, fills out
+the partial obvious facts with connected suggested phenomena, foresees
+their probable future, and makes plans accordingly. When knowledge is
+cut off from use in giving meaning to what is blind and baffling,
+it drops out of consciousness entirely or else becomes an object of
+aesthetic contemplation. There is much emotional satisfaction to be had
+from a survey of the symmetry and order of possessed knowledge, and the
+satisfaction is a legitimate one. But this contemplative attitude is
+aesthetic, not intellectual. It is the same sort of joy that comes from
+viewing a finished picture or a well composed landscape. It would make
+no difference if the subject matter were totally different, provided
+it had the same harmonious organization. Indeed, it would make no
+difference if it were wholly invented, a play of fancy. Applicability to
+the world means not applicability to what is past and gone--that is out
+of the question by the nature of the case; it means applicability to
+what is still going on, what is still unsettled, in the moving scene in
+which we are implicated. The very fact that we so easily overlook
+this trait, and regard statements of what is past and out of reach as
+knowledge is because we assume the continuity of past and future. We
+cannot entertain the conception of a world in which knowledge of its
+past would not be helpful in forecasting and giving meaning to its
+future. We ignore the prospective reference just because it is so
+irretrievably implied.
+
+Yet many of the philosophic schools of method which have been mentioned
+transform the ignoring into a virtual denial. They regard knowledge as
+something complete in itself irrespective of its availability in dealing
+with what is yet to be. And it is this omission which vitiates them
+and which makes them stand as sponsors for educational methods which an
+adequate conception of knowledge condemns. For one has only to call to
+mind what is sometimes treated in schools as acquisition of knowledge
+to realize how lacking it is in any fruitful connection with the ongoing
+experience of the students--how largely it seems to be believed that the
+mere appropriation of subject matter which happens to be stored in books
+constitutes knowledge. No matter how true what is learned to those who
+found it out and in whose experience it functioned, there is nothing
+which makes it knowledge to the pupils. It might as well be something
+about Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the
+individual's own life.
+
+At the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to social
+conditions. It was a method for systematizing and lending rational
+sanction to material accepted on authority. This subject matter meant
+so much that it vitalized the defining and systematizing brought to
+bear upon it. Under present conditions the scholastic method, for most
+persons, means a form of knowing which has no especial connection
+with any particular subject matter. It includes making distinctions,
+definitions, divisions, and classifications for the mere sake of making
+them--with no objective in experience. The view of thought as a purely
+physical activity having its own forms, which are applied to any
+material as a seal may be stamped on any plastic stuff, the view which
+underlies what is termed formal logic is essentially the scholastic
+method generalized. The doctrine of formal discipline in education is
+the natural counterpart of the scholastic method.
+
+The contrasting theories of the method of knowledge which go by the name
+of sensationalism and rationalism correspond to an exclusive emphasis
+upon the particular and the general respectively--or upon bare facts on
+one side and bare relations on the other. In real knowledge, there is a
+particularizing and a generalizing function working together. So far as
+a situation is confused, it has to be cleared up; it has to be resolved
+into details, as sharply defined as possible. Specified facts and
+qualities constitute the elements of the problem to be dealt with, and
+it is through our sense organs that they are specified. As setting
+forth the problem, they may well be termed particulars, for they are
+fragmentary. Since our task is to discover their connections and to
+recombine them, for us at the time they are partial. They are to be
+given meaning; hence, just as they stand, they lack it. Anything which
+is to be known, whose meaning has still to be made out, offers itself as
+particular. But what is already known, if it has been worked over with
+a view to making it applicable to intellectually mastering new
+particulars, is general in function. Its function of introducing
+connection into what is otherwise unconnected constitutes its
+generality. Any fact is general if we use it to give meaning to the
+elements of a new experience. "Reason" is just the ability to bring the
+subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the significance
+of the subject matter of a new experience. A person is reasonable in
+the degree in which he is habitually open to seeing an event which
+immediately strikes his senses not as an isolated thing but in its
+connection with the common experience of mankind.
+
+Without the particulars as they are discriminated by the active
+responses of sense organs, there is no material for knowing and no
+intellectual growth. Without placing these particulars in the context of
+the meanings wrought out in the larger experience of the past--without
+the use of reason or thought--particulars are mere excitations or
+irritations. The mistake alike of the sensational and the rationalistic
+schools is that each fails to see that the function of sensory
+stimulation and thought is relative to reorganizing experience in
+applying the old to the new, thereby maintaining the continuity or
+consistency of life. The theory of the method of knowing which is
+advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature
+is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which
+purposely modifies the environment. It holds that knowledge in its
+strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual
+resources--of all the habits that render our action intelligent. Only
+that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to
+adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims and desires
+to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. Knowledge is
+not just something which we are now conscious of, but consists of the
+dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now happens.
+Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to
+consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by
+conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world in which we
+live.
+
+Summary. Such social divisions as interfere with free and full
+intercourse react to make the intelligence and knowing of members of
+the separated classes one-sided. Those whose experience has to do
+with utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve are practical
+empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings
+in whose active production they have had no share are practical
+rationalists. Those who come in direct contact with things and have to
+adapt their activities to them immediately are, in effect, realists;
+those who isolate the meanings of these things and put them in a
+religious or so-called spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect,
+idealists. Those concerned with progress, who are striving to change
+received beliefs, emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those
+whose chief business it is to withstand change and conserve received
+truth emphasize the universal and the fixed--and so on. Philosophic
+systems in their opposed theories of knowledge present an explicit
+formulation of the traits characteristic of these cut-off and one-sided
+segments of experience--one-sided because barriers to intercourse
+prevent the experience of one from being enriched and supplemented by
+that of others who are differently situated.
+
+In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free
+interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of
+knowledge which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is
+made available in giving direction and meaning to another. The recent
+advances in physiology, biology, and the logic of the experimental
+sciences supply the specific intellectual instrumentalities demanded to
+work out and formulate such a theory. Their educational equivalent
+is the connection of the acquisition of knowledge in the schools with
+activities, or occupations, carried on in a medium of associated life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals
+
+1. The Inner and the Outer.
+
+Since morality is concerned with conduct, any dualisms which are set
+up between mind and activity must reflect themselves in the theory of
+morals. Since the formulations of the separation in the philosophic
+theory of morals are used to justify and idealize the practices employed
+in moral training, a brief critical discussion is in place. It is a
+commonplace of educational theory that the establishing of character is
+a comprehensive aim of school instruction and discipline. Hence it is
+important that we should be on our guard against a conception of the
+relations of intelligence to character which hampers the realization
+of the aim, and on the look-out for the conditions which have to be
+provided in order that the aim may be successfully acted upon. The first
+obstruction which meets us is the currency of moral ideas which
+split the course of activity into two opposed factors, often named
+respectively the inner and outer, or the spiritual and the physical.
+This division is a culmination of the dualism of mind and the world,
+soul and body, end and means, which we have so frequently noted. In
+morals it takes the form of a sharp demarcation of the motive of
+action from its consequences, and of character from conduct. Motive and
+character are regarded as something purely "inner," existing exclusively
+in consciousness, while consequences and conduct are regarded as outside
+of mind, conduct having to do simply with the movements which carry out
+motives; consequences with what happens as a result. Different schools
+identify morality with either the inner state of mind or the outer act
+and results, each in separation from the other. Action with a purpose is
+deliberate; it involves a consciously foreseen end and a mental weighing
+of considerations pro and eon. It also involves a conscious state of
+longing or desire for the end. The deliberate choice of an aim and of
+a settled disposition of desire takes time. During this time complete
+overt action is suspended. A person who does not have his mind made up,
+does not know what to do. Consequently he postpones definite action
+so far as possible. His position may be compared to that of a man
+considering jumping across a ditch. If he were sure he could or could
+not make it, definite activity in some direction would occur. But if
+he considers, he is in doubt; he hesitates. During the time in which a
+single overt line of action is in suspense, his activities are confined
+to such redistributions of energy within the organism as will prepare
+a determinate course of action. He measures the ditch with his eyes;
+he brings himself taut to get a feel of the energy at his disposal; he
+looks about for other ways across, he reflects upon the importance of
+getting across. All this means an accentuation of consciousness; it
+means a turning in upon the individual's own attitudes, powers, wishes,
+etc.
+
+Obviously, however, this surging up of personal factors into conscious
+recognition is a part of the whole activity in its temporal development.
+There is not first a purely psychical process, followed abruptly by
+a radically different physical one. There is one continuous behavior,
+proceeding from a more uncertain, divided, hesitating state to a more
+overt, determinate, or complete state. The activity at first consists
+mainly of certain tensions and adjustments within the organism; as
+these are coordinated into a unified attitude, the organism as a whole
+acts--some definite act is undertaken. We may distinguish, of course,
+the more explicitly conscious phase of the continuous activity as mental
+or psychical. But that only identifies the mental or psychical to mean
+the indeterminate, formative state of an activity which in its fullness
+involves putting forth of overt energy to modify the environment.
+
+Our conscious thoughts, observations, wishes, aversions are important,
+because they represent inchoate, nascent activities. They fulfill their
+destiny in issuing, later on, into specific and perceptible acts. And
+these inchoate, budding organic readjustments are important because
+they are our sole escape from the dominion of routine habits and
+blind impulse. They are activities having a new meaning in process
+of development. Hence, normally, there is an accentuation of personal
+consciousness whenever our instincts and ready formed habits find
+themselves blocked by novel conditions. Then we are thrown back upon
+ourselves to reorganize our own attitude before proceeding to a definite
+and irretrievable course of action. Unless we try to drive our way
+through by sheer brute force, we must modify our organic resources to
+adapt them to the specific features of the situation in which we find
+ourselves. The conscious deliberating and desiring which precede overt
+action are, then, the methodic personal readjustment implied in activity
+in uncertain situations. This role of mind in continuous activity is not
+always maintained, however. Desires for something different, aversion to
+the given state of things caused by the blocking of successful activity,
+stimulates the imagination. The picture of a different state of things
+does not always function to aid ingenious observation and recollection
+to find a way out and on. Except where there is a disciplined
+disposition, the tendency is for the imagination to run loose. Instead
+of its objects being checked up by conditions with reference to their
+practicability in execution, they are allowed to develop because of
+the immediate emotional satisfaction which they yield. When we find the
+successful display of our energies checked by uncongenial surroundings,
+natural and social, the easiest way out is to build castles in the air
+and let them be a substitute for an actual achievement which involves
+the pains of thought. So in overt action we acquiesce, and build up
+an imaginary world in, mind. This break between thought and conduct is
+reflected in those theories which make a sharp separation between mind
+as inner and conduct and consequences as merely outer.
+
+For the split may be more than an incident of a particular individual's
+experience. The social situation may be such as to throw the class
+given to articulate reflection back into their own thoughts and desires
+without providing the means by which these ideas and aspirations can
+be used to reorganize the environment. Under such conditions, men
+take revenge, as it were, upon the alien and hostile environment by
+cultivating contempt for it, by giving it a bad name. They seek refuge
+and consolation within their own states of mind, their own imaginings
+and wishes, which they compliment by calling both more real and more
+ideal than the despised outer world. Such periods have recurred in
+history. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the influential
+moral systems of Stoicism, of monastic and popular Christianity and
+other religious movements of the day, took shape under the influence of
+such conditions. The more action which might express prevailing ideals
+was checked, the more the inner possession and cultivation of ideals was
+regarded as self-sufficient--as the essence of morality. The external
+world in which activity belongs was thought of as morally indifferent.
+Everything lay in having the right motive, even though that motive
+was not a moving force in the world. Much the same sort of situation
+recurred in Germany in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth
+centuries; it led to the Kantian insistence upon the good will as
+the sole moral good, the will being regarded as something complete in
+itself, apart from action and from the changes or consequences effected
+in the world. Later it led to any idealization of existing institutions
+as themselves the embodiment of reason.
+
+The purely internal morality of "meaning well," of having a good
+disposition regardless of what comes of it, naturally led to a reaction.
+This is generally known as either hedonism or utilitarianism. It was
+said in effect that the important thing morally is not what a man is
+inside of his own consciousness, but what he does--the consequences
+which issue, the charges he actually effects. Inner morality was
+attacked as sentimental, arbitrary, dogmatic, subjective--as giving men
+leave to dignify and shield any dogma congenial to their self-interest
+or any caprice occurring to imagination by calling it an intuition or an
+ideal of conscience. Results, conduct, are what counts; they afford
+the sole measure of morality. Ordinary morality, and hence that of the
+schoolroom, is likely to be an inconsistent compromise of both views.
+On one hand, certain states of feeling are made much of; the individual
+must "mean well," and if his intentions are good, if he had the right
+sort of emotional consciousness, he may be relieved of responsibility
+for full results in conduct. But since, on the other hand, certain
+things have to be done to meet the convenience and the requirements of
+others, and of social order in general, there is great insistence upon
+the doing of certain things, irrespective of whether the individual has
+any concern or intelligence in their doing. He must toe the mark; he
+must have his nose held to the grindstone; he must obey; he must form
+useful habits; he must learn self-control,--all of these precepts being
+understood in a way which emphasizes simply the immediate thing tangibly
+done, irrespective of the spirit of thought and desire in which it is
+done, and irrespective therefore of its effect upon other less obvious
+doings.
+
+It is hoped that the prior discussion has sufficiently elaborated the
+method by which both of these evils are avoided. One or both of these
+evils must result wherever individuals, whether young or old, cannot
+engage in a progressively cumulative undertaking under conditions which
+engage their interest and require their reflection. For only in such
+cases is it possible that the disposition of desire and thinking should
+be an organic factor in overt and obvious conduct. Given a consecutive
+activity embodying the student's own interest, where a definite result
+is to be obtained, and where neither routine habit nor the following of
+dictated directions nor capricious improvising will suffice, and
+there the rise of conscious purpose, conscious desire, and deliberate
+reflection are inevitable. They are inevitable as the spirit and quality
+of an activity having specific consequences, not as forming an isolated
+realm of inner consciousness.
+
+2. The Opposition of Duty and Interest. Probably there is no antithesis
+more often set up in moral discussion than that between acting
+from "principle" and from "interest." To act on principle is to act
+disinterestedly, according to a general law, which is above all personal
+considerations. To act according to interest is, so the allegation runs,
+to act selfishly, with one's own personal profit in view. It substitutes
+the changing expediency of the moment for devotion to unswerving moral
+law. The false idea of interest underlying this opposition has already
+been criticized (See Chapter X), but some moral aspects of the question
+will now be considered. A clew to the matter may be found in the fact
+that the supporters of the "interest" side of the controversy habitually
+use the term "self-interest." Starting from the premises that unless
+there is interest in an object or idea, there is no motive force, they
+end with the conclusion that even when a person claims to be acting from
+principle or from a sense of duty, he really acts as he does because
+there "is something in it" for himself. The premise is sound; the
+conclusion false. In reply the other school argues that since man is
+capable of generous self-forgetting and even self-sacrificing action, he
+is capable of acting without interest. Again the premise is sound, and
+the conclusion false. The error on both sides lies in a false notion of
+the relation of interest and the self.
+
+Both sides assume that the self is a fixed and hence isolated quantity.
+As a consequence, there is a rigid dilemma between acting for an
+interest of the self and without interest. If the self is something
+fixed antecedent to action, then acting from interest means trying to
+get more in the way of possessions for the self--whether in the way
+of fame, approval of others, power over others, pecuniary profit, or
+pleasure. Then the reaction from this view as a cynical depreciation
+of human nature leads to the view that men who act nobly act with no
+interest at all. Yet to an unbiased judgment it would appear plain that
+a man must be interested in what he is doing or he would not do it. A
+physician who continues to serve the sick in a plague at almost certain
+danger to his own life must be interested in the efficient performance
+of his profession--more interested in that than in the safety of his
+own bodily life. But it is distorting facts to say that this interest
+is merely a mask for an interest in something else which he gets by
+continuing his customary services--such as money or good repute or
+virtue; that it is only a means to an ulterior selfish end. The moment
+we recognize that the self is not something ready-made, but something
+in continuous formation through choice of action, the whole situation
+clears up. A man's interest in keeping at his work in spite of danger to
+life means that his self is found in that work; if he finally gave up,
+and preferred his personal safety or comfort, it would mean that he
+preferred to be that kind of a self. The mistake lies in making a
+separation between interest and self, and supposing that the latter
+is the end to which interest in objects and acts and others is a mere
+means. In fact, self and interest are two names for the same fact;
+the kind and amount of interest actively taken in a thing reveals
+and measures the quality of selfhood which exists. Bear in mind that
+interest means the active or moving identity of the self with a certain
+object, and the whole alleged dilemma falls to the ground.
+
+Unselfishness, for example, signifies neither lack of interest in
+what is done (that would mean only machine-like indifference) nor
+selflessness--which would mean absence of virility and character. As
+employed everywhere outside of this particular theoretical controversy,
+the term "unselfishness" refers to the kind of aims and objects which
+habitually interest a man. And if we make a mental survey of the kind
+of interests which evoke the use of this epithet, we shall see that
+they have two intimately associated features. (i) The generous self
+consciously identifies itself with the full range of relationships
+implied in its activity, instead of drawing a sharp line between itself
+and considerations which are excluded as alien or indifferent; (ii)
+it readjusts and expands its past ideas of itself to take in new
+consequences as they become perceptible. When the physician began
+his career he may not have thought of a pestilence; he may not have
+consciously identified himself with service under such conditions. But,
+if he has a normally growing or active self, when he finds that his
+vocation involves such risks, he willingly adopts them as integral
+portions of his activity. The wider or larger self which means inclusion
+instead of denial of relationships is identical with a self which
+enlarges in order to assume previously unforeseen ties.
+
+In such crises of readjustment--and the crisis may be slight as well
+as great--there may be a transitional conflict of "principle" with
+"interest." It is the nature of a habit to involve ease in the
+accustomed line of activity. It is the nature of a readjusting of habit
+to involve an effort which is disagreeable--something to which a man
+has deliberately to hold himself. In other words, there is a tendency to
+identify the self--or take interest--in what one has got used to, and to
+turn away the mind with aversion or irritation when an unexpected thing
+which involves an unpleasant modification of habit comes up. Since
+in the past one has done one's duty without having to face such a
+disagreeable circumstance, why not go on as one has been? To yield to
+this temptation means to narrow and isolate the thought of the self--to
+treat it as complete. Any habit, no matter how efficient in the past,
+which has become set, may at any time bring this temptation with it. To
+act from principle in such an emergency is not to act on some abstract
+principle, or duty at large; it is to act upon the principle of a course
+of action, instead of upon the circumstances which have attended it. The
+principle of a physician's conduct is its animating aim and spirit--the
+care for the diseased. The principle is not what justifies an activity,
+for the principle is but another name for the continuity of the
+activity. If the activity as manifested in its consequences is
+undesirable, to act upon principle is to accentuate its evil. And a man
+who prides himself upon acting upon principle is likely to be a man who
+insists upon having his own way without learning from experience what
+is the better way. He fancies that some abstract principle justifies
+his course of action without recognizing that his principle needs
+justification.
+
+Assuming, however, that school conditions are such as to provide
+desirable occupations, it is interest in the occupation as a whole--that
+is, in its continuous development--which keeps a pupil at his work in
+spite of temporary diversions and unpleasant obstacles. Where there is
+no activity having a growing significance, appeal to principle is either
+purely verbal, or a form of obstinate pride or an appeal to extraneous
+considerations clothed with a dignified title. Undoubtedly there are
+junctures where momentary interest ceases and attention flags, and
+where reinforcement is needed. But what carries a person over these hard
+stretches is not loyalty to duty in the abstract, but interest in his
+occupation. Duties are "offices"--they are the specific acts needed for
+the fulfilling of a function--or, in homely language--doing one's job.
+And the man who is genuinely interested in his job is the man who
+is able to stand temporary discouragement, to persist in the face of
+obstacles, to take the lean with the fat: he makes an interest out of
+meeting and overcoming difficulties and distraction.
+
+3. Intelligence and Character. A noteworthy paradox often accompanies
+discussions of morals. On the one hand, there is an identification of
+the moral with the rational. Reason is set up as a faculty from which
+proceed ultimate moral intuitions, and sometimes, as in the Kantian
+theory, it is said to supply the only proper moral motive. On the
+other hand, the value of concrete, everyday intelligence is constantly
+underestimated, and even deliberately depreciated. Morals is often
+thought to be an affair with which ordinary knowledge has nothing to
+do. Moral knowledge is thought to be a thing apart, and conscience is
+thought of as something radically different from consciousness. This
+separation, if valid, is of especial significance for education.
+Moral education in school is practically hopeless when we set up the
+development of character as a supreme end, and at the same time treat
+the acquiring of knowledge and the development of understanding, which
+of necessity occupy the chief part of school time, as having nothing
+to do with character. On such a basis, moral education is inevitably
+reduced to some kind of catechetical instruction, or lessons about
+morals. Lessons "about morals" signify as matter of course lessons
+in what other people think about virtues and duties. It amounts to
+something only in the degree in which pupils happen to be already
+animated by a sympathetic and dignified regard for the sentiments of
+others. Without such a regard, it has no more influence on character
+than information about the mountains of Asia; with a servile regard, it
+increases dependence upon others, and throws upon those in authority the
+responsibility for conduct. As a matter of fact, direct instruction in
+morals has been effective only in social groups where it was a part of
+the authoritative control of the many by the few. Not the teaching as
+such but the reinforcement of it by the whole regime of which it was
+an incident made it effective. To attempt to get similar results from
+lessons about morals in a democratic society is to rely upon sentimental
+magic.
+
+At the other end of the scale stands the Socratic-Platonic teaching
+which identifies knowledge and virtue--which holds that no man does evil
+knowingly but only because of ignorance of the good. This doctrine is
+commonly attacked on the ground that nothing is more common than for a
+man to know the good and yet do the bad: not knowledge, but habituation
+or practice, and motive are what is required. Aristotle, in fact, at
+once attacked the Platonic teaching on the ground that moral virtue is
+like an art, such as medicine; the experienced practitioner is better
+than a man who has theoretical knowledge but no practical experience of
+disease and remedies. The issue turns, however, upon what is meant by
+knowledge. Aristotle's objection ignored the gist of Plato's teaching to
+the effect that man could not attain a theoretical insight into the
+good except as he had passed through years of practical habituation and
+strenuous discipline. Knowledge of the good was not a thing to be got
+either from books or from others, but was achieved through a prolonged
+education. It was the final and culminating grace of a mature experience
+of life. Irrespective of Plato's position, it is easy to perceive that
+the term knowledge is used to denote things as far apart as intimate
+and vital personal realization,--a conviction gained and tested in
+experience,--and a second-handed, largely symbolic, recognition that
+persons in general believe so and so--a devitalized remote information.
+That the latter does not guarantee conduct, that it does not profoundly
+affect character, goes without saying. But if knowledge means something
+of the same sort as our conviction gained by trying and testing that
+sugar is sweet and quinine bitter, the case stands otherwise. Every time
+a man sits on a chair rather than on a stove, carries an umbrella when
+it rains, consults a doctor when ill--or in short performs any of the
+thousand acts which make up his daily life, he proves that knowledge of
+a certain kind finds direct issue in conduct. There is every reason to
+suppose that the same sort of knowledge of good has a like expression;
+in fact "good" is an empty term unless it includes the satisfactions
+experienced in such situations as those mentioned. Knowledge that other
+persons are supposed to know something might lead one to act so as to
+win the approbation others attach to certain actions, or at least so
+as to give others the impression that one agrees with them; there is no
+reason why it should lead to personal initiative and loyalty in behalf
+of the beliefs attributed to them.
+
+It is not necessary, accordingly, to dispute about the proper meaning
+of the term knowledge. It is enough for educational purposes to note
+the different qualities covered by the one name, to realize that it
+is knowledge gained at first hand through the exigencies of experience
+which affects conduct in significant ways. If a pupil learns things
+from books simply in connection with school lessons and for the sake of
+reciting what he has learned when called upon, then knowledge will have
+effect upon some conduct--namely upon that of reproducing statements at
+the demand of others. There is nothing surprising that such "knowledge"
+should not have much influence in the life out of school. But this is
+not a reason for making a divorce between knowledge and conduct, but for
+holding in low esteem this kind of knowledge. The same thing may be
+said of knowledge which relates merely to an isolated and technical
+specialty; it modifies action but only in its own narrow line. In truth,
+the problem of moral education in the schools is one with the problem of
+securing knowledge--the knowledge connected with the system of impulses
+and habits. For the use to which any known fact is put depends upon its
+connections. The knowledge of dynamite of a safecracker may be identical
+in verbal form with that of a chemist; in fact, it is different, for it
+is knit into connection with different aims and habits, and thus has a
+different import.
+
+Our prior discussion of subject-matter as proceeding from direct
+activity having an immediate aim, to the enlargement of meaning found in
+geography and history, and then to scientifically organized knowledge,
+was based upon the idea of maintaining a vital connection between
+knowledge and activity. What is learned and employed in an occupation
+having an aim and involving cooperation with others is moral knowledge,
+whether consciously so regarded or not. For it builds up a social
+interest and confers the intelligence needed to make that interest
+effective in practice. Just because the studies of the curriculum
+represent standard factors in social life, they are organs of initiation
+into social values. As mere school studies, their acquisition has only
+a technical worth. Acquired under conditions where their social
+significance is realized, they feed moral interest and develop moral
+insight. Moreover, the qualities of mind discussed under the topic
+of method of learning are all of them intrinsically moral qualities.
+Open-mindedness, single-mindedness, sincerity, breadth of outlook,
+thoroughness, assumption of responsibility for developing the
+consequences of ideas which are accepted, are moral traits. The habit
+of identifying moral characteristics with external conformity to
+authoritative prescriptions may lead us to ignore the ethical value of
+these intellectual attitudes, but the same habit tends to reduce morals
+to a dead and machinelike routine. Consequently while such an attitude
+has moral results, the results are morally undesirable--above all in a
+democratic society where so much depends upon personal disposition.
+
+4. The Social and the Moral. All of the separations which we have been
+criticizing--and which the idea of education set forth in the
+previous chapters is designed to avoid--spring from taking morals too
+narrowly,--giving them, on one side, a sentimental goody-goody turn
+without reference to effective ability to do what is socially needed,
+and, on the other side, overemphasizing convention and tradition so
+as to limit morals to a list of definitely stated acts. As a matter of
+fact, morals are as broad as acts which concern our relationships with
+others. And potentially this includes all our acts, even though their
+social bearing may not be thought of at the time of performance. For
+every act, by the principle of habit, modifies disposition--it sets up
+a certain kind of inclination and desire. And it is impossible to tell
+when the habit thus strengthened may have a direct and perceptible
+influence on our association with others. Certain traits of character
+have such an obvious connection with our social relationships that we
+call them "moral" in an emphatic sense--truthfulness, honesty, chastity,
+amiability, etc. But this only means that they are, as compared with
+some other attitudes, central:--that they carry other attitudes with
+them. They are moral in an emphatic sense not because they are isolated
+and exclusive, but because they are so intimately connected with
+thousands of other attitudes which we do not explicitly recognize--which
+perhaps we have not even names for. To call them virtues in their
+isolation is like taking the skeleton for the living body. The bones
+are certainly important, but their importance lies in the fact that they
+support other organs of the body in such a way as to make them capable
+of integrated effective activity. And the same is true of the qualities
+of character which we specifically designate virtues. Morals concern
+nothing less than the whole character, and the whole character is
+identical with the man in all his concrete make-up and manifestations.
+To possess virtue does not signify to have cultivated a few namable
+and exclusive traits; it means to be fully and adequately what one is
+capable of becoming through association with others in all the offices
+of life.
+
+The moral and the social quality of conduct are, in the last analysis,
+identical with each other. It is then but to restate explicitly
+the import of our earlier chapters regarding the social function of
+education to say that the measure of the worth of the administration,
+curriculum, and methods of instruction of the school is the extent to
+which they are animated by a social spirit. And the great danger which
+threatens school work is the absence of conditions which make possible
+a permeating social spirit; this is the great enemy of effective moral
+training. For this spirit can be actively present only when certain
+conditions are met.
+
+(i) In the first place, the school must itself be a community life
+in all which that implies. Social perceptions and interests can be
+developed only in a genuinely social medium--one where there is give and
+take in the building up of a common experience. Informational statements
+about things can be acquired in relative isolation by any one who
+previously has had enough intercourse with others to have learned
+language. But realization of the meaning of the linguistic signs is
+quite another matter. That involves a context of work and play in
+association with others. The plea which has been made for education
+through continued constructive activities in this book rests upon the
+fact they afford an opportunity for a social atmosphere. In place of a
+school set apart from life as a place for learning lessons, we have
+a miniature social group in which study and growth are incidents of
+present shared experience. Playgrounds, shops, workrooms, laboratories
+not only direct the natural active tendencies of youth, but they
+involve intercourse, communication, and cooperation,--all extending the
+perception of connections.
+
+(ii) The learning in school should be continuous with that out of
+school. There should be a free interplay between the two. This is
+possible only when there are numerous points of contact between the
+social interests of the one and of the other. A school is conceivable in
+which there should be a spirit of companionship and shared activity,
+but where its social life would no more represent or typify that of the
+world beyond the school walls than that of a monastery. Social concern
+and understanding would be developed, but they would not be available
+outside; they would not carry over. The proverbial separation of
+town and gown, the cultivation of academic seclusion, operate in
+this direction. So does such adherence to the culture of the past as
+generates a reminiscent social spirit, for this makes an individual feel
+more at home in the life of other days than in his own. A professedly
+cultural education is peculiarly exposed to this danger. An idealized
+past becomes the refuge and solace of the spirit; present-day concerns
+are found sordid, and unworthy of attention. But as a rule, the absence
+of a social environment in connection with which learning is a need and
+a reward is the chief reason for the isolation of the school; and this
+isolation renders school knowledge inapplicable to life and so infertile
+in character.
+
+
+A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to
+recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education
+are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social
+efficiency, are moral traits--marks of a person who is a worthy member
+of that society which it is the business of education to further. There
+is an old saying to the effect that it is not enough for a man to be
+good; he must be good for something. The something for which a man must
+be good is capacity to live as a social member so that what he gets from
+living with others balances with what he contributes. What he gets and
+gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions, and ideas, is
+not external possessions, but a widening and deepening of conscious
+life--a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of
+meanings. What he materially receives and gives is at most opportunities
+and means for the evolution of conscious life. Otherwise, it is neither
+giving nor taking, but a shifting about of the position of things in
+space, like the stirring of water and sand with a stick. Discipline,
+culture, social efficiency, personal refinement, improvement of
+character are but phases of the growth of capacity nobly to share in
+such a balanced experience. And education is not a mere means to such a
+life. Education is such a life. To maintain capacity for such education
+is the essence of morals. For conscious life is a continual beginning
+afresh.
+
+Summary. The most important problem of moral education in the school
+concerns the relationship of knowledge and conduct. For unless the
+learning which accrues in the regular course of study affects character,
+it is futile to conceive the moral end as the unifying and culminating
+end of education. When there is no intimate organic connection between
+the methods and materials of knowledge and moral growth, particular
+lessons and modes of discipline have to be resorted to: knowledge is
+not integrated into the usual springs of action and the outlook on life,
+while morals become moralistic--a scheme of separate virtues.
+
+The two theories chiefly associated with the separation of learning
+from activity, and hence from morals, are those which cut off inner
+disposition and motive--the conscious personal factor--and deeds
+as purely physical and outer; and which set action from interest
+in opposition to that from principle. Both of these separations are
+overcome in an educational scheme where learning is the accompaniment of
+continuous activities or occupations which have a social aim and utilize
+the materials of typical social situations. For under such conditions,
+the school becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community
+and one in close interaction with other modes of associated experience
+beyond school walls. All education which develops power to share
+effectively in social life is moral. It forms a character which not only
+does the particular deed socially necessary but one which is interested
+in that continuous readjustment which is essential to growth. Interest
+in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral
+interest.
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 852 ***
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+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      Democracy and Education | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <style> /* <![CDATA[ */
+
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+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
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+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 852 ***</div>
+
+    <p>
+      <br><br>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      by John Dewey
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br>
+    </p>
+    <hr>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br>
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      Transcriber's Note:
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      I have tried to make this the most accurate text possible but I am sure
+      that there are still mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would like to dedicate this etext to my mother who was a elementary
+      school teacher for more years than I can remember. Thanks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      David Reed
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br>
+    </p>
+    <hr>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br>
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <span class="big"><b>CONTENTS</b></span>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> <b>Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of
+        Life</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. It
+        is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> <b>Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM27"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        development within the young of the attitudes </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> <b>Chapter Three: Education as Direction</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM3"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        natural or native impulses of the young do not agree </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> <b>Chapter Four: Education as Growth</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM4"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> <b>Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and
+        Formal Discipline</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM5"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        conception that the result of the educative process </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> <b>Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and
+        Progressive</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM6"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Education may be conceived either retrospectively </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> <b>Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in
+        Education</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM7"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> <b>Chapter Eight: Aims in Education</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM8"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. An
+        aim denotes the result of any natural process </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> <b>Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social
+        Efficiency as Aims</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM9"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> <b>Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM10"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> <b>Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM11"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. In
+        determining the place of thinking </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> <b>Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM12"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Processes of instruction are unified in the degree </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> <b>Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM13"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Method is a statement of the way the subject matter </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> <b>Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject
+        Matter</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM15"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        subject matter of education consists primarily </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> <b>Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the
+        Curriculum</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM16"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. In
+        the previous chapter we found that the primary subject </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> <b>Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of
+        Geography and History</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM17"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. It
+        is the nature of an experience to have implications </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> <b>Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of
+        Study</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM18"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> <b>Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM19"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> <b>Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM20"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. Of
+        the segregations of educational values </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> <b>Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical
+        Studies</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM21"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        Greeks were induced to philosophize </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> <b>Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social
+        Studies: Naturalism and Humanism</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM22"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022"> <b>Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the
+        World</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM23"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        True individualism is a product of the relaxation of the grip </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023"> <b>Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of
+        Education</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM24"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. A
+        vocation signifies any form of continuous activity </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024"> <b>Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM25"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        After a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025"> <b>Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM26"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Such social divisions as interfere with free and full </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026"> <b>Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM27"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        most important problem of moral education in the school </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br>
+    </p>
+    <hr>
+    <p>
+      <br> <br> <a id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between
+      living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by
+      renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than
+      the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise,
+      it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react
+      in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so
+      as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action.
+      While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none
+      the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its
+      own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into
+      smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its
+      identity as a living thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own
+      behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say
+      that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own
+      conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus
+      turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the
+      return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense,
+      it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for
+      its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up.
+      Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up indefinitely. After
+      a while they succumb; they die. The creature is not equal to the task of
+      indefinite self-renewal. But continuity of the life process is not
+      dependent upon the prolongation of the existence of any one individual.
+      Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous sequence. And
+      though, as the geological record shows, not merely individuals but also
+      species die out, the life process continues in increasingly complex forms.
+      As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles
+      against which they struggled in vain come into being. Continuity of life
+      means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living
+      organisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have been speaking of life in its lowest terms&mdash;as a physical
+      thing. But we use the word "Life" to denote the whole range of experience,
+      individual and racial. When we see a book called the Life of Lincoln we do
+      not expect to find within its covers a treatise on physiology. We look for
+      an account of social antecedents; a description of early surroundings, of
+      the conditions and occupation of the family; of the chief episodes in the
+      development of character; of signal struggles and achievements; of the
+      individual's hopes, tastes, joys and sufferings. In precisely similar
+      fashion we speak of the life of a savage tribe, of the Athenian people, of
+      the American nation. "Life" covers customs, institutions, beliefs,
+      victories and defeats, recreations and occupations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense. And to it, as
+      well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the principle of
+      continuity through renewal applies. With the renewal of physical existence
+      goes, in the case of human beings, the recreation of beliefs, ideals,
+      hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. The continuity of any experience,
+      through renewing of the social group, is a literal fact. Education, in its
+      broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every one
+      of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a
+      savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs,
+      ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier
+      of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of
+      the group goes on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the
+      constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of
+      education. On one hand, there is the contrast between the immaturity of
+      the new-born members of the group&mdash;its future sole representatives&mdash;and
+      the maturity of the adult members who possess the knowledge and customs of
+      the group. On the other hand, there is the necessity that these immature
+      members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers, but that
+      they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and
+      practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will cease its
+      characteristic life. Even in a savage tribe, the achievements of adults
+      are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of if left to
+      themselves. With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original
+      capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the elders
+      increases. Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities
+      of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group.
+      Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required. Beings
+      who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and
+      habits of the social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and
+      actively interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as
+      biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of
+      habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.
+      Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards,
+      opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group
+      life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. If
+      the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might
+      educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal
+      interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is
+      obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of
+      each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them
+      all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born
+      as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices
+      the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not
+      automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough
+      transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into
+      barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the human young are so immature
+      that if they were left to themselves without the guidance and succor of
+      others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities necessary for
+      physical existence. The young of human beings compare so poorly in
+      original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even
+      the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under
+      tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the
+      technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of
+      teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we may
+      seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. But justification is found in the
+      fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an unduly
+      scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are, indeed, one
+      important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the
+      immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a
+      relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the necessity of
+      more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we make sure of
+      placing the scholastic methods in their true context.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but
+      it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is
+      more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and
+      communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they
+      have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess
+      things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a
+      community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge&mdash;a
+      common understanding&mdash;like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such
+      things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks; they
+      cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical
+      pieces. The communication which insures participation in a common
+      understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual
+      dispositions&mdash;like ways of responding to expectations and
+      requirements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more
+      than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles
+      removed from others. A book or a letter may institute a more intimate
+      association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each
+      other than exists between dwellers under the same roof. Individuals do not
+      even compose a social group because they all work for a common end. The
+      parts of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common
+      result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were all
+      cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that they
+      regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a
+      community. But this would involve communication. Each would have to know
+      what the other was about and would have to have some way of keeping the
+      other informed as to his own purpose and progress. Consensus demands
+      communication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most social group
+      there are many relations which are not as yet social. A large number of
+      human relationships in any social group are still upon the machine-like
+      plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired results, without
+      reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of
+      those used. Such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of
+      position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools, mechanical or
+      fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and child, teacher and pupil,
+      employer and employee, governor and governed, remain upon this level, they
+      form no true social group, no matter how closely their respective
+      activities touch one another. Giving and taking of orders modifies action
+      and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a
+      communication of interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
+      communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a
+      recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed
+      experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far,
+      meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who
+      communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating, with
+      fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be
+      somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your
+      experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations.
+      The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. To
+      formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see
+      it, considering what points of contact it has with the life of another so
+      that it may be got into such form that he can appreciate its meaning.
+      Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to
+      assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to
+      tell him intelligently of one's own experience. All communication is like
+      art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that
+      remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who
+      participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a
+      routine way does it lose its educative power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and
+      learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together
+      educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and
+      enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness
+      of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone mentally as
+      well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his
+      past experience to extract its net meaning. The inequality of achievement
+      between the mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the
+      young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus to
+      reducing experience to that order and form which will render it most
+      easily communicable and hence most usable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a marked
+      difference between the education which every one gets from living with
+      others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist,
+      and the deliberate educating of the young. In the former case the
+      education is incidental; it is natural and important, but it is not the
+      express reason of the association. While it may be said, without
+      exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution,
+      economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in
+      enlarging and improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of its
+      original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.
+      Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to secure the
+      favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; family life in
+      the desire to gratify appetites and secure family perpetuity; systematic
+      labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others, etc. Only
+      gradually was the by-product of the institution, its effect upon the
+      quality and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still
+      was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct of the
+      institution. Even today, in our industrial life, apart from certain values
+      of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of
+      the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried on
+      receives little attention as compared with physical output.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as an
+      immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy to ignore in
+      our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition, or to
+      subordinate that educative effect to some external and tangible result, it
+      is not so easy as in dealing with adults. The need of training is too
+      evident; the pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits
+      is too urgent to leave these consequences wholly out of account. Since our
+      chief business with them is to enable them to share in a common life we
+      cannot help considering whether or no we are forming the powers which will
+      secure this ability. If humanity has made some headway in realizing that
+      the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect&mdash;its
+      effect upon conscious experience&mdash;we may well believe that this
+      lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process which
+      we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of education&mdash;that
+      of direct tuition or schooling. In undeveloped social groups, we find very
+      little formal teaching and training. Savage groups mainly rely for
+      instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the same sort of
+      association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special
+      devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with
+      initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted into full social
+      membership. For the most part, they depend upon children learning the
+      customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas,
+      by sharing in what the elders are doing. In part, this sharing is direct,
+      taking part in the occupations of adults and thus serving an
+      apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the dramatic plays in
+      which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and thus learn to know
+      what they are like. To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a
+      place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might
+      learn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the young
+      and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in the
+      pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the case of
+      the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so remote in
+      space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less adequate to
+      reproduce its spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult activities
+      thus depends upon a prior training given with this end in view.
+      Intentional agencies&mdash;schools&mdash;and explicit material&mdash;studies&mdash;are
+      devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special
+      group of persons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the
+      resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way to a
+      kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if they
+      were left to pick up their training in informal association with others,
+      since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from
+      indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether directly
+      or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital. These qualities
+      compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of available
+      opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes remote
+      and dead&mdash;abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of
+      depreciation. What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies is
+      at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists
+      with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within urgent daily
+      interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in
+      symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. Such
+      material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the ordinary
+      standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this measure is
+      connection with practical concerns. Such material exists in a world by
+      itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression. There
+      is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be
+      merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter
+      of life-experience. The permanent social interests are likely to be lost
+      from view. Those which have not been carried over into the structure of
+      social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information
+      expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. Thus we reach the
+      ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores its social
+      necessity and its identity with all human association that affects
+      conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about
+      remote matters and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the
+      acquisition of literacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
+      education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between
+      the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional, modes of
+      education. When the acquiring of information and of technical intellectual
+      skill do not influence the formation of a social disposition, ordinary
+      vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far,
+      creates only "sharps" in learning&mdash;that is, egoistic specialists. To
+      avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are aware of
+      having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they
+      unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the formation of their
+      characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate
+      task with every development of special schooling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Since this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life is a
+      self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to
+      physiological life, education is to social life. This education consists
+      primarily in transmission through communication. Communication is a
+      process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It
+      modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it. That the
+      ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in the
+      contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of
+      experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the immature.
+      That is to say, while every social arrangement is educative in effect, the
+      educative effect first becomes an important part of the purpose of the
+      association in connection with the association of the older with the
+      younger. As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the
+      need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. As formal
+      teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an
+      undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct
+      associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater
+      than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few
+      centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a community or
+      social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and that
+      this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the
+      immature members of the group. By various agencies, unintentional and
+      designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into
+      robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a
+      fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. All of these words mean
+      that it implies attention to the conditions of growth. We also speak of
+      rearing, raising, bringing up&mdash;words which express the difference of
+      level which education aims to cover. Etymologically, the word education
+      means just a process of leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome
+      of the process in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding
+      activity&mdash;that is, a shaping into the standard form of social
+      activity. In this chapter we are concerned with the general features of
+      the way in which a social group brings up its immature members into its
+      own social form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience
+      till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the
+      social group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical forming.
+      Things can be physically transported in space; they may be bodily
+      conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically extracted and
+      inserted. How then are they communicated? Given the impossibility of
+      direct contagion or literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the
+      method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or the
+      older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves. The answer, in
+      general formulation, is: By means of the action of the environment in
+      calling out certain responses. The required beliefs cannot be hammered in;
+      the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on. But the particular medium in
+      which an individual exists leads him to see and feel one thing rather than
+      another; it leads him to have certain plans in order that he may act
+      successfully with others; it strengthens some beliefs and weakens others
+      as a condition of winning the approval of others. Thus it gradually
+      produces in him a certain system of behavior, a certain disposition of
+      action. The words "environment," "medium" denote something more than
+      surroundings which encompass an individual. They denote the specific
+      continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies. An
+      inanimate being is, of course, continuous with its surroundings; but the
+      environing circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an
+      environment. For the inorganic being is not concerned in the influences
+      which affect it. On the other hand, some things which are remote in space
+      and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his
+      environment even more truly than some of the things close to him. The
+      things with which a man varies are his genuine environment. Thus the
+      activities of the astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or
+      about which he calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is
+      most intimately his environment. The environment of an antiquarian, as an
+      antiquarian, consists of the remote epoch of human life with which he is
+      concerned, and the relics, inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes
+      connections with that period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or
+      hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living
+      being. Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the
+      fish's activities&mdash;to its life. The north pole is a significant
+      element in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in
+      reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what
+      they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive
+      existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting,
+      environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a
+      sustaining or frustrating condition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Social Environment. A being whose activities are associated with
+      others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend
+      upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others. A
+      being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities
+      without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the
+      indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he
+      moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as well try to imagine a
+      business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to
+      conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms of
+      his isolated actions. The manufacturer moreover is as truly socially
+      guided in his activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his own
+      counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling his
+      finished goods. Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in
+      association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the
+      most overt cooperative or hostile act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium nurtures
+      its immature members. There is no great difficulty in seeing how it shapes
+      the external habits of action. Even dogs and horses have their actions
+      modified by association with human beings; they form different habits
+      because human beings are concerned with what they do. Human beings control
+      animals by controlling the natural stimuli which influence them; by
+      creating a certain environment in other words. Food, bits and bridles,
+      noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in which the natural or
+      instinctive responses of horses occur. By operating steadily to call out
+      certain acts, habits are formed which function with the same uniformity as
+      the original stimuli. If a rat is put in a maze and finds food only by
+      making a given number of turns in a given sequence, his activity is
+      gradually modified till he habitually takes that course rather than
+      another when he is hungry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Human actions are modified in a like fashion. A burnt child dreads the
+      fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every time a child touched a
+      certain toy he got burned, the child would learn to avoid that toy as
+      automatically as he avoids touching fire. So far, however, we are dealing
+      with what may be called training in distinction from educative teaching.
+      The changes considered are in outer action rather than in mental and
+      emotional dispositions of behavior. The distinction is not, however, a
+      sharp one. The child might conceivably generate in time a violent
+      antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class of toys
+      resembling it. The aversion might even persist after he had forgotten
+      about the original burns; later on he might even invent some reason to
+      account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases, altering
+      the external habit of action by changing the environment to affect the
+      stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in the
+      action. Yet this does not always happen; a person trained to dodge a
+      threatening blow, dodges automatically with no corresponding thought or
+      emotion. We have to find, then, some differentia of training from
+      education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really share in
+      the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the horse to
+      secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous to the
+      horse to perform the act&mdash;he gets food, etc. But the horse,
+      presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains interested in food,
+      not in the service he is rendering. He is not a partner in a shared
+      activity. Were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging in the
+      conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment which
+      others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now in many cases&mdash;too many cases&mdash;the activity of the immature
+      human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is
+      trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His
+      instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure.
+      But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a
+      way agreeable to others. In other cases, he really shares or participates
+      in the common activity. In this case, his original impulse is modified. He
+      not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of others, but, in so
+      acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused in him that animate the
+      others. A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The successes for which it
+      strives, the achievements upon which it sets store, are connected with
+      fighting and victory. The presence of this medium incites bellicose
+      exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then in fact when he is strong
+      enough. As he fights he wins approval and advancement; as he refrains, he
+      is disliked, ridiculed, shut out from favorable recognition. It is not
+      surprising that his original belligerent tendencies and emotions are
+      strengthened at the expense of others, and that his ideas turn to things
+      connected with war. Only in this way can he become fully a recognized
+      member of his group. Thus his mental habitudes are gradually assimilated
+      to those of his group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we shall
+      perceive that the social medium neither implants certain desires and ideas
+      directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular habits of
+      action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow. Setting up
+      conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways of acting is
+      the first step. Making the individual a sharer or partner in the
+      associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its
+      failure as his failure, is the completing step. As soon as he is possessed
+      by the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to recognize the
+      special ends at which it aims and the means employed to secure success.
+      His beliefs and ideas, in other words, will take a form similar to those
+      of others in the group. He will also achieve pretty much the same stock of
+      knowledge since that knowledge is an ingredient of his habitual pursuits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief
+      cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one
+      to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an idea into
+      the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus imparting
+      knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process. But learning from
+      language will be found, when analyzed, to confirm the principle just laid
+      down. It would probably be admitted with little hesitation that a child
+      gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as other persons do; by covering
+      the head with it, giving it to others to wear, having it put on by others
+      when going out, etc. But it may be asked how this principle of shared
+      activity applies to getting through speech or reading the idea of, say, a
+      Greek helmet, where no direct use of any kind enters in. What shared
+      activity is there in learning from books about the discovery of America?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about many
+      things, let us see how it works. The baby begins of course with mere
+      sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning, expressing, that is, no idea.
+      Sounds are just one kind of stimulus to direct response, some having a
+      soothing effect, others tending to make one jump, and so on. The sound
+      h-a-t would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a seemingly
+      inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection with an action
+      which is participated in by a number of people. When the mother is taking
+      the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she puts something on the
+      baby's head. Being taken out becomes an interest to the child; mother and
+      child not only go out with each other physically, but both are concerned
+      in the going out; they enjoy it in common. By conjunction with the other
+      factors in activity the sound "hat" soon gets the same meaning for the
+      child that it has for the parent; it becomes a sign of the activity into
+      which it enters. The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are
+      mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends
+      upon connection with a shared experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way that the
+      thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. And they acquire the
+      same meaning with the child which they have with the adult because they
+      are used in a common experience by both. The guarantee for the same manner
+      of use is found in the fact that the thing and the sound are first
+      employed in a joint activity, as a means of setting up an active
+      connection between the child and a grownup. Similar ideas or meanings
+      spring up because both persons are engaged as partners in an action where
+      what each does depends upon and influences what the other does. If two
+      savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a certain signal meant
+      "move to the right" to the one who uttered it, and "move to the left" to
+      the one who heard it, they obviously could not successfully carry on their
+      hunt together. Understanding one another means that objects, including
+      sounds, have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common
+      pursuit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After sounds have got meaning through connection with other things
+      employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with other
+      like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for which
+      they stand are combined. Thus the words in which a child learns about,
+      say, the Greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were understood) by use
+      in an action having a common interest and end. They now arouse a new
+      meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads to rehearse imaginatively
+      the activities in which the helmet has its use. For the time being, the
+      one who understands the words "Greek helmet" becomes mentally a partner
+      with those who used the helmet. He engages, through his imagination, in a
+      shared activity. It is not easy to get the full meaning of words. Most
+      persons probably stop with the idea that "helmet" denotes a queer kind of
+      headgear a people called the Greeks once wore. We conclude, accordingly,
+      that the use of language to convey and acquire ideas is an extension and
+      refinement of the principle that things gain meaning by being used in a
+      shared experience or joint action; in no sense does it contravene that
+      principle. When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation,
+      either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli,
+      not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running
+      in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or
+      meaning. Thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the
+      act of writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the
+      person performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless
+      he realizes the meaning of what he does.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that social
+      environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of behavior in
+      individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse and strengthen
+      certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail certain
+      consequences. A child growing up in a family of musicians will inevitably
+      have whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and, relatively,
+      stimulated more than other impulses which might have been awakened in
+      another environment. Save as he takes an interest in music and gains a
+      certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he is unable to share in the
+      life of the group to which he belongs. Some kinds of participation in the
+      life of those with whom the individual is connected are inevitable; with
+      respect to them, the social environment exercises an educative or
+      formative influence unconsciously and apart from any set purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
+      (constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we have
+      spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the young into the
+      practices and beliefs of the group. Even in present-day societies, it
+      furnishes the basic nurture of even the most insistently schooled youth.
+      In accord with the interests and occupations of the group, certain things
+      become objects of high esteem; others of aversion. Association does not
+      create impulses or affection and dislike, but it furnishes the objects to
+      which they attach themselves. The way our group or class does things tends
+      to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus to prescribe the
+      directions and limits of observation and memory. What is strange or
+      foreign (that is to say outside the activities of the groups) tends to be
+      morally forbidden and intellectually suspect. It seems almost incredible
+      to us, for example, that things which we know very well could have escaped
+      recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing
+      congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native
+      intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes of
+      life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds
+      riveted to other things. Just as the senses require sensible objects to
+      stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and
+      imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the
+      demands set up by current social occupations. The main texture of
+      disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences.
+      What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the
+      capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their
+      grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more
+      productive of meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so subtle and
+      pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and mind, it may be
+      worth while to specify a few directions in which its effect is most
+      marked. First, the habits of language. Fundamental modes of speech, the
+      bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life,
+      carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.
+      The babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech habits
+      thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious teaching,
+      yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes of speech often
+      fall away, and individuals relapse into their really native tongue.
+      Secondly, manners. Example is notoriously more potent than precept. Good
+      manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding;
+      and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual
+      stimuli, not by conveying information. Despite the never ending play of
+      conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere and
+      spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners. And manners are
+      but minor morals. Moreover, in major morals, conscious instruction is
+      likely to be efficacious only in the degree in which it falls in with the
+      general "walk and conversation" of those who constitute the child's social
+      environment. Thirdly, good taste and esthetic appreciation. If the eye is
+      constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and
+      color, a standard of taste naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry,
+      unarranged, and over-decorated environment works for the deterioration of
+      taste, just as meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for
+      beauty. Against such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than
+      convey second-hand information as to what others think. Such taste never
+      becomes spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a labored
+      reminder of what those think to whom one has been taught to look up. To
+      say that the deeper standards of judgments of value are framed by the
+      situations into which a person habitually enters is not so much to mention
+      a fourth point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned.
+      We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is
+      worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not
+      conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we
+      take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which
+      determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these
+      habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which
+      have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with
+      others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. The School as a Special Environment. The chief importance of this
+      foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on willy-nilly is
+      to lead us to note that the only way in which adults consciously control
+      the kind of education which the immature get is by controlling the
+      environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. We never educate
+      directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit
+      chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for
+      the purpose makes a great difference. And any environment is a chance
+      environment so far as its educative influence is concerned unless it has
+      been deliberately regulated with reference to its educative effect. An
+      intelligent home differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the
+      habits of life and intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least
+      colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the development of children.
+      But schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed
+      with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of
+      their members.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are so
+      complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to
+      writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are even
+      more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in
+      accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form tends to
+      select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday
+      life. The achievements accumulated from generation to generation are
+      deposited in it even though some of them have fallen temporarily out of
+      use. Consequently as soon as a community depends to any considerable
+      extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its own immediate
+      generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools to insure adequate
+      transmission of all its resources. To take an obvious illustration: The
+      life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own,
+      and yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves on the
+      surface of our ordinary experiences. In similar fashion, peoples still
+      existing, but remote in space, British, Germans, Italians, directly
+      concern our own social affairs, but the nature of the interaction cannot
+      be understood without explicit statement and attention. In precisely
+      similar fashion, our daily associations cannot be trusted to make clear to
+      the young the part played in our activities by remote physical energies,
+      and by invisible structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is
+      instituted, the school, to care for such matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific, as
+      compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. First, a complex
+      civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. It has to be broken
+      up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a gradual and
+      graded way. The relationships of our present social life are so numerous
+      and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable position could
+      not readily share in many of the most important of them. Not sharing in
+      them, their meaning would not be communicated to him, would not become a
+      part of his own mental disposition. There would be no seeing the trees
+      because of the forest. Business, politics, art, science, religion, would
+      make all at once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome.
+      The first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide a
+      simplified environment. It selects the features which are fairly
+      fundamental and capable of being responded to by the young. Then it
+      establishes a progressive order, using the factors first acquired as means
+      of gaining insight into what is more complicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the second place, it is the business of the school environment to
+      eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing
+      environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a
+      purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but at
+      weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what
+      is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively
+      perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things from the
+      environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to counteract
+      their influence in the ordinary social environment. By selecting the best
+      for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the power of this best. As
+      a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not
+      to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only
+      such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency
+      for the accomplishment of this end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to balance
+      the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each
+      individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the
+      social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a
+      broader environment. Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to
+      be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single
+      thing corresponding to the single word. As a matter of fact, a modern
+      society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each household
+      with its immediate extension of friends makes a society; the village or
+      street group of playmates is a community; each business group, each club,
+      is another. Passing beyond these more intimate groups, there is in a
+      country like our own a variety of races, religious affiliations, economic
+      divisions. Inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal political
+      unity, there are probably more communities, more differing customs,
+      traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control, than existed
+      in an entire continent at an earlier epoch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active dispositions
+      of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's household of thieves,
+      the prisoners in a jail, provide educative environments for those who
+      enter into their collective or conjoint activities, as truly as a church,
+      a labor union, a business partnership, or a political party. Each of them
+      is a mode of associated or community life, quite as much as is a family, a
+      town, or a state. There are also communities whose members have little or
+      no direct contact with one another, like the guild of artists, the
+      republic of letters, the members of the professional learned class
+      scattered over the face of the earth. For they have aims in common, and
+      the activity of each member is directly modified by knowledge of what
+      others are doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical
+      matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory, was
+      comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce,
+      transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the
+      United States are composed of a combination of different groups with
+      different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps
+      more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational
+      institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced
+      environment for the young. Only in this way can the centrifugal forces set
+      up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and the same political
+      unit be counteracted. The intermingling in the school of youth of
+      different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a
+      new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a
+      unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of
+      any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American
+      public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and
+      balanced appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition of
+      each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments
+      into which he enters. One code prevails in the family; another, on the
+      street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth, in the religious
+      association. As a person passes from one of the environments to another,
+      he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is in danger of being split
+      into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion for
+      different occasions. This danger imposes upon the school a steadying and
+      integrating office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM27">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The development within the young of the attitudes and
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society
+      cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and
+      knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary of the environment. The
+      environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are concerned in
+      the execution of the activity characteristic of a living being. The social
+      environment consists of all the activities of fellow beings that are bound
+      up in the carrying on of the activities of any one of its members. It is
+      truly educative in its effect in the degree in which an individual shares
+      or participates in some conjoint activity. By doing his share in the
+      associated activity, the individual appropriates the purpose which
+      actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and subject matters,
+      acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its emotional spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition comes,
+      without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the activities
+      of the various groups to which they may belong. As a society becomes more
+      complex, however, it is found necessary to provide a special social
+      environment which shall especially look after nurturing the capacities of
+      the immature. Three of the more important functions of this special
+      environment are: simplifying and ordering the factors of the disposition
+      it is wished to develop; purifying and idealizing the existing social
+      customs; creating a wider and better balanced environment than that by
+      which the young would be likely, if left to themselves, to be influenced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Three: Education as Direction
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Environment as Directive.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We now pass to one of the special forms which the general function of
+      education assumes: namely, that of direction, control, or guidance. Of
+      these three words, direction, control, and guidance, the last best conveys
+      the idea of assisting through cooperation the natural capacities of the
+      individuals guided; control conveys rather the notion of an energy brought
+      to bear from without and meeting some resistance from the one controlled;
+      direction is a more neutral term and suggests the fact that the active
+      tendencies of those directed are led in a certain continuous course,
+      instead of dispersing aimlessly. Direction expresses the basic function,
+      which tends at one extreme to become a guiding assistance and at another,
+      a regulation or ruling. But in any case, we must carefully avoid a meaning
+      sometimes read into the term "control." It is sometimes assumed,
+      explicitly or unconsciously, that an individual's tendencies are naturally
+      purely individualistic or egoistic, and thus antisocial. Control then
+      denotes the process by which he is brought to subordinate his natural
+      impulses to public or common ends. Since, by conception, his own nature is
+      quite alien to this process and opposes it rather than helps it, control
+      has in this view a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it. Systems of
+      government and theories of the state have been built upon this notion, and
+      it has seriously affected educational ideas and practices. But there is no
+      ground for any such view. Individuals are certainly interested, at times,
+      in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of
+      others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the
+      whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part in
+      conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as a community
+      would be possible. And there would not even be any one interested in
+      furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of harmony unless he thought
+      that thereby he could gain some personal advantage. Control, in truth,
+      means only an emphatic form of direction of powers, and covers the
+      regulation gained by an individual through his own efforts quite as much
+      as that brought about when others take the lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite it
+      or stir it up, but directs it toward an object. Put the other way around,
+      a response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were, against being
+      disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. It meets the stimulus,
+      and corresponds with it. There is an adaptation of the stimulus and
+      response to each other. A light is the stimulus to the eye to see
+      something, and the business of the eye is to see. If the eyes are open and
+      there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a condition of the
+      fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an outside
+      interruption. To some extent, then, all direction or control is a guiding
+      of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully what some
+      organ is already tending to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two respects. In
+      the first place, except in the case of a small number of instincts, the
+      stimuli to which an immature human being is subject are not sufficiently
+      definite to call out, in the beginning, specific responses. There is
+      always a great deal of superfluous energy aroused. This energy may be
+      wasted, going aside from the point; it may also go against the successful
+      performance of an act. It does harm by getting in the way. Compare the
+      behavior of a beginner in riding a bicycle with that of the expert. There
+      is little axis of direction in the energies put forth; they are largely
+      dispersive and centrifugal. Direction involves a focusing and fixating of
+      action in order that it may be truly a response, and this requires an
+      elimination of unnecessary and confusing movements. In the second place,
+      although no activity can be produced in which the person does not
+      cooperate to some extent, yet a response may be of a kind which does not
+      fit into the sequence and continuity of action. A person boxing may dodge
+      a particular blow successfully, but in such a way as to expose himself the
+      next instant to a still harder blow. Adequate control means that the
+      successive acts are brought into a continuous order; each act not only
+      meets its immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, direction is both simultaneous and successive. At a given time,
+      it requires that, from all the tendencies that are partially called out,
+      those be selected which center energy upon the point of need.
+      Successively, it requires that each act be balanced with those which
+      precede and come after, so that order of activity is achieved. Focusing
+      and ordering are thus the two aspects of direction, one spatial, the other
+      temporal. The first insures hitting the mark; the second keeps the balance
+      required for further action. Obviously, it is not possible to separate
+      them in practice as we have distinguished them in idea. Activity must be
+      centered at a given time in such a way as to prepare for what comes next.
+      The problem of the immediate response is complicated by one's having to be
+      on the lookout for future occurrences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two conclusions emerge from these general statements. On the one hand,
+      purely external direction is impossible. The environment can at most only
+      supply stimuli to call out responses. These responses proceed from
+      tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even when a person is
+      frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because
+      the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having
+      it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him
+      than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes. While the
+      customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli which direct as well as evoke
+      the activities of the young, the young, after all, participate in the
+      direction which their actions finally take. In the strict sense, nothing
+      can be forced upon them or into them. To overlook this fact means to
+      distort and pervert human nature. To take into account the contribution
+      made by the existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct
+      them economically and wisely. Speaking accurately, all direction is but
+      re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another
+      channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in
+      operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and regulations of
+      others may be short-sighted. It may accomplish its immediate effect, but
+      at the expense of throwing the subsequent action of the person out of
+      balance. A threat may, for example, prevent a person from doing something
+      to which he is naturally inclined by arousing fear of disagreeable
+      consequences if he persists. But he may be left in the position which
+      exposes him later on to influences which will lead him to do even worse
+      things. His instincts of cunning and slyness may be aroused, so that
+      things henceforth appeal to him on the side of evasion and trickery more
+      than would otherwise have been the case. Those engaged in directing the
+      actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of
+      the sequential development of those they direct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Modes of Social Direction. Adults are naturally most conscious of
+      directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so to do.
+      As a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find themselves
+      resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish them to do. But
+      the more permanent and influential modes of control are those which
+      operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate
+      intention on our part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. When others are not doing what we would like them to or are threatening
+      disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of controlling them and of
+      the influences by which they are controlled. In such cases, our control
+      becomes most direct, and at this point we are most likely to make the
+      mistakes just spoken of. We are even likely to take the influence of
+      superior force for control, forgetting that while we may lead a horse to
+      water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a
+      penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. In all such cases of immediate
+      action upon others, we need to discriminate between physical results and
+      moral results. A person may be in such a condition that forcible feeding
+      or enforced confinement is necessary for his own good. A child may have to
+      be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt.
+      But no improvement of disposition, no educative effect, need follow. A
+      harsh and commanding tone may be effectual in keeping a child away from
+      the fire, and the same desirable physical effect will follow as if he had
+      been snatched away. But there may be no more obedience of a moral sort in
+      one case than in the other. A man can be prevented from breaking into
+      other persons' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not
+      alter his disposition to commit burglary. When we confuse a physical with
+      an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the person's
+      own participating disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby
+      of developing within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the
+      right way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control should be
+      limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive that the one
+      performing them has no means of foreseeing their outcome. If a person
+      cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of
+      understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more
+      experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In
+      such a state, every act is alike to him. Whatever moves him does move him,
+      and that is all there is to it. In some cases, it is well to permit him to
+      experiment, and to discover the consequences for himself in order that he
+      may act intelligently next time under similar circumstances. But some
+      courses of action are too discommoding and obnoxious to others to allow of
+      this course being pursued. Direct disapproval is now resorted to. Shaming,
+      ridicule, disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used. Or contrary
+      tendencies in the child are appealed to to divert him from his troublesome
+      line of behavior. His sensitiveness to approbation, his hope of winning
+      favor by an agreeable act, are made use of to induce action in another
+      direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. These methods of control are so obvious (because so intentionally
+      employed) that it would hardly be worth while to mention them if it were
+      not that notice may now be taken, by way of contrast, of the other more
+      important and permanent mode of control. This other method resides in the
+      ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is associated, use
+      things; the instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own ends.
+      The very existence of the social medium in which an individual lives,
+      moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of directing his
+      activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail what is
+      meant by the social environment. We are given to separating from each
+      other the physical and social environments in which we live. The
+      separation is responsible on one hand for an exaggeration of the moral
+      importance of the more direct or personal modes of control of which we
+      have been speaking; and on the other hand for an exaggeration, in current
+      psychology and philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of contact
+      with a purely physical environment. There is not, in fact, any such thing
+      as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of
+      the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a
+      word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change.
+      Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of
+      another. Comparatively speaking, such modes of influence may be regarded
+      as personal. The physical medium is reduced to a mere means of personal
+      contact. In contrast with such direct modes of mutual influence, stand
+      associations in common pursuits involving the use of things as means and
+      as measures of results. Even if the mother never told her daughter to help
+      her, or never rebuked her for not helping, the child would be subjected to
+      direction in her activities by the mere fact that she was engaged, along
+      with the parent, in the household life. Imitation, emulation, the need of
+      working together, enforce control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must reach the
+      thing in order to get it. Where there is giving there must be taking. The
+      way the child handles the thing after it is got, the use to which it is
+      put, is surely influenced by the fact that the child has watched the
+      mother. When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as
+      natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it
+      finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply
+      such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has
+      a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to
+      the activities of the young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously about
+      participating in a joint activity as the chief way of forming disposition.
+      We have explicitly added, however, the recognition of the part played in
+      the joint activity by the use of things. The philosophy of learning has
+      been unduly dominated by a false psychology. It is frequently stated that
+      a person learns by merely having the qualities of things impressed upon
+      his mind through the gateway of the senses. Having received a store of
+      sensory impressions, association or some power of mental synthesis is
+      supposed to combine them into ideas&mdash;into things with a meaning. An
+      object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is supposed to convey different
+      impressions of color, shape, size, hardness, smell, taste, etc., which
+      aggregated together constitute the characteristic meaning of each thing.
+      But as matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to which the thing is
+      put, because of its specific qualities, which supplies the meaning with
+      which it is identified. A chair is a thing which is put to one use; a
+      table, a thing which is employed for another purpose; an orange is a thing
+      which costs so much, which is grown in warm climes, which is eaten, and
+      when eaten has an agreeable odor and refreshing taste, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental
+      act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning; the
+      former does not. A noise may make me jump without my mind being
+      implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get water and put out a blaze,
+      I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant need of
+      being extinguished. I bump into a stone, and kick it to one side purely
+      physically. I put it to one side for fear some one will stumble upon it,
+      intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has. I am startled
+      by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not&mdash;more likely, if I do
+      not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud or to myself, that is
+      thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a meaning. My behavior has a
+      mental quality. When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend,
+      propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously,
+      unintelligently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or
+      controlled. But in the merely blind response, direction is also blind.
+      There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated responses to
+      recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. All of us
+      have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were
+      formed without our knowing what we were about. Consequently they possess
+      us, rather than we them. They move us; they control us. Unless we become
+      aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the worth of the
+      result, we do not control them. A child might be made to bow every time he
+      met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would
+      finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of recognition
+      or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view&mdash;as
+      having a certain meaning. And not till he knew what he was about and
+      performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to be
+      "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an idea of a
+      thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. It is to be able
+      to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of
+      action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of the action
+      of the thing upon us and of our action upon it. To have the same ideas
+      about things which others have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to
+      be really members of a social group, is therefore to attach the same
+      meanings to things and to acts which others attach. Otherwise, there is no
+      common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared activity,
+      each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and
+      vice-versa. That is, the activity of each is placed in the same inclusive
+      situation. To pull at a rope at which others happen to be pulling is not a
+      shared or conjoint activity, unless the pulling is done with knowledge
+      that others are pulling and for the sake of either helping or hindering
+      what they are doing. A pin may pass in the course of its manufacture
+      through the hands of many persons. But each may do his part without
+      knowledge of what others do or without any reference to what they do; each
+      may operate simply for the sake of a separate result&mdash;his own pay.
+      There is, in this case, no common consequence to which the several acts
+      are referred, and hence no genuine intercourse or association, in spite of
+      juxtaposition, and in spite of the fact that their respective doings
+      contribute to a single outcome. But if each views the consequences of his
+      own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into
+      account the consequences of their behavior upon himself, then there is a
+      common mind; a common intent in behavior. There is an understanding set up
+      between the different contributors; and this common understanding controls
+      the action of each. Suppose that conditions were so arranged that one
+      person automatically caught a ball and then threw it to another person who
+      caught and automatically returned it; and that each so acted without
+      knowing where the ball came from or went to. Clearly, such action would be
+      without point or meaning. It might be physically controlled, but it would
+      not be socially directed. But suppose that each becomes aware of what the
+      other is doing, and becomes interested in the other's action and thereby
+      interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the action of the
+      other. The behavior of each would then be intelligent; and socially
+      intelligent and guided. Take one more example of a less imaginary kind. An
+      infant is hungry, and cries while food is prepared in his presence. If he
+      does not connect his own state with what others are doing, nor what they
+      are doing with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with increasing
+      impatience to his own increasing discomfort. He is physically controlled
+      by his own organic state. But when he makes a back and forth reference,
+      his whole attitude changes. He takes an interest, as we say; he takes note
+      and watches what others are doing. He no longer reacts just to his own
+      hunger, but behaves in the light of what others are doing for its
+      prospective satisfaction. In that way, he also no longer just gives way to
+      hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or recognizes, or identifies his
+      own state. It becomes an object for him. His attitude toward it becomes in
+      some degree intelligent. And in such noting of the meaning of the actions
+      of others and of his own state, he is socially directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. One of them
+      has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do not influence
+      mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are implicated in action
+      for prospective consequences. The other point is persons modify one
+      another's dispositions only through the special use they make of physical
+      conditions. Consider first the case of so-called expressive movements to
+      which others are sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning, clinching of
+      fists, natural gestures of all kinds. In themselves, these are not
+      expressive. They are organic parts of a person's attitude. One does not
+      blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but because the
+      capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli. But others use the
+      blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of the muscles of a person
+      with whom they are associated, as a sign of the state in which that person
+      finds himself, and as an indication of what course to pursue. The frown
+      signifies an imminent rebuke for which one must prepare, or an uncertainty
+      and hesitation which one must, if possible, remove by saying or doing
+      something to restore confidence. A man at some distance is waving his arms
+      wildly. One has only to preserve an attitude of detached indifference, and
+      the motions of the other person will be on the level of any remote
+      physical change which we happen to note. If we have no concern or
+      interest, the waving of the arms is as meaningless to us as the gyrations
+      of the arms of a windmill. But if interest is aroused, we begin to
+      participate. We refer his action to something we are doing ourselves or
+      that we should do. We have to judge the meaning of his act in order to
+      decide what to do. Is he beckoning for help? Is he warning us of an
+      explosion to be set off, against which we should guard ourselves? In one
+      case, his action means to run toward him; in the other case, to run away.
+      In any case, it is the change he effects in the physical environment which
+      is a sign to us of how we should conduct ourselves. Our action is socially
+      controlled because we endeavor to refer what we are to do to the same
+      situation in which he is acting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Language is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this joint
+      reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation.
+      Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social direction. But
+      language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that it
+      takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of physical
+      means to accomplish results. A child sees persons with whom he lives using
+      chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws, plows, horses, money in certain ways.
+      If he has any share at all in what they are doing, he is led thereby to
+      use things in the same way, or to use other things in a way which will fit
+      in. If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign that he is to sit in
+      it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to extend his; and so on in
+      a never ending stream of detail. The prevailing habits of using the
+      products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all
+      odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control. When children
+      go to school, they already have "minds"&mdash;they have knowledge and
+      dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to through the use of
+      language. But these "minds" are the organized habits of intelligent
+      response which they have previously required by putting things to use in
+      connection with the way other persons use things. The control is
+      inescapable; it saturates disposition. The net outcome of the discussion
+      is that the fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual.
+      It is not "moral" in the sense that a person is moved by direct personal
+      appeal from others, important as is this method at critical junctures. It
+      consists in the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects
+      in correspondence with others, whether by way of cooperation and
+      assistance or rivalry and competition. Mind as a concrete thing is
+      precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them;
+      a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to
+      which they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this
+      sense is the method of social control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the defects of a
+      psychology of learning which places the individual mind naked, as it were,
+      in contact with physical objects, and which believes that knowledge,
+      ideas, and beliefs accrue from their interaction. Only comparatively
+      recently has the predominating influence of association with fellow beings
+      in the formation of mental and moral disposition been perceived. Even now
+      it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an alleged method of
+      learning by direct contact with things, and as merely supplementing
+      knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of persons. The purport of
+      our discussion is that such a view makes an absurd and impossible
+      separation between persons and things. Interaction with things may form
+      habits of external adjustment. But it leads to activity having a meaning
+      and conscious intent only when things are used to produce a result. And
+      the only way one person can modify the mind of another is by using
+      physical conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering
+      activity from him. Such are our two main conclusions. It is desirable to
+      amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast with the theory which
+      uses a psychology of supposed direct relationships of human beings to one
+      another as an adjunct to the psychology of the supposed direct relation of
+      an individual to physical objects. In substance, this so-called social
+      psychology has been built upon the notion of imitation. Consequently, we
+      shall discuss the nature and role of imitation in the formation of mental
+      disposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to this theory, social control of individuals rests upon the
+      instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of
+      others. The latter serve as models. The imitative instinct is so strong
+      that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by
+      others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behavior. According to
+      our theory, what is here called imitation is a misleading name for
+      partaking with others in a use of things which leads to consequences of
+      common interest. The basic error in the current notion of imitation is
+      that it puts the cart before the horse. It takes an effect for the cause
+      of the effect. There can be no doubt that individuals in forming a social
+      group are like-minded; they understand one another. They tend to act with
+      the same controlling ideas, beliefs, and intentions, given similar
+      circumstances. Looked at from without, they might be said to be engaged in
+      "imitating" one another. In the sense that they are doing much the same
+      sort of thing in much the same sort of way, this would be true enough. But
+      "imitation" throws no light upon why they so act; it repeats the fact as
+      an explanation of itself. It is an explanation of the same order as the
+      famous saying that opium puts men to sleep because of its dormitive power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Objective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in being in
+      conformity with others are baptized by the name imitation. This social
+      fact is then taken for a psychological force, which produced the likeness.
+      A considerable portion of what is called imitation is simply the fact that
+      persons being alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli.
+      Quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted get angry and
+      attack the insulter. This statement may be met by citing the undoubted
+      fact that response to an insult takes place in different ways in groups
+      having different customs. In one group, it may be met by recourse to
+      fisticuffs, in another by a challenge to a duel, in a third by an
+      exhibition of contemptuous disregard. This happens, so it is said, because
+      the model set for imitation is different. But there is no need to appeal
+      to imitation. The mere fact that customs are different means that the
+      actual stimuli to behavior are different. Conscious instruction plays a
+      part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a large influence. Still more
+      effective is the fact that unless an individual acts in the way current in
+      his group, he is literally out of it. He can associate with others on
+      intimate and equal terms only by behaving in the way in which they behave.
+      The pressure that comes from the fact that one is let into the group
+      action by acting in one way and shut out by acting in another way is
+      unremitting. What is called the effect of imitation is mainly the product
+      of conscious instruction and of the selective influence exercised by the
+      unconscious confirmations and ratifications of those with whom one
+      associates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls it
+      back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not just the sight of the
+      ball, or the sight of the other rolling it. It is the situation&mdash;the
+      game which is playing. The response is not merely rolling the ball back;
+      it is rolling it back so that the other one may catch and return it,&mdash;that
+      the game may continue. The "pattern" or model is not the action of the
+      other person. The whole situation requires that each should adapt his
+      action in view of what the other person has done and is to do. Imitation
+      may come in but its role is subordinate. The child has an interest on his
+      own account; he wants to keep it going. He may then note how the other
+      person catches and holds the ball in order to improve his own acts. He
+      imitates the means of doing, not the end or thing to be done. And he
+      imitates the means because he wishes, on his own behalf, as part of his
+      own initiative, to take an effective part in the game. One has only to
+      consider how completely the child is dependent from his earliest days for
+      successful execution of his purposes upon fitting his acts into those of
+      others to see what a premium is put upon behaving as others behave, and of
+      developing an understanding of them in order that he may so behave. The
+      pressure for likemindedness in action from this source is so great that it
+      is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation. As matter of fact, imitation
+      of ends, as distinct from imitation of means which help to reach ends, is
+      a superficial and transitory affair which leaves little effect upon
+      disposition. Idiots are especially apt at this kind of imitation; it
+      affects outward acts but not the meaning of their performance. When we
+      find children engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging
+      them (as we would do if it were an important means of social control) we
+      are more likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy cats.
+      Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent
+      act. It involves close observation, and judicious selection of what will
+      enable one to do better something which he already is trying to do. Used
+      for a purpose, the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become
+      a factor in the development of effective action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing the
+      conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of a certain
+      mental disposition; a way of understanding objects, events, and acts which
+      enables one to participate effectively in associated activities. Only the
+      friction engendered by meeting resistance from others leads to the view
+      that it takes place by forcing a line of action contrary to natural
+      inclinations. Only failure to take account of the situations in which
+      persons are mutually concerned (or interested in acting responsively to
+      one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief agent in promoting
+      social control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group perpetuate
+      savagery, and a civilized group civilization? Doubtless the first answer
+      to occur to mind is because savages are savages; being of low-grade
+      intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. But careful study has made
+      it doubtful whether their native capacities are appreciably inferior to
+      those of civilized man. It has made it certain that native differences are
+      not sufficient to account for the difference in culture. In a sense the
+      mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their
+      backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict
+      their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to
+      mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope
+      of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and
+      imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. Lack of
+      control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects
+      enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of natural resources
+      are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The advance
+      of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects
+      have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for
+      securing ends. We start not so much with superior capacities as with
+      superior stimuli for evocation and direction of our capacities. The savage
+      deals largely with crude stimuli; we have weighted stimuli. Prior human
+      efforts have made over natural conditions. As they originally existed they
+      were indifferent to human endeavors. Every domesticated plant and animal,
+      every tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article,
+      every esthetic decoration, every work of art means a transformation of
+      conditions once hostile or indifferent to characteristic human activities
+      into friendly and favoring conditions. Because the activities of children
+      today are controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are
+      able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow,
+      tortured ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes
+      which have preceded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our system
+      of roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat, light,
+      and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every purpose,
+      do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a civilization.
+      But the uses to which they are put are civilization, and without the
+      things the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise necessarily devoted to
+      wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment and securing a
+      precarious protection against its inclemencies is freed. A body of
+      knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which is guaranteed by the
+      fact that the physical equipment in which it is incarnated leads to
+      results that square with the other facts of nature. Thus these appliances
+      of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief protection, against a
+      recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and
+      infertile imaginings about nature in which so much of the best
+      intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we add one other factor,
+      namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the interests
+      of a truly shared or associated life, then the appliances become the
+      positive resources of civilization. If Greece, with a scant tithe of our
+      material resources, achieved a worthy and noble intellectual and artistic
+      career, it is because Greece operated for social ends such resources as it
+      had. But whatever the situation, whether one of barbarism or civilization,
+      whether one of stinted control of physical forces, or of partial
+      enslavement to a mechanism not yet made tributary to a shared experience,
+      things as they enter into action furnish the educative conditions of daily
+      life and direct the formation of mental and moral disposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially
+      selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials
+      and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. Since
+      language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to
+      the maximum transformation in the interests of social life&mdash;physical
+      things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools&mdash;it
+      is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other
+      appliances. By it we are led to share vicariously in past human
+      experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of the present. We
+      are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate situations. In
+      countless ways, language condenses meanings that record social outcomes
+      and presage social outlooks. So significant is it of a liberal share in
+      what is worth while in life that unlettered and uneducated have become
+      almost synonymous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its dangers&mdash;dangers
+      which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice. Why is it, in spite
+      of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption,
+      are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice?
+      That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active
+      and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in
+      practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to
+      the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is
+      lectured; it is written about. But its enactment into practice requires
+      that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with
+      tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely attained. It requires
+      that methods of instruction and administration be modified to allow and to
+      secure direct and continuous occupations with things. Not that the use of
+      language as an educational resource should lessen; but that its use should
+      be more vital and fruitful by having its normal connection with shared
+      activities. "These things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the
+      others undone." And for the school "these things" mean equipment with the
+      instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in
+      the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a
+      pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go to
+      school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most
+      adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When treating it
+      as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which comes
+      from sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the effort at
+      isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim. We may secure
+      motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an individual by himself,
+      but we cannot thereby get him to understand the meaning which things have
+      in the life of which he is a part. We may secure technical specialized
+      ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence
+      which directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in a joint
+      activity, where one person's use of material and tools is consciously
+      referred to the use other persons are making of their capacities and
+      appliances, is a social direction of disposition attained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM3">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      the life-customs of the group into which they are born. Consequently they
+      have to be directed or guided. This control is not the same thing as
+      physical compulsion; it consists in centering the impulses acting at any
+      one time upon some specific end and in introducing an order of continuity
+      into the sequence of acts. The action of others is always influenced by
+      deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions. But in some cases as
+      in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and disapprovals, the stimuli
+      proceed from persons with a direct view to influencing action. Since in
+      such cases we are most conscious of controlling the action of others, we
+      are likely to exaggerate the importance of this sort of control at the
+      expense of a more permanent and effective method. The basic control
+      resides in the nature of the situations in which the young take part. In
+      social situations the young have to refer their way of acting to what
+      others are doing and make it fit in. This directs their action to a common
+      result, and gives an understanding common to the participants. For all
+      mean the same thing, even when performing different acts. This common
+      understanding of the means and ends of action is the essence of social
+      control. It is indirect, or emotional and intellectual, not direct or
+      personal. Moreover it is intrinsic to the disposition of the person, not
+      external and coercive. To achieve this internal control through identity
+      of interest and understanding is the business of education. While books
+      and conversation can do much, these agencies are usually relied upon too
+      exclusively. Schools require for their full efficiency more opportunity
+      for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so that they
+      may acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and
+      appliances used.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Four: Education as Growth
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Conditions of Growth.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In directing the activities of the young, society determines its own
+      future in determining that of the young. Since the young at a given time
+      will at some later date compose the society of that period, the latter's
+      nature will largely turn upon the direction children's activities were
+      given at an earlier period. This cumulative movement of action toward a
+      later result is what is meant by growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The primary condition of growth is immaturity. This may seem to be a mere
+      truism&mdash;saying that a being can develop only in some point in which
+      he is undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the word immaturity means
+      something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is noteworthy that the
+      terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one sense being
+      negative, the other positive. Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like
+      the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by potentiality a merely
+      dormant or quiescent state&mdash;a capacity to become something different
+      under external influences. But we also mean by capacity an ability, a
+      power; and by potentiality potency, force. Now when we say that immaturity
+      means the possibility of growth, we are not referring to absence of powers
+      which may exist at a later time; we express a force positively present&mdash;the
+      ability to develop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something
+      which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to
+      regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat it
+      simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed
+      standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not, and will not
+      have till he becomes a man. This comparative standpoint is legitimate
+      enough for some purposes, but if we make it final, the question arises
+      whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption. Children, if they
+      could express themselves articulately and sincerely, would tell a
+      different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for the conviction
+      that for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults must become as
+      little children. The seriousness of the assumption of the negative quality
+      of the possibilities of immaturity is apparent when we reflect that it
+      sets up as an ideal and standard a static end. The fulfillment of growing
+      is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is to say, an Ungrowth,
+      something which is no longer growing. The futility of the assumption is
+      seen in the fact that every adult resents the imputation of having no
+      further possibilities of growth; and so far as he finds that they are
+      closed to him mourns the fact as evidence of loss, instead of falling back
+      on the achieved as adequate manifestation of power. Why an unequal measure
+      for child and man?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a
+      positive force or ability,&mdash;the power to grow. We do not have to
+      draw out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational
+      doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager and
+      impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is
+      something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility
+      gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity,
+      dependence and plasticity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive,
+      still more absurd as a power. Yet if helplessness were all there were in
+      dependence, no development could ever take place. A merely impotent being
+      has to be carried, forever, by others. The fact that dependence is
+      accompanied by growth in ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into
+      parasitism, suggests that it is already something constructive. Being
+      merely sheltered by others would not promote growth. For
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) it would only build a wall around impotence. With reference to the
+      physical world, the child is helpless. He lacks at birth and for a long
+      time thereafter power to make his way physically, to make his own living.
+      If he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive an hour. On this
+      side his helplessness is almost complete. The young of the brutes are
+      immeasurably his superiors. He is physically weak and not able to turn the
+      strength which he possesses to coping with the physical environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however,
+      some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
+      animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an
+      early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound up
+      with the life of those about them. They are compelled, so to speak, to
+      have physical gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. Human
+      infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
+      because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk and think as if they
+      simply happened to be physically in a social environment; as if social
+      forces exclusively existed in the adults who take care of them, they being
+      passive recipients. If it were said that children are themselves
+      marvelously endowed with power to enlist the cooperative attention of
+      others, this would be thought to be a backhanded way of saying that others
+      are marvelously attentive to the needs of children. But observation shows
+      that children are gifted with an equipment of the first order for social
+      intercourse. Few grown-up persons retain all of the flexible and sensitive
+      ability of children to vibrate sympathetically with the attitudes and
+      doings of those about them. Inattention to physical things (going with
+      incapacity to control them) is accompanied by a corresponding
+      intensification of interest and attention as to the doings of people. The
+      native mechanism of the child and his impulses all tend to facile social
+      responsiveness. The statement that children, before adolescence, are
+      egotistically self-centered, even if it were true, would not contradict
+      the truth of this statement. It would simply indicate that their social
+      responsiveness is employed on their own behalf, not that it does not
+      exist. But the statement is not true as matter of fact. The facts which
+      are cited in support of the alleged pure egoism of children really show
+      the intensity and directness with which they go to their mark. If the ends
+      which form the mark seem narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because
+      adults (by means of a similar engrossment in their day) have mastered
+      these ends, which have consequently ceased to interest them. Most of the
+      remainder of children's alleged native egoism is simply an egoism which
+      runs counter to an adult's egoism. To a grown-up person who is too
+      absorbed in his own affairs to take an interest in children's affairs,
+      children doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a
+      weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that
+      increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an
+      individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more
+      self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes
+      an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an
+      illusion of being really able to stand and act alone&mdash;an unnamed form
+      of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable
+      suffering of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
+      constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different from the
+      plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a capacity to take on change of form
+      in accord with external pressure. It lies near the pliable elasticity by
+      which some persons take on the color of their surroundings while retaining
+      their own bent. But it is something deeper than this. It is essentially
+      the ability to learn from experience; the power to retain from one
+      experience something which is of avail in coping with the difficulties of
+      a later situation. This means power to modify actions on the basis of the
+      results of prior experiences, the power to develop dispositions. Without
+      it, the acquisition of habits is impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and especially
+      the human young, have to learn to utilize their instinctive reactions. The
+      human being is born with a greater number of instinctive tendencies than
+      other animals. But the instincts of the lower animals perfect themselves
+      for appropriate action at an early period after birth, while most of those
+      of the human infant are of little account just as they stand. An original
+      specialized power of adjustment secures immediate efficiency, but, like a
+      railway ticket, it is good for one route only. A being who, in order to
+      use his eyes, ears, hands, and legs, has to experiment in making varied
+      combinations of their reactions, achieves a control that is flexible and
+      varied. A chick, for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few
+      hours after hatching. This means that definite coordinations of activities
+      of the eyes in seeing and of the body and head in striking are perfected
+      in a few trials. An infant requires about six months to be able to gauge
+      with approximate accuracy the action in reaching which will coordinate
+      with his visual activities; to be able, that is, to tell whether he can
+      reach a seen object and just how to execute the reaching. As a result, the
+      chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original endowment. The
+      infant has the advantage of the multitude of instinctive tentative
+      reactions and of the experiences that accompany them, even though he is at
+      a temporary disadvantage because they cross one another. In learning an
+      action, instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity learns to
+      vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them, according to change
+      of circumstances. A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the
+      fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other
+      situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires
+      a habit of learning. He learns to learn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and variable
+      control has been summed up in the doctrine of the significance of
+      prolonged infancy. 1 This prolongation is significant from the standpoint
+      of the adult members of the group as well as from that of the young. The
+      presence of dependent and learning beings is a stimulus to nurture and
+      affection. The need for constant continued care was probably a chief means
+      in transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent unions. It
+      certainly was a chief influence in forming habits of affectionate and
+      sympathetic watchfulness; that constructive interest in the well-being of
+      others which is essential to associated life. Intellectually, this moral
+      development meant the introduction of many new objects of attention; it
+      stimulated foresight and planning for the future. Thus there is a
+      reciprocal influence. Increasing complexity of social life requires a
+      longer period of infancy in which to acquire the needed powers; this
+      prolongation of dependence means prolongation of plasticity, or power of
+      acquiring variable and novel modes of control. Hence it provides a further
+      push to social progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Habits as Expressions of Growth. We have already noted that plasticity
+      is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior experience factors
+      which modify subsequent activities. This signifies the capacity to acquire
+      habits, or develop definite dispositions. We have now to consider the
+      salient features of habits. In the first place, a habit is a form of
+      executive skill, of efficiency in doing. A habit means an ability to use
+      natural conditions as means to ends. It is an active control of the
+      environment through control of the organs of action. We are perhaps apt to
+      emphasize the control of the body at the expense of control of the
+      environment. We think of walking, talking, playing the piano, the
+      specialized skills characteristic of the etcher, the surgeon, the
+      bridge-builder, as if they were simply ease, deftness, and accuracy on the
+      part of the organism. They are that, of course; but the measure of the
+      value of these qualities lies in the economical and effective control of
+      the environment which they secure. To be able to walk is to have certain
+      properties of nature at our disposal&mdash;and so with all other habits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the acquisition of
+      those habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his
+      environment. The definition expresses an essential phase of growth. But it
+      is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense of control
+      of means for achieving ends. If we think of a habit simply as a change
+      wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change consists in
+      ability to effect subsequent changes in the environment, we shall be led
+      to think of "adjustment" as a conformity to environment as wax conforms to
+      the seal which impresses it. The environment is thought of as something
+      fixed, providing in its fixity the end and standard of changes taking
+      place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting ourselves to this fixity
+      of external conditions. 2 Habit as habituation is indeed something
+      relatively passive; we get used to our surroundings&mdash;to our clothing,
+      our shoes, and gloves; to the atmosphere as long as it is fairly equable;
+      to our daily associates, etc. Conformity to the environment, a change
+      wrought in the organism without reference to ability to modify
+      surroundings, is a marked trait of such habituations. Aside from the fact
+      that we are not entitled to carry over the traits of such adjustments
+      (which might well be called accommodations, to mark them off from active
+      adjustments) into habits of active use of our surroundings, two features
+      of habituations are worth notice. In the first place, we get used to
+      things by first using them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider getting used to a strange city. At first, there is excessive
+      stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response. Gradually certain
+      stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are degraded.
+      We can say either that we do not respond to them any longer, or more truly
+      that we have effected a persistent response to them&mdash;an equilibrium
+      of adjustment. This means, in the second place, that this enduring
+      adjustment supplies the background upon which are made specific
+      adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never interested in changing the
+      whole environment; there is much that we take for granted and accept just
+      as it already is. Upon this background our activities focus at certain
+      points in an endeavor to introduce needed changes. Habituation is thus our
+      adjustment to an environment which at the time we are not concerned with
+      modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active habits. Adaptation,
+      in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the environment to our own
+      activities as of our activities to the environment. A savage tribe manages
+      to live on a desert plain. It adapts itself. But its adaptation involves a
+      maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a
+      maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of
+      subjection to use. A civilized people enters upon the scene. It also
+      adapts itself. It introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants
+      and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by
+      careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, the
+      wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the
+      civilized man has habits which transform the environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its executive and
+      motor phase. It means formation of intellectual and emotional disposition
+      as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency of action. Any
+      habit marks an inclination&mdash;an active preference and choice for the
+      conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not wait, Micawber-like,
+      for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy; it actively seeks for
+      occasions to pass into full operation. If its expression is unduly
+      blocked, inclination shows itself in uneasiness and intense craving. A
+      habit also marks an intellectual disposition. Where there is a habit,
+      there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment to which action is
+      applied. There is a definite way of understanding the situations in which
+      the habit operates. Modes of thought, of observation and reflection, enter
+      as forms of skill and of desire into the habits that make a man an
+      engineer, an architect, a physician, or a merchant. In unskilled forms of
+      labor, the intellectual factors are at minimum precisely because the
+      habits involved are not of a high grade. But there are habits of judging
+      and reasoning as truly as of handling a tool, painting a picture, or
+      conducting an experiment. Such statements are, however, understatements.
+      The habits of mind involved in habits of the eye and hand supply the
+      latter with their significance. Above all, the intellectual element in a
+      habit fixes the relation of the habit to varied and elastic use, and hence
+      to continued growth. We speak of fixed habits. Well, the phrase may mean
+      powers so well established that their possessor always has them as
+      resources when needed. But the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine
+      ways, with loss of freshness, open-mindedness, and originality. Fixity of
+      habit may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our
+      having a free hold upon things. This fact explains two points in a common
+      notion about habits: their identification with mechanical and external
+      modes of action to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the
+      tendency to give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad habits."
+      Many a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his chosen
+      profession called a habit, and would naturally think of his use of
+      tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the meaning of habit. A
+      habit is to him something which has a hold on him, something not easily
+      thrown off even though judgment condemn it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into
+      ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which
+      intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking
+      habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that they are
+      opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation and decision. As we
+      have seen, the acquiring of habits is due to an original plasticity of our
+      natures: to our ability to vary responses till we find an appropriate and
+      efficient way of acting. Routine habits, and habits that possess us
+      instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to plasticity.
+      They mark the close of power to vary. There can be no doubt of the
+      tendency of organic plasticity, of the physiological basis, to lessen with
+      growing years. The instinctively mobile and eagerly varying action of
+      childhood, the love of new stimuli and new developments, too easily passes
+      into a "settling down," which means aversion to change and a resting on
+      past achievements. Only an environment which secures the full use of
+      intelligence in the process of forming habits can counteract this
+      tendency. Of course, the same hardening of the organic conditions affects
+      the physiological structures which are involved in thinking. But this fact
+      only indicates the need of persistent care to see to it that the function
+      of intelligence is invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted
+      method which falls back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure
+      external efficiency of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought,
+      marks a deliberate closing in of surroundings upon growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development. We have had
+      so far but little to say in this chapter about education. We have been
+      occupied with the conditions and implications of growth. If our
+      conclusions are justified, they carry with them, however, definite
+      educational consequences. When it is said that education is development,
+      everything depends upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion
+      is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is life.
+      Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the
+      educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and that
+      (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing,
+      reconstructing, transforming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. Development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that is, with
+      respect to the special traits of child and adult life, means the direction
+      of power into special channels: the formation of habits involving
+      executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific objects of
+      observation and thought. But the comparative view is not final. The child
+      has specific powers; to ignore that fact is to stunt or distort the organs
+      upon which his growth depends. The adult uses his powers to transform his
+      environment, thereby occasioning new stimuli which redirect his powers and
+      keep them developing. Ignoring this fact means arrested development, a
+      passive accommodation. Normal child and normal adult alike, in other
+      words, are engaged in growing. The difference between them is not the
+      difference between growth and no growth, but between the modes of growth
+      appropriate to different conditions. With respect to the development of
+      powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we
+      may say the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to
+      sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we
+      may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. One statement
+      is as true as the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely privative
+      nature of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and
+      rigidity of habit, are all connected with a false idea of growth or
+      development,&mdash;that it is a movement toward a fixed goal. Growth is
+      regarded as having an end, instead of being an end. The educational
+      counterparts of the three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take
+      account of the instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly,
+      failure to develop initiative in coping with novel situations; thirdly, an
+      undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure automatic skill
+      at the expense of personal perception. In all cases, the adult environment
+      is accepted as a standard for the child. He is to be brought up to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Natural instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances&mdash;as
+      obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be brought into
+      conformity with external standards. Since conformity is the aim, what is
+      distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or regarded
+      as a source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to
+      uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the novel,
+      aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown. Since
+      the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process of growing,
+      external agents have to be resorted to to induce movement toward it.
+      Whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be
+      sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more
+      growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more
+      education. It is a commonplace to say that education should not cease when
+      one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that the purpose of
+      school education is to insure the continuance of education by organizing
+      the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from life itself
+      and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process
+      of living is the finest product of schooling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed
+      comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up
+      thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. Abandoning this notion,
+      we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of instruction as a
+      method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge into a mental and moral
+      hole which awaits filling. Since life means growth, a living creature
+      lives as truly and positively at one stage as at another, with the same
+      intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims. Hence education means the
+      enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure growth, or adequacy of
+      life, irrespective of age. We first look with impatience upon immaturity,
+      regarding it as something to be got over as rapidly as possible. Then the
+      adult formed by such educative methods looks back with impatient regret
+      upon childhood and youth as a scene of lost opportunities and wasted
+      powers. This ironical situation will endure till it is recognized that
+      living has its own intrinsic quality and that the business of education is
+      with that quality. Realization that life is growth protects us from that
+      so-called idealizing of childhood which in effect is nothing but lazy
+      indulgence. Life is not to be identified with every superficial act and
+      interest. Even though it is not always easy to tell whether what appears
+      to be mere surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained
+      power, we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as ends
+      in themselves. They are signs of possible growth. They are to be turned
+      into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or
+      cultivated for their own sake. Excessive attention to surface phenomena
+      (even in the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to their
+      fixation and thus to arrested development. What impulses are moving
+      toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for parent and
+      teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity cannot be better put
+      than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the child. Be not too much his
+      parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry which replies
+      to this suggestion: Would you verily throw up the reins of public and
+      private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of
+      his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the
+      child's nature? I answer,&mdash;Respect the child, respect him to the end,
+      but also respect yourself.... The two points in a boy's training are, to
+      keep his naturel and train off all but that; to keep his naturel, but stop
+      off his uproar, fooling, and horseplay; keep his nature and arm it with
+      knowledge in the very direction in which it points." And as Emerson goes
+      on to show this reverence for childhood and youth instead of opening up an
+      easy and easy-going path to the instructors, "involves at once, immense
+      claims on the time, the thought, on the life of the teacher. It requires
+      time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of God;
+      and only to think of using it implies character and profoundness."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM4">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Both of these conditions are at their height in childhood and youth.
+      Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of
+      habits. Habits give control over the environment, power to utilize it for
+      human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or a general and
+      persistent balance of organic activities with the surroundings, and of
+      active capacities to readjust activity to meet new conditions. The former
+      furnishes the background of growth; the latter constitute growing. Active
+      habits involve thought, invention, and initiative in applying capacities
+      to new aims. They are opposed to routine which marks an arrest of growth.
+      Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with
+      growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school
+      education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth
+      and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 Intimations of its significance are found in a number of writers, but
+      John Fiske, in his Excursions of an Evolutionist, is accredited with its
+      first systematic exposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2 This conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the conceptions of
+      the external relation of stimulus and response, considered in the last
+      chapter, and of the negative conceptions of immaturity and plasticity
+      noted in this chapter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Education as Preparation. We have laid it down that the educative
+      process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every
+      stage an added capacity of growth. This conception contrasts sharply with
+      other ideas which have influenced practice. By making the contrast
+      explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to
+      light. The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process of
+      preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared for is, of course,
+      the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. Children are not
+      regarded as social members in full and regular standing. They are looked
+      upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list. The conception is
+      only carried a little farther when the life of adults is considered as not
+      having meaning on its own account, but as a preparatory probation for
+      "another life." The idea is but another form of the notion of the negative
+      and privative character of growth already criticized; hence we shall not
+      repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the evil consequences which flow
+      from putting education on this basis. In the first place, it involves loss
+      of impetus. Motive power is not utilized. Children proverbially live in
+      the present; that is not only a fact not to be evaded, but it is an
+      excellence. The future just as future lacks urgency and body. To get ready
+      for something, one knows not what nor why, is to throw away the leverage
+      that exists, and to seek for motive power in a vague chance. Under such
+      circumstances, there is, in the second place, a premium put on
+      shilly-shallying and procrastination. The future prepared for is a long
+      way off; plenty of time will intervene before it becomes a present. Why be
+      in a hurry about getting ready for it? The temptation to postpone is much
+      increased because the present offers so many wonderful opportunities and
+      proffers such invitations to adventure. Naturally attention and energy go
+      to them; education accrues naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education
+      than if the full stress of effort had been put upon making conditions as
+      educative as possible. A third undesirable result is the substitution of a
+      conventional average standard of expectation and requirement for a
+      standard which concerns the specific powers of the individual under
+      instruction. For a severe and definite judgment based upon the strong and
+      weak points of the individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion
+      concerning what youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some
+      more or less remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions
+      are to take place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to
+      enter upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as
+      the serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the loss
+      which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point to
+      a comparatively unproductive point. It fails most just where it thinks it
+      is succeeding&mdash;in getting a preparation for the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a large
+      scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The future
+      having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the
+      possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make
+      it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy
+      work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely
+      unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is
+      actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to be
+      told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
+      accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future,
+      rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely systems
+      of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems which
+      neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a future. Then,
+      in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this method, the pendulum
+      swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of information required
+      against some later day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be fooled into
+      taking something which they do not care for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the
+      future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present
+      possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later
+      requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd moments;
+      it is a continuous leading into the future. If the environment, in school
+      and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the present
+      capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of the present is
+      surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching importance to
+      preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of present
+      effort. Because the need of preparation for a continually developing life
+      is great, it is imperative that every energy should be bent to making the
+      present experience as rich and significant as possible. Then as the
+      present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education which
+      professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it takes back with
+      one hand what it proffers with the other. Development is conceived not as
+      continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent powers toward a
+      definite goal. The goal is conceived of as completion,&mdash;perfection.
+      Life at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an unfolding
+      toward it. Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the preparation
+      theory. Practically the two differ in that the adherents of the latter
+      make much of the practical and professional duties for which one is
+      preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal and
+      spiritual qualities of the principle which is unfolding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a final
+      unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its transition from a
+      static to a dynamic understanding of life. It simulates the style of the
+      latter. It pays the tribute of speaking much of development, process,
+      progress. But all of these operations are conceived to be merely
+      transitional; they lack meaning on their own account. They possess
+      significance only as movements toward something away from what is now
+      going on. Since growth is just a movement toward a completed being, the
+      final ideal is immobile. An abstract and indefinite future is in control
+      with all which that connotes in depreciation of present power and
+      opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is very far
+      away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is unattainable.
+      Consequently, in order to be available for present guidance it must be
+      translated into something which stands for it. Otherwise we should be
+      compelled to regard any and every manifestation of the child as an
+      unfolding from within, and hence sacred. Unless we set up some definite
+      criterion representing the ideal end by which to judge whether a given
+      attitude or act is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is
+      to withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere with
+      proper development. Since that is not practicable, a working substitute is
+      set up. Usually, of course, this is some idea which an adult would like to
+      have a child acquire. Consequently, by "suggestive questioning" or some
+      other pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out" from the
+      pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that is evidence
+      that the child is unfolding properly. But as the pupil generally has no
+      initiative of his own in this direction, the result is a random groping
+      after what is wanted, and the formation of habits of dependence upon the
+      cues furnished by others. Just because such methods simulate a true
+      principle and claim to have its sanction they may do more harm than would
+      outright "telling," where, at least, it remains with the child how much
+      will stick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two typical
+      attempts to provide a working representative of the absolute goal. Both
+      start from the conception of a whole&mdash;an absolute&mdash;which is
+      "immanent" in human life. The perfect or complete ideal is not a mere
+      ideal; it is operative here and now. But it is present only implicitly,
+      "potentially," or in an enfolded condition. What is termed development is
+      the gradual making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up.
+      Froebel and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes referred to,
+      have different ideas of the path by which the progressive realization of
+      manifestation of the complete principle is effected. According to Hegel,
+      it is worked out through a series of historical institutions which embody
+      the different factors in the Absolute. According to Froebel, the actuating
+      force is the presentation of symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding
+      to the essential traits of the Absolute. When these are presented to the
+      child, the Whole, or perfection, sleeping within him, is awakened. A
+      single example may indicate the method. Every one familiar with the
+      kindergarten is acquainted with the circle in which the children gather.
+      It is not enough that the circle is a convenient way of grouping the
+      children. It must be used "because it is a symbol of the collective life
+      of mankind in general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the
+      native capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his
+      influence in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the most
+      effective single force in modern educational theory in effecting
+      widespread acknowledgment of the idea of growth. But his formulation of
+      the notion of development and his organization of devices for promoting it
+      were badly hampered by the fact that he conceived development to be the
+      unfolding of a ready-made latent principle. He failed to see that growing
+      is growth, developing is development, and consequently placed the emphasis
+      upon the completed product. Thus he set up a goal which meant the arrest
+      of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to immediate guidance
+      of powers, save through translation into abstract and symbolic formulae.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical philosophic
+      language, transcendental. That is, it is something apart from direct
+      experience and perception. So far as experience is concerned, it is empty;
+      it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything which
+      can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be
+      compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection
+      between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of
+      development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To regard
+      known things as symbols, according to some arbitrary a priori formula&mdash;and
+      every a priori conception must be arbitrary&mdash;is an invitation to
+      romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal to it and treat
+      them as laws. After the scheme of symbolism has been settled upon, some
+      definite technique must be invented by which the inner meaning of the
+      sensible symbols used may be brought home to children. Adults being the
+      formulators of the symbolism are naturally the authors and controllers of
+      the technique. The result was that Froebel's love of abstract symbolism
+      often got the better of his sympathetic insight; and there was substituted
+      for development as arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation
+      as the history of instruction has ever seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of
+      the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional, rather than symbolic,
+      form. His philosophy, like Froebel's, marks in one direction an
+      indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the process of life.
+      The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident to
+      him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical
+      institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and
+      nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated the
+      efforts of a whole series of German writers&mdash;Lessing, Herder, Kant,
+      Schiller, Goethe&mdash;to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great
+      collective institutional products of humanity. For those who learned the
+      lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive of
+      institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely&mdash;in
+      idea, not in fact&mdash;the psychology that regarded "mind" as a
+      ready-made possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of
+      "objective mind"&mdash;language, government, art, religion&mdash;in the
+      formation of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the
+      conception of an absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as
+      they concretely exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each
+      in its time and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the
+      self-realizing process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or
+      stage, its existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an
+      integral element in the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as
+      they are, individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and
+      nurture, consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing
+      institutions. Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education.
+      Institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and fall
+      of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the great
+      "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have no share or
+      lot in it. In the later nineteenth century, this type of idealism was
+      amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end. As against it,
+      or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of individuals
+      are impotent. Or, rather, they are but the means by which it works itself
+      out. Social progress is an "organic growth," not an experimental
+      selection. Reason is all powerful, but only Absolute Reason has any power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the Greeks)
+      that great historic institutions are active factors in the intellectual
+      nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational philosophy. It
+      indicated a genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had marred his assertion
+      that education must be a natural development and not something forced or
+      grafted upon individuals from without, by the notion that social
+      conditions are not natural. But in its notion of a complete and
+      all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory swallowed up
+      concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual in the
+      abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the claims of the
+      Whole and of individuality by the conception of society as an organic
+      whole, or organism. That social organization is presupposed in the
+      adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted. But the
+      social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of the body
+      to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual has a
+      certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented by the
+      place and functions of the other organs. As one portion of the bodily
+      tissue is differentiated so that it can be the hand and the hand only,
+      another, the eye, and so on, all taken together making the organism, so
+      one individual is supposed to be differentiated for the exercise of the
+      mechanical operations of society, another for those of a statesman,
+      another for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion of "organism" is
+      thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class distinctions in social
+      organization&mdash;a notion which in its educational application again
+      means external dictation instead of growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had great vogue
+      and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much
+      influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." It has in view a
+      correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of specific
+      powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do the chief
+      things which it is important for him to do better than he could without
+      training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency, economy,
+      promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education was indicated in
+      what was said about habits as the product of educative development. But
+      the theory in question takes, as it were, a short cut; it regards some
+      powers (to be presently named) as the direct and conscious aims of
+      instruction, and not simply as the results of growth. There is a definite
+      number of powers to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of
+      strokes which a golfer has to master. Consequently education should get
+      directly at the business of training them. But this implies that they are
+      already there in some untrained form; otherwise their creation would have
+      to be an indirect product of other activities and agencies. Being there
+      already in some crude form, all that remains is to exercise them in
+      constant and graded repetitions, and they will inevitably be refined and
+      perfected. In the phrase "formal discipline" as applied to this
+      conception, "discipline" refers both to the outcome of trained power and
+      to the method of training through repeated exercise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of
+      perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing,
+      feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise upon
+      material presented. In its classic form, this theory was expressed by
+      Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the material or content
+      of knowledge through passively received sensations. On the other hand, the
+      mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation, retention,
+      comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. Knowledge results if the mind
+      discriminates and combines things as they are united and divided in nature
+      itself. But the important thing for education is the exercise or practice
+      of the faculties of the mind till they become thoroughly established
+      habitudes. The analogy constantly employed is that of a billiard player or
+      gymnast, who by repeated use of certain muscles in a uniform way at last
+      secures automatic skill. Even the faculty of thinking was to be formed
+      into a trained habit by repeated exercises in making and combining simple
+      distinctions, for which, Locke thought, mathematics affords unrivaled
+      opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to
+      do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of
+      the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which mind
+      should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which were few in
+      number and which might be trained by specific exercises. The scheme
+      appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and yet it
+      insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception and storage
+      of information, but the formation of personal powers of attention, memory,
+      observation, abstraction, and generalization. It was realistic in its
+      emphatic assertion that all material whatever is received from without; it
+      was idealistic in that final stress fell upon the formation of
+      intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal in its assertion that
+      the individual cannot possess or generate any true ideas on his own
+      account; it was individualistic in placing the end of education in the
+      perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset by the individual.
+      This kind of distribution of values expressed with nicety the state of
+      opinion in the generations following upon Locke. It became, without
+      explicit reference to Locke, a common-place of educational theory and of
+      psychology. Practically, it seemed to provide the educator with definite,
+      instead of vague, tasks. It made the elaboration of a technique of
+      instruction relatively easy. All that was necessary was to provide for
+      sufficient practice of each of the powers. This practice consists in
+      repeated acts of attending, observing, memorizing, etc. By grading the
+      difficulty of the acts, making each set of repetitions somewhat more
+      difficult than the set which preceded it, a complete scheme of instruction
+      is evolved. There are various ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing
+      this conception, in both its alleged foundations and in its educational
+      application. (1) Perhaps the most direct mode of attack consists in
+      pointing out that the supposed original faculties of observation,
+      recollection, willing, thinking, etc., are purely mythological. There are
+      no such ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained.
+      There are, indeed, a great number of original native tendencies,
+      instinctive modes of action, based on the original connections of neurones
+      in the central nervous system. There are impulsive tendencies of the eyes
+      to follow and fixate light; of the neck muscles to turn toward light and
+      sound; of the hands to reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of
+      the vocal apparatus to make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant
+      substances; to gag and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite
+      number. But these tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply
+      marked off from one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving
+      with one another in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent
+      intellectual powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they
+      are tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment so
+      as to bring about other changes. Something in the throat makes one cough;
+      the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus modify the
+      subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a hot thing; it is impulsively,
+      wholly unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal alters the
+      stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with the needs of
+      the organism. It is by such specific changes of organic activities in
+      response to specific changes in the medium that that control of the
+      environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is effected. Now all
+      of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and smellings and tastings
+      are of this kind. In any legitimate sense of the words mental or
+      intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these qualities, and no
+      amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any intellectual properties of
+      observation, judgment, or intentional action (volition) upon them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is not
+      a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one might strengthen
+      a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in selecting from the
+      diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which are
+      especially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to say,
+      among the reactions of the body in general occur upon stimulation of the
+      eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to reaching,
+      grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are gradually eliminated&mdash;or
+      else no training occurs. As we have already noted, the primary reactions,
+      with a very few exceptions are too diffused and general to be practically
+      of much use in the case of the human infant. Hence the identity of
+      training with selective response. (Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important
+      is the specific coordination of different factors of response which takes
+      place. There is not merely a selection of the hand reactions which effect
+      grasping, but of the particular visual stimuli which call out just these
+      reactions and no others, and an establishment of connection between the
+      two. But the coordinating does not stop here. Characteristic temperature
+      reactions may take place when the object is grasped. These will also be
+      brought in; later, the temperature reaction may be connected directly with
+      the optical stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed&mdash;as a bright
+      flame, independent of close contact, may steer one away. Or the child in
+      handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues.
+      The ear response is then brought into the system of response. If a certain
+      sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies the
+      activity, response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected with
+      auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the complex
+      response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each
+      other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the stimuli
+      are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the more rigid
+      and the less generally available is the training secured. In equivalent
+      language, less intellectual or educative quality attaches to the training.
+      The usual way of stating this fact is that the more specialized the
+      reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing and perfecting it
+      transferable to other modes of behavior. According to the orthodox theory
+      of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his spelling lesson acquires,
+      besides ability to spell those particular words, an increase of power of
+      observation, attention, and recollection which may be employed whenever
+      these powers are needed. As matter of fact, the more he confines himself
+      to noticing and fixating the forms of words, irrespective of connection
+      with other things (such as the meaning of the words, the context in which
+      they are habitually used, the derivation and classification of the verbal
+      form, etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be used
+      for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not
+      even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions among
+      geometrical forms, to say nothing of ability to observe in general. He is
+      merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the
+      motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination
+      (to use our prior terminology) is extremely limited. The connections which
+      are employed in other observations and recollections (or reproductions)
+      are deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon forms
+      of letters and words. Having been excluded, they cannot be restored when
+      needed. The ability secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is not
+      available for perceiving and recalling other things. In the ordinary
+      phraseology, it is not transferable. But the wider the context&mdash;that
+      is to say, the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated&mdash;the
+      more the ability acquired is available for the effective performance of
+      other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any "transfer," but
+      because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is
+      equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to a
+      narrow and rigid, coordination. (4) Going to the root of the matter, the
+      fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its
+      separation of activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no
+      such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there is
+      only the ability to see or hear or remember something. To talk about
+      training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject
+      matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. Exercise may react upon
+      circulation, breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigor or strength,
+      but this reservoir is available for specific ends only by use in
+      connection with the material means which accomplish them. Vigor will
+      enable a man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he would
+      if he were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and club,
+      sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one of
+      them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far as
+      it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordinations or as the
+      same kind of coordination is involved in all of them. Moreover, the
+      difference between the training of ability to spell which comes from
+      taking visual forms in a narrow context and one which takes them in
+      connection with the activities required to grasp meaning, such as context,
+      affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the difference between
+      exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to "develop" certain
+      muscles, and a game or sport. The former is uniform and mechanical; it is
+      rigidly specialized. The latter is varied from moment to moment; no two
+      acts are quite alike; novel emergencies have to be met; the coordinations
+      forming have to be kept flexible and elastic. Consequently, the training
+      is much more "general"; that is to say, it covers a wider territory and
+      includes more factors. Exactly the same thing holds of special and general
+      education of the mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one
+      special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping or
+      calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. One may be an
+      authority in a particular field and yet of more than usually poor judgment
+      in matters not closely allied, unless the training in the special field
+      has been of a kind to ramify into the subject matter of the other fields.
+      (5) Consequently, such powers as observation, recollection, judgment,
+      esthetic taste, represent organized results of the occupation of native
+      active tendencies with certain subject matters. A man does not observe
+      closely and fully by pressing a button for the observing faculty to get to
+      work (in other words by "willing" to observe); but if he has something to
+      do which can be accomplished successfully only through intensive and
+      extensive use of eye and hand, he naturally observes. Observation is an
+      outcome, a consequence, of the interaction of sense organ and subject
+      matter. It will vary, accordingly, with the subject matter employed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of
+      faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first determined
+      what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become expert in
+      observing and recalling and for what purpose. And it is only repeating in
+      another form what has already been said, to declare that the criterion
+      here must be social. We want the person to note and recall and judge those
+      things which make him an effective competent member of the group in which
+      he is associated with others. Otherwise we might as well set the pupil to
+      observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to memorizing
+      meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue&mdash;which is about what
+      we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of formal discipline. If
+      the observing habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer are better
+      habits than those which are thus formed, it is because they deal with
+      subject matter which is more significant in life. In concluding this
+      portion of the discussion, we note that the distinction between special
+      and general education has nothing to do with the transferability of
+      function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer is miraculous and
+      impossible. But some activities are broad; they involve a coordination of
+      many factors. Their development demands continuous alternation and
+      readjustment. As conditions change, certain factors are subordinated, and
+      others which had been of minor importance come to the front. There is
+      constant redistribution of the focus of the action, as is seen in the
+      illustration of a game as over against pulling a fixed weight by a series
+      of uniform motions. Thus there is practice in prompt making of new
+      combinations with the focus of activity shifted to meet change in subject
+      matter. Wherever an activity is broad in scope (that is, involves the
+      coordinating of a large variety of sub-activities), and is constantly and
+      unexpectedly obliged to change direction in its progressive development,
+      general education is bound to result. For this is what "general" means;
+      broad and flexible. In practice, education meets these conditions, and
+      hence is general, in the degree in which it takes account of social
+      relationships. A person may become expert in technical philosophy, or
+      philology, or mathematics or engineering or financiering, and be inept and
+      ill-advised in his action and judgment outside of his specialty. If
+      however his concern with these technical subject matters has been
+      connected with human activities having social breadth, the range of active
+      responses called into play and flexibly integrated is much wider.
+      Isolation of subject matter from a social context is the chief obstruction
+      in current practice to securing a general training of mind. Literature,
+      art, religion, when thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the
+      technical things which the professional upholders of general education
+      strenuously oppose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM5">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The conception that the result of the educative process is
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other ideas
+      which have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting
+      conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some
+      future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which
+      result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher and
+      taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully directed&mdash;namely,
+      taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the immediate present.
+      Consequently it defeats its own professed purpose. The notion that
+      education is an unfolding from within appears to have more likeness to the
+      conception of growth which has been set forth. But as worked out in the
+      theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves ignoring the interaction of
+      present organic tendencies with the present environment, just as much as
+      the notion of preparation. Some implicit whole is regarded as given
+      ready-made and the significance of growth is merely transitory; it is not
+      an end in itself, but simply a means of making explicit what is already
+      implicit. Since that which is not explicit cannot be made definite use of,
+      something has to be found to represent it. According to Froebel, the
+      mystic symbolic value of certain objects and acts (largely mathematical)
+      stand for the Absolute Whole which is in process of unfolding. According
+      to Hegel, existing institutions are its effective actual representatives.
+      Emphasis upon symbols and institutions tends to divert perception from the
+      direct growth of experience in richness of meaning. Another influential
+      but defective theory is that which conceives that mind has, at birth,
+      certain mental faculties or powers, such as perceiving, remembering,
+      willing, judging, generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is the
+      training of these faculties through repeated exercise. This theory treats
+      subject matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its value
+      residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of the general
+      powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of the alleged powers
+      from one another and from the material upon which they act. The outcome of
+      the theory in practice was shown to be an undue emphasis upon the training
+      of narrow specialized modes of skill at the expense of initiative,
+      inventiveness, and readaptability&mdash;qualities which depend upon the
+      broad and consecutive interaction of specific activities with one another.
+      1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is so great, there are so many
+      paths of construction, that every stimulus brings about some change in all
+      of the organs of response. We are accustomed however to ignore most of
+      these modifications of the total organic activity, concentrating upon that
+      one which is most specifically adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the
+      moment. 2 This statement should be compared with what was said earlier
+      about the sequential ordering of responses (p. 25). It is merely a more
+      explicit statement of the way in which that consecutive arrangement
+      occurs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Education as Formation. We now come to a type of theory which denies
+      the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique role of subject
+      matter in the development of mental and moral disposition. According to
+      it, education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it a
+      training of faculties resident in mind itself. It is rather the formation
+      of mind by setting up certain associations or connections of content by
+      means of a subject matter presented from without. Education proceeds by
+      instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind
+      from without. That education is formative of mind is not questioned; it is
+      the conception already propounded. But formation here has a technical
+      meaning dependent upon the idea of something operating from without.
+      Herbart is the best historical representative of this type of theory. He
+      denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties. The mind is simply
+      endowed with the power of producing various qualities in reaction to the
+      various realities which act upon it. These qualitatively different
+      reactions are called presentations (Vorstellungen). Every presentation
+      once called into being persists; it may be driven below the "threshold" of
+      consciousness by new and stronger presentations, produced by the reaction
+      of the soul to new material, but its activity continues by its own
+      inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness. What are termed
+      faculties&mdash;attention, memory, thinking, perception, even the
+      sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and complications, formed by
+      the interaction of these submerged presentations with one another and with
+      new presentations. Perception, for example, is the complication of
+      presentations which result from the rise of old presentations to greet and
+      combine with new ones; memory is the evoking of an old presentation above
+      the threshold of consciousness by getting entangled with another
+      presentation, etc. Pleasure is the result of reinforcement among the
+      independent activities of presentations; pain of their pulling different
+      ways, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the various
+      arrangements formed by the various presentations in their different
+      qualities. The "furniture" of the mind is the mind. Mind is wholly a
+      matter of "contents." The educational implications of this doctrine are
+      threefold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) This or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects which evoke
+      this or that kind of reaction and which produce this or that arrangement
+      among the reactions called out. The formation of mind is wholly a matter
+      of the presentation of the proper educational materials.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) Since the earlier presentations constitute the "apperceiving organs"
+      which control the assimilation of new presentations, their character is
+      all important. The effect of new presentations is to reinforce groupings
+      previously formed. The business of the educator is, first, to select the
+      proper material in order to fix the nature of the original reactions, and,
+      secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations on the basis
+      of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions. The control is from
+      behind, from the past, instead of, as in the unfolding conception, in the
+      ultimate goal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down.
+      Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the central thing, but
+      since knowing consists in the way in which this interacts with the
+      contents already submerged below consciousness, the first thing is the
+      step of "preparation,"&mdash;that is, calling into special activity and
+      getting above the floor of consciousness those older presentations which
+      are to assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation, follow the
+      processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the application of the
+      newly formed content to the performance of some task. Everything must go
+      through this course; consequently there is a perfectly uniform method in
+      instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the
+      region of routine and accident. He brought it into the sphere of conscious
+      method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim and procedure,
+      instead of being a compound of casual inspiration and subservience to
+      tradition. Moreover, everything in teaching and discipline could be
+      specified, instead of our having to be content with vague and more or less
+      mystic generalities about ultimate ideals and speculative spiritual
+      symbols. He abolished the notion of ready-made faculties, which might be
+      trained by exercise upon any sort of material, and made attention to
+      concrete subject matter, to the content, all-important. Herbart
+      undoubtedly has had a greater influence in bringing to the front questions
+      connected with the material of study than any other educational
+      philosopher. He stated problems of method from the standpoint of their
+      connection with subject matter: method having to do with the manner and
+      sequence of presenting new subject matter to insure its proper interaction
+      with old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring the
+      existence in a living being of active and specific functions which are
+      developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they are
+      occupied with their environment. The theory represents the Schoolmaster
+      come to his own. This fact expresses at once its strength and its
+      weakness. The conception that the mind consists of what has been taught,
+      and that the importance of what has been taught consists in its
+      availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue's view of life.
+      The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in instructing
+      pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of learning. It
+      emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment upon the mind; it
+      slurs over the fact that the environment involves a personal sharing in
+      common experiences. It exaggerates beyond reason the possibilities of
+      consciously formulated and used methods, and underestimates the role of
+      vital, unconscious, attitudes. It insists upon the old, the past, and
+      passes lightly over the operation of the genuinely novel and
+      unforeseeable. It takes, in brief, everything educational into account
+      save its essence,&mdash;vital energy seeking opportunity for effective
+      exercise. All education forms character, mental and moral, but formation
+      consists in the selection and coordination of native activities so that
+      they may utilize the subject matter of the social environment. Moreover,
+      the formation is not only a formation of native activities, but it takes
+      place through them. It is a process of reconstruction, reorganization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar combination
+      of the ideas of development and formation from without has given rise to
+      the recapitulation theory of education, biological and cultural. The
+      individual develops, but his proper development consists in repeating in
+      orderly stages the past evolution of animal life and human history. The
+      former recapitulation occurs physiologically; the latter should be made to
+      occur by means of education. The alleged biological truth that the
+      individual in his growth from the simple embryo to maturity repeats the
+      history of the evolution of animal life in the progress of forms from the
+      simplest to the most complex (or expressed technically, that ontogenesis
+      parallels phylogenesis) does not concern us, save as it is supposed to
+      afford scientific foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past.
+      Cultural recapitulation says, first, that children at a certain age are in
+      the mental and moral condition of savagery; their instincts are vagrant
+      and predatory because their ancestors at one time lived such a life.
+      Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper subject matter of their
+      education at this time is the material&mdash;especially the literary
+      material of myths, folk-tale, and song&mdash;produced by humanity in the
+      analogous stage. Then the child passes on to something corresponding, say,
+      to the pastoral stage, and so on till at the time when he is ready to take
+      part in contemporary life, he arrives at the present epoch of culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a small
+      school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part), has had little
+      currency. But the idea which underlies it is that education is essentially
+      retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past and especially to the
+      literary products of the past, and that mind is adequately formed in the
+      degree in which it is patterned upon the spiritual heritage of the past.
+      This idea has had such immense influence upon higher instruction
+      especially, that it is worth examination in its extreme formulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embyronic growth
+      of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of lower
+      forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of past stages.
+      If there were any strict "law" of repetition, evolutionary development
+      would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation would simply have
+      repeated its predecessors' existence. Development, in short, has taken
+      place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in the prior scheme of
+      growth. And this suggests that the aim of education is to facilitate such
+      short-circuited growth. The great advantage of immaturity, educationally
+      speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate the young from the need of
+      dwelling in an outgrown past. The business of education is rather to
+      liberate the young from reviving and retraversing the past than to lead
+      them to a recapitulation of it. The social environment of the young is
+      constituted by the presence and action of the habits of thinking and
+      feeling of civilized men. To ignore the directive influence of this
+      present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate the educational
+      function. A biologist has said: "The history of development in different
+      animals. . . offers to us. . . a series of ingenious, determined, varied
+      but more or less unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of
+      recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral method a more direct
+      method." Surely it would be foolish if education did not deliberately
+      attempt to facilitate similar efforts in conscious experience so that they
+      become increasingly successful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled from
+      association with the false context which perverts them. On the biological
+      side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with precisely the
+      assortment of impulsive activities with which he does start, they being
+      blind, and many of them conflicting with one another, casual, sporadic,
+      and unadapted to their immediate environment. The other point is that it
+      is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of past history so far as they
+      are of help for the future. Since they represent the results of prior
+      experience, their value for future experience may, of course, be
+      indefinitely great. Literatures produced in the past are, so far as men
+      are now in possession and use of them, a part of the present environment
+      of individuals; but there is an enormous difference between availing
+      ourselves of them as present resources and taking them as standards and
+      patterns in their retrospective character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through misuse
+      of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity means that past life
+      has somehow predetermined the main traits of an individual, and that they
+      are so fixed that little serious change can be introduced into them. Thus
+      taken, the influence of heredity is opposed to that of the environment,
+      and the efficacy of the latter belittled. But for educational purposes
+      heredity means neither more nor less than the original endowment of an
+      individual. Education must take the being as he is; that a particular
+      individual has just such and such an equipment of native activities is a
+      basic fact. That they were produced in such and such a way, or that they
+      are derived from one's ancestry, is not especially important for the
+      educator, however it may be with the biologist, as compared with the fact
+      that they now exist. Suppose one had to advise or direct a person
+      regarding his inheritance of property. The fallacy of assuming that the
+      fact it is an inheritance, predetermines its future use, is obvious. The
+      advisor is concerned with making the best use of what is there&mdash;putting
+      it at work under the most favorable conditions. Obviously he cannot
+      utilize what is not there; neither can the educator. In this sense,
+      heredity is a limit of education. Recognition of this fact prevents the
+      waste of energy and the irritation that ensue from the too prevalent habit
+      of trying to make by instruction something out of an individual which he
+      is not naturally fitted to become. But the doctrine does not determine
+      what use shall be made of the capacities which exist. And, except in the
+      case of the imbecile, these original capacities are much more varied and
+      potential, even in the case of the more stupid, than we as yet know
+      properly how to utilize. Consequently, while a careful study of the native
+      aptitudes and deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary
+      necessity, the subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment
+      which will adequately function whatever activities are present. The
+      relation of heredity and environment is well expressed in the case of
+      language. If a being had no vocal organs from which issue articulate
+      sounds, if he had no auditory or other sense-receptors and no connections
+      between the two sets of apparatus, it would be a sheer waste of time to
+      try to teach him to converse. He is born short in that respect, and
+      education must accept the limitation. But if he has this native equipment,
+      its possession in no way guarantees that he will ever talk any language or
+      what language he will talk. The environment in which his activities occur
+      and by which they are carried into execution settles these things. If he
+      lived in a dumb unsocial environment where men refused to talk to one
+      another and used only that minimum of gestures without which they could
+      not get along, vocal language would be as unachieved by him as if he had
+      no vocal organs. If the sounds which he makes occur in a medium of persons
+      speaking the Chinese language, the activities which make like sounds will
+      be selected and coordinated. This illustration may be applied to the
+      entire range of the educability of any individual. It places the heritage
+      from the past in its right connection with the demands and opportunities
+      of the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is found in
+      the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or more specifically
+      in the particular literatures which were produced in the culture epoch
+      which is supposed to correspond with the stage of development of those
+      taught) affords another instance of that divorce between the process and
+      product of growth which has been criticized. To keep the process alive, to
+      keep it alive in ways which make it easier to keep it alive in the future,
+      is the function of educational subject matter. But an individual can live
+      only in the present. The present is not just something which comes after
+      the past; much less something produced by it. It is what life is in
+      leaving the past behind it. The study of past products will not help us
+      understand the present, because the present is not due to the products,
+      but to the life of which they were the products. A knowledge of the past
+      and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present,
+      but not otherwise. And the mistake of making the records and remains of
+      the past the main material of education is that it cuts the vital
+      connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the
+      present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past. Under
+      such circumstances, culture becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge and
+      an asylum. Men escape from the crudities of the present to live in its
+      imagined refinements, instead of using what the past offers as an agency
+      for ripening these crudities. The present, in short, generates the
+      problems which lead us to search the past for suggestion, and which
+      supplies meaning to what we find when we search. The past is the past
+      precisely because it does not include what is characteristic in the
+      present. The moving present includes the past on condition that it uses
+      the past to direct its own movement. The past is a great resource for the
+      imagination; it adds a new dimension to life, but OD condition that it be
+      seen as the past of the present, and not as another and disconnected
+      world. The principle which makes little of the present act of living and
+      operation of growing, the only thing always present, naturally looks to
+      the past because the future goal which it sets up is remote and empty. But
+      having turned its back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it
+      laden with the spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive to
+      the needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the liveliest
+      of motives for interest in the background of the present, and will never
+      have to hunt for a way back because it will never have lost connection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas both of
+      unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the formation from without,
+      whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the past, the
+      ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant
+      reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an
+      immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end&mdash;the
+      direct transformation of the quality of experience. Infancy, youth, adult
+      life,&mdash;all stand on the same educative level in the sense that what
+      is really learned at any and every stage of experience constitutes the
+      value of that experience, and in the sense that it is the chief business
+      of life at every point to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of
+      its own perceptible meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
+      reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning
+      of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of
+      subsequent experience. (1) The increment of meaning corresponds to the
+      increased perception of the connections and continuities of the activities
+      in which we are engaged. The activity begins in an impulsive form; that
+      is, it is blind. It does not know what it is about; that is to say, what
+      are its interactions with other activities. An activity which brings
+      education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of the
+      connections which had been imperceptible. To recur to our simple example,
+      a child who reaches for a bright light gets burned. Henceforth he knows
+      that a certain act of touching in connection with a certain act of vision
+      (and vice-versa) means heat and pain; or, a certain light means a source
+      of heat. The acts by which a scientific man in his laboratory learns more
+      about flame differ no whit in principle. By doing certain things, he makes
+      perceptible certain connections of heat with other things, which had been
+      previously ignored. Thus his acts in relation to these things get more
+      meaning; he knows better what he is doing or "is about" when he has to do
+      with them; he can intend consequences instead of just letting them happen&mdash;all
+      synonymous ways of saying the same thing. At the same stroke, the flame
+      has gained in meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation,
+      about light and temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its
+      intellectual content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) The other side of an educative experience is an added power of
+      subsequent direction or control. To say that one knows what he is about,
+      or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of course, that he can
+      better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can, therefore, get
+      ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial consequences and
+      avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative experience, then, one in
+      which instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is
+      contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a capricious
+      activity on the other. (a) In the latter one "does not care what happens";
+      one just lets himself go and avoids connecting the consequences of one's
+      act (the evidences of its connections with other things) with the act. It
+      is customary to frown upon such aimless random activity, treating it as
+      willful mischief or carelessness or lawlessness. But there is a tendency
+      to seek the cause of such aimless activities in the youth's own
+      disposition, isolated from everything else. But in fact such activity is
+      explosive, and due to maladjustment with surroundings. Individuals act
+      capriciously whenever they act under external dictation, or from being
+      told, without having a purpose of their own or perceiving the bearing of
+      the deed upon other acts. One may learn by doing something which he does
+      not understand; even in the most intelligent action, we do much which we
+      do not mean, because the largest portion of the connections of the act we
+      consciously intend are not perceived or anticipated. But we learn only
+      because after the act is performed we note results which we had not noted
+      before. But much work in school consists in setting up rules by which
+      pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they
+      are not led to see the connection between the result&mdash;say the answer&mdash;and
+      the method pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a
+      trick and a kind of miracle. Such action is essentially capricious, and
+      leads to capricious habits. (b) Routine action, action which is automatic,
+      may increase skill to do a particular thing. In so far, it might be said
+      to have an educative effect. But it does not lead to new perceptions of
+      bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens the
+      meaning-horizon. And since the environment changes and our way of acting
+      has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced connection
+      with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at some
+      critical moment. The vaunted "skill" turns out gross ineptitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
+      reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been
+      criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the end
+      (the result) and the process. This is verbally self-contradictory, but
+      only verbally. It means that experience as an active process occupies time
+      and that its later period completes its earlier portion; it brings to
+      light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived. The later outcome
+      thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the experience as a whole
+      establishes a bent or disposition toward the things possessing this
+      meaning. Every such continuous experience or activity is educative, and
+      all education resides in having such experiences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention
+      later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as
+      personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken in the earlier
+      chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them
+      with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of
+      catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult
+      group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of
+      established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in the
+      main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the
+      experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits,
+      better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an
+      improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of the extent
+      to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social
+      evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these
+      ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an
+      instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless far
+      from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive
+      agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only a
+      development of children and youth but also of the future society of which
+      they will be the constituents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM6">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Education may be conceived either retrospectively or
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      prospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as process of
+      accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the past for
+      a resource in a developing future. The former finds its standards and
+      patterns in what has gone before. The mind may be regarded as a group of
+      contents resulting from having certain things presented. In this case, the
+      earlier presentations constitute the material to which the later are to be
+      assimilated. Emphasis upon the value of the early experiences of immature
+      beings is most important, especially because of the tendency to regard
+      them as of little account. But these experiences do not consist of
+      externally presented material, but of interaction of native activities
+      with the environment which progressively modifies both the activities and
+      the environment. The defect of the Herbartian theory of formation through
+      presentations consists in slighting this constant interaction and change.
+      The same principle of criticism applies to theories which find the primary
+      subject matter of study in the cultural products&mdash;especially the
+      literary products&mdash;of man's history. Isolated from their connection
+      with the present environment in which individuals have to act, they become
+      a kind of rival and distracting environment. Their value lies in their use
+      to increase the meaning of the things with which we have actively to do at
+      the present time. The idea of education advanced in these chapters is
+      formally summed up in the idea of continuous reconstruction of experience,
+      an idea which is marked off from education as preparation for a remote
+      future, as unfolding, as external formation, and as recapitulation of the
+      past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned with
+      education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to make
+      explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of education
+      as it operates in different types of community life. To say that education
+      is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature
+      through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong,
+      is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life
+      which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that a society which
+      not only changes but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve
+      it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which
+      aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs. To make the general
+      ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is,
+      therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of present
+      social life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word, but many
+      things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of
+      purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in which
+      his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they had
+      nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life. Within
+      every larger social organization there are numerous minor groups: not only
+      political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious,
+      associations. There are political parties with differing aims, social
+      sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely
+      together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. In many modern
+      states and in some ancient, there is great diversity of populations, of
+      varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
+      standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for
+      example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an
+      inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (See ante, p.
+      20.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a
+      eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning de jure
+      and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy, the former connotation is
+      almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one by its very nature.
+      The qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy community of
+      purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of sympathy, are
+      emphasized. But when we look at the facts which the term denotes instead
+      of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation, we find not
+      unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. Men banded together in
+      a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public
+      while serving it, political machines held together by the interest of
+      plunder, are included. If it is said that such organizations are not
+      societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion of
+      society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of society is then
+      made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having no reference to facts; and in
+      part, that each of these organizations, no matter how opposed to the
+      interests of other groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of
+      "Society" which hold it together. There is honor among thieves, and a band
+      of robbers has a common interest as respects its members. Gangs are marked
+      by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own
+      codes. Family life may be marked by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy
+      as to those without, and yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within.
+      Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the
+      quality and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of
+      the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any
+      given mode of social life. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two
+      extremes. We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an
+      ideal society. We must base our conception upon societies which actually
+      exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one.
+      But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which
+      are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of
+      forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize
+      undesirable features and suggest improvement. Now in any social group
+      whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common,
+      and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse
+      with other groups. From these two traits we derive our standard. How
+      numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How
+      full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? If we
+      apply these considerations to, say, a criminal band, we find that the ties
+      which consciously hold the members together are few in number, reducible
+      almost to a common interest in plunder; and that they are of such a nature
+      as to isolate the group from other groups with respect to give and take of
+      the values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is partial
+      and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life
+      which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material,
+      intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the
+      progress of one member has worth for the experience of other members&mdash;it
+      is readily communicable&mdash;and that the family is not an isolated
+      whole, but enters intimately into relationships with business groups, with
+      schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar
+      groups, and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in
+      return receives support from it. In short, there are many interests
+      consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free points
+      of contact with other modes of association.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically
+      governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an
+      organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command
+      must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects, must call
+      some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government could do
+      everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical declaration is
+      at least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of
+      coercive force. It may be said, however, that the activities appealed to
+      are themselves unworthy and degrading&mdash;that such a government calls
+      into functioning activity simply capacity for fear. In a way, this
+      statement is true. But it overlooks the fact that fear need not be an
+      undesirable factor in experience. Caution, circumspection, prudence,
+      desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these
+      desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into
+      play as is cowardice and abject submission. The real difficulty is that
+      the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread and hope of specific
+      tangible reward&mdash;say comfort and ease&mdash;many other capacities are
+      left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to
+      pervert them. Instead of operating on their own account they are reduced
+      to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common
+      interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of the
+      social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. In order
+      to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group
+      must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others. There
+      must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise,
+      the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into
+      slaves. And the experience of each party loses in meaning, when the free
+      interchange of varying modes of life-experience is arrested. A separation
+      into a privileged and a subject-class prevents social endosmosis. The
+      evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less
+      perceptible, but equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be
+      turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and
+      artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their
+      manners fastidious rather than humane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety of
+      shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity of
+      stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought. The
+      more activity is restricted to a few definite lines&mdash;as it is when
+      there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences&mdash;the
+      more action tends to become routine on the part of the class at a
+      disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part of the
+      class having the materially fortunate position. Plato defined a slave as
+      one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This
+      condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is
+      found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable,
+      but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
+      Much is said about scientific management of work. It is a narrow view
+      which restricts the science which secures efficiency of operation to
+      movements of the muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the
+      discovery of the relations of a man to his work&mdash;including his
+      relations to others who take part&mdash;which will enlist his intelligent
+      interest in what he is doing. Efficiency in production often demands
+      division of labor. But it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless
+      workers see the technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved
+      in what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation
+      furnished by such perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as
+      efficiency of activity and scientific management to purely technical
+      externals is evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to
+      those in control of industry&mdash;those who supply its aims. Because of
+      their lack of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not
+      sufficient stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships
+      in industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
+      technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and
+      intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the
+      failure to take into account the significant social factors means none the
+      less an absence of mind, and a corresponding distortion of emotional life.
+      II. This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations
+      lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point. The
+      isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its antisocial
+      spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has
+      interests "of its own" which shut it out from full interaction with other
+      groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has
+      got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships.
+      It marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which
+      seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with a larger
+      life; schools when separated from the interest of home and community; the
+      divisions of rich and poor; learned and unlearned. The essential point is
+      that isolation makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life,
+      for static and selfish ideals within the group. That savage tribes regard
+      aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the
+      fact that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to
+      their past customs. On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear
+      intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom. It would
+      certainly occasion reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and
+      expanding mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the
+      physical environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to
+      the field where we are apt to ignore it&mdash;the sphere of social
+      contacts. Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with
+      the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between
+      peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the
+      alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact
+      that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and
+      thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to
+      expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at
+      present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and
+      classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. It
+      remains for the most part to secure the intellectual and emotional
+      significance of this physical annihilation of space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point to
+      democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more varied
+      points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon the
+      recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The second
+      means not only freer interaction between social groups (once isolated so
+      far as intention could keep up a separation) but change in social habit&mdash;its
+      continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by
+      varied intercourse. And these two traits are precisely what characterize
+      the democratically constituted society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of
+      social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where
+      progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a
+      democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to
+      be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of democracy to
+      education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a
+      government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those
+      who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic
+      society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a
+      substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created
+      only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more
+      than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of
+      conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of
+      individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his
+      own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give
+      point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of
+      those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from
+      perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more
+      varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an
+      individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in
+      his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as
+      long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group
+      which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a
+      greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy,
+      are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort. On the
+      contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of manufacture and
+      commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the
+      command of science over natural energy. But after greater
+      individualization on one hand, and a broader community of interest on the
+      other have come into existence, it is a matter of deliberate effort to
+      sustain and extend them. Obviously a society to which stratification into
+      separate classes would be fatal, must see to it that intellectual
+      opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms. A society
+      marked off into classes need he specially attentive only to the education
+      of its ruling elements. A society which is mobile, which is full of
+      channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to
+      it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.
+      Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are
+      caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. The
+      result will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves
+      the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be
+      devoted to making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas in
+      education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider
+      the educational theories which have been evolved in three epochs when the
+      social import of education was especially conspicuous. The first one to be
+      considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than did he the
+      fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing that
+      for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be useful to
+      others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs); and that it is
+      the business of education to discover these aptitudes and progressively to
+      train them for social use. Much which has been said so far is borrowed
+      from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But conditions which
+      he could not intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in
+      their application. He never got any conception of the indefinite plurality
+      of activities which may characterize an individual and a social group, and
+      consequently limited his view to a limited number of classes of capacities
+      and of social arrangements. Plato's starting point is that the
+      organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of
+      existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident
+      and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion
+      for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be
+      promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. We shall have no
+      conception of the proper limits and distribution of activities&mdash;what
+      he called justice&mdash;as a trait of both individual and social
+      organization. But how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to
+      be achieved? In dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly
+      insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is not possible save in a just
+      and harmonious social order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted and
+      misled by false valuations and false perspectives. A disorganized and
+      factional society sets up a number of different models and standards.
+      Under such conditions it is impossible for the individual to attain
+      consistency of mind. Only a complete whole is fully self-consistent. A
+      society which rests upon the supremacy of some factor over another
+      irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads
+      thought astray. It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over others,
+      and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and distorted. Education
+      proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs,
+      and laws. Only in a just state will these be such as to give the right
+      education; and only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to
+      recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. We seem to be caught
+      in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out. A few men,
+      philosophers or lovers of wisdom&mdash;or truth&mdash;may by study learn
+      at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence. If a powerful
+      ruler should form a state after these patterns, then its regulations could
+      be preserved. An education could be given which would sift individuals,
+      discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning
+      each to the work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own
+      part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
+      maintained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a more
+      adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance of social
+      arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those arrangements
+      upon the means used to educate the young. It would be impossible to find a
+      deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and developing
+      personal capacities, and training them so that they would connect with the
+      activities of others. Yet the society in which the theory was propounded
+      was so undemocratic that Plato could not work out a solution for the
+      problem whose terms he clearly saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in
+      society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional
+      status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education,
+      he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall
+      by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.
+      Consequently the testing and sifting function of education only shows to
+      which one of three classes an individual belongs. There being no
+      recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be
+      no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
+      combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable. There were
+      only three types of faculties or powers in the individual's constitution.
+      Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each class, for only
+      diversity makes change and progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned to
+      the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human wants.
+      Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites, they have a
+      generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition. They become the
+      citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its internal
+      guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason,
+      which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are
+      capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time the
+      legislators of the state&mdash;for laws are the universals which control
+      the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in intent, Plato
+      subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that
+      lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his
+      incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a
+      society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and
+      classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of
+      individuality. We cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is
+      happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those
+      activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that
+      it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its
+      possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in knowledge
+      has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals
+      and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has
+      taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable.
+      It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which
+      society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of
+      the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by
+      classes. Although his educational philosophy was revolutionary, it was
+      none the less in bondage to static ideals. He thought that change or
+      alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true reality was
+      unchangeable. Hence while he would radically change the existing state of
+      society, his aim was to construct a state in which change would
+      subsequently have no place. The final end of life is fixed; given a state
+      framed with this end in view, not even minor details are to be altered.
+      Though they might not be inherently important, yet if permitted they would
+      inure the minds of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and
+      anarchic. The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in the fact
+      that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring
+      about a better society which should then improve education, and so on
+      indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an
+      ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to
+      its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust
+      to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to
+      coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In the
+      eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very different circle
+      of ideas. "Nature" still means something antithetical to existing social
+      organization; Plato exercised a great influence upon Rousseau. But the
+      voice of nature now speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for
+      the need of free development of individuality in all its variety.
+      Education in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of
+      instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original endowment was
+      conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even as antisocial. Social
+      arrangements were thought of as mere external expedients by which these
+      nonsocial individuals might secure a greater amount of private happiness
+      for themselves. Nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate
+      idea of the true significance of the movement. In reality its chief
+      interest was in progress and in social progress. The seeming antisocial
+      philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider
+      and freer society&mdash;toward cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was
+      humanity. In membership in humanity, as distinct from a state, man's
+      capacities would be liberated; while in existing political organizations
+      his powers were hampered and distorted to meet the requirements and
+      selfish interests of the rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme
+      individualism was but the counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the
+      indefinite perfectibility of man and of a social organization having a
+      scope as wide as humanity. The emancipated individual was to become the
+      organ and agent of a comprehensive and progressive society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the
+      social estate in which they found themselves. They attributed these evils
+      to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. Such limitation
+      was both distorting and corrupting. Their impassioned devotion to
+      emancipation of life from external restrictions which operated to the
+      exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past feudal system consigned
+      power, found intellectual formulation in a worship of nature. To give
+      "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial, corrupt, and inequitable
+      social order by a new and better kingdom of humanity. Unrestrained faith
+      in Nature as both a model and a working power was strengthened by the
+      advances of natural science. Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial
+      restraints of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of
+      law. The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of natural law,
+      was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force balanced with every
+      other. Natural law would accomplish the same result in human relations, if
+      men would only get rid of the artificial man-imposed coercive
+      restrictions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in
+      insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen that economic and
+      political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of
+      thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external chains
+      was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and
+      ideals. What was called social life, existing institutions, were too false
+      and corrupt to be intrusted with this work. How could it be expected to
+      undertake it when the undertaking meant its own destruction? "Nature" must
+      then be the power to which the enterprise was to be left. Even the extreme
+      sensationalistic theory of knowledge which was current derived itself from
+      this conception. To insist that mind is originally passive and empty was
+      one way of glorifying the possibilities of education. If the mind was a
+      wax tablet to be written upon by objects, there were no limits to the
+      possibility of education by means of the natural environment. And since
+      the natural world of objects is a scene of harmonious "truth," this
+      education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm
+      for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the constructive side
+      became obvious. Merely to leave everything to nature was, after all, but
+      to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the accidents of
+      circumstance. Not only was some method required but also some positive
+      organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the process of
+      instruction. The "complete and harmonious development of all powers,"
+      having as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive humanity,
+      required definite organization for its realization. Private individuals
+      here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the work.
+      A Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined
+      persons having wealth and power to follow his example. But even Pestalozzi
+      saw that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required the
+      support of the state. The realization of the new education destined to
+      produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon the activities of
+      existing states. The movement for the democratic idea inevitably became a
+      movement for publicly conducted and administered schools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the
+      movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement
+      in political life&mdash;a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent
+      movements. Under the influence of German thought in particular, education
+      became a civic function and the civic function was identified with the
+      realization of the ideal of the national state. The "state" was
+      substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To form
+      the citizen, not the "man," became the aim of education. 1 The historic
+      situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of the
+      Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt (and
+      subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that
+      systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and
+      maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they were weak
+      and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen they made this
+      condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and thoroughly
+      grounded system of public education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory. The
+      individualistic theory receded into the background. The state furnished
+      not only the instrumentalities of public education but also its goal. When
+      the actual practice was such that the school system, from the elementary
+      grades through the university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen
+      and soldier and the future state official and administrator and furnished
+      the means for military, industrial, and political defense and expansion,
+      it was impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim of social
+      efficiency. And with the immense importance attached to the nationalistic
+      state, surrounded by other competing and more or less hostile states, it
+      was equally impossible to interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague
+      cosmopolitan humanitarianism. Since the maintenance of a particular
+      national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior
+      interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles for
+      international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was understood to
+      imply a like subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of
+      disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since, however,
+      the ideal of culture as complete development of personality persisted,
+      educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. The
+      reconciliation took the form of the conception of the "organic" character
+      of the state. The individual in his isolation is nothing; only in and
+      through an absorption of the aims and meaning of organized institutions
+      does he attain true personality. What appears to be his subordination to
+      political authority and the demand for sacrifice of himself to the
+      commands of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective
+      reason manifested in the state&mdash;the only way in which he can become
+      truly rational. The notion of development which we have seen to be
+      characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the Hegelian philosophy)
+      was just such a deliberate effort to combine the two ideas of complete
+      realization of personality and thoroughgoing "disciplinary" subordination
+      to existing institutions. The extent of the transformation of educational
+      philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation occupied by the
+      struggle against Napoleon for national independence, may be gathered from
+      Kant, who well expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his
+      treatise on Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later years of
+      the eighteenth century, he defines education as the process by which man
+      becomes man. Mankind begins its history submerged in nature&mdash;not as
+      Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and
+      appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which education is to develop and
+      perfect. The peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create
+      himself by his own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly
+      moral, rational, and free being. This creative effort is carried on by the
+      educational activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon
+      men consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing
+      state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity. But
+      there is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to educate its
+      young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to
+      the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible
+      realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so
+      that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of
+      their own purposes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must
+      depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity. "All
+      culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them. Simply
+      through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who are capable
+      of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the gradual
+      approximation of human nature to its end possible. Rulers are simply
+      interested in such training as will make their subjects better tools for
+      their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of privately conducted
+      schools must be carefully safeguarded. For the rulers' interest in the
+      welfare of their own nation instead of in what is best for humanity, will
+      make them, if they give money for the schools, wish to draw their plans.
+      We have in this view an express statement of the points characteristic of
+      the eighteenth century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full
+      development of private personality is identified with the aims of humanity
+      as a whole and with the idea of progress. In addition we have an explicit
+      fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated
+      education upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades
+      after this time, Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel,
+      elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational;
+      that in particular the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an
+      education carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
+      individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his
+      appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the
+      educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit,
+      Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and
+      compulsory system of education extending from the primary school through
+      the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and supervision
+      all private educational enterprises. Two results should stand out from
+      this brief historical survey. The first is that such terms as the
+      individual and the social conceptions of education are quite meaningless
+      taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato had the ideal of an
+      education which should equate individual realization and social coherency
+      and stability. His situation forced his ideal into the notion of a society
+      organized in stratified classes, losing the individual in the class. The
+      eighteenth century educational philosophy was highly individualistic in
+      form, but this form was inspired by a noble and generous social ideal:
+      that of a society organized to include humanity, and providing for the
+      indefinite perfectibility of mankind. The idealistic philosophy of Germany
+      in the early nineteenth century endeavored again to equate the ideals of a
+      free and complete development of cultured personality with social
+      discipline and political subordination. It made the national state an
+      intermediary between the realization of private personality on one side
+      and of humanity on the other. Consequently, it is equally possible to
+      state its animating principle with equal truth either in the classic terms
+      of "harmonious development of all the powers of personality" or in the
+      more recent terminology of "social efficiency." All this reinforces the
+      statement which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a
+      social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the
+      kind of society we have in mind. These considerations pave the way for our
+      second conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in and for
+      a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider
+      social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian" conception
+      suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite organs of execution
+      and agencies of administration. In Europe, in the Continental states
+      particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for human
+      welfare and progress was captured by national interests and harnessed to
+      do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. The social
+      aim of education and its national aim were identified, and the result was
+      a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human intercourse.
+      On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend national boundaries.
+      They are largely international in quality and method. They involve
+      interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples inhabiting different
+      countries. At the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has never
+      been as accentuated in politics as it is at the present time. Each nation
+      lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient war with its
+      neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme judge of its own interests,
+      and it is assumed as matter of course that each has interests which are
+      exclusively its own. To question this is to question the very idea of
+      national sovereignty which is assumed to be basic to political practice
+      and political science. This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between
+      the wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and the
+      narrower sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and
+      purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer conception of the meaning
+      of "social" as a function and test of education than has yet been
+      attained. Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a
+      national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not
+      be restricted, constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to
+      face the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split
+      society into classes some of which are made merely tools for the higher
+      culture of others. Externally, the question is concerned with the
+      reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior devotion
+      to the things which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national
+      political boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be worked out by
+      merely negative means. It is not enough to see to it that education is not
+      actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one
+      class by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and
+      efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of
+      economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the nation equality
+      of equipment for their future careers. Accomplishment of this end demands
+      not only adequate administrative provision of school facilities, and such
+      supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take advantage
+      of them, but also such modification of traditional ideals of culture,
+      traditional subjects of study and traditional methods of teaching and
+      discipline as will retain all the youth under educational influences until
+      they are equipped to be masters of their own economic and social careers.
+      The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of
+      education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and
+      more dominates our public system of education. The same principle has
+      application on the side of the considerations which concern the relations
+      of one nation to another. It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and
+      to avoid everything which would stimulate international jealousy and
+      animosity. The emphasis must be put upon whatever binds people together in
+      cooperative human pursuits and results, apart from geographical
+      limitations. The secondary and provisional character of national
+      sovereignty in respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association
+      and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be instilled as
+      a working disposition of mind. If these applications seem to be remote
+      from a consideration of the philosophy of education, the impression shows
+      that the meaning of the idea of education previously developed has not
+      been adequately grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of
+      education as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth
+      directed to social aims. Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can
+      only be inconsistently applied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM7">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction
+      implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to
+      measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the
+      interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and
+      freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable society,
+      in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to
+      free intercourse and communication of experience. A society which makes
+      provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms
+      and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through
+      interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far
+      democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives
+      individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and
+      the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing
+      disorder. Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered
+      from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally
+      quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out
+      by making a class rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called
+      individualism of the eighteenth-century enlightenment was found to involve
+      the notion of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the
+      individual was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the
+      development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature.
+      The institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century
+      supplied this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so
+      doing narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members
+      of the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination
+      of the individual to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain
+      in Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the
+      existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the citizen
+      nor the man. Under existing conditions, he preferred to try for the latter
+      rather than for the former. But there are many sayings of his which point
+      to the formation of the citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate
+      that his own endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was simply the best
+      makeshift the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Nature of an Aim.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
+      anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
+      education in a democratic community. For it assumed that the aim of
+      education is to enable individuals to continue their education&mdash;or
+      that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.
+      Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except
+      where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is
+      adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and
+      institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably
+      distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our search
+      for aims in education, we are not concerned, therefore, with finding an
+      end outside of the educative process to which education is subordinate.
+      Our whole conception forbids. We are rather concerned with the contrast
+      which exists when aims belong within the process in which they operate and
+      when they are set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must
+      obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that
+      case, some portions of the whole social group will find their aims
+      determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise from the
+      free growth of their own experience, and their nominal aims will be means
+      to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls
+      within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. We approach
+      the definition by a contrast of mere results with ends. Any exhibition of
+      energy has results. The wind blows about the sands of the desert; the
+      position of the grains is changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not an
+      end. For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills what
+      went before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One state of affairs
+      is just as good as any other. Consequently there is no basis upon which to
+      select an earlier state of affairs as a beginning, a later as an end, and
+      to consider what intervenes as a process of transformation and
+      realization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes
+      in the sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees'
+      actions may be called ends not because they are designed or consciously
+      intended, but because they are true terminations or completions of what
+      has preceded. When the bees gather pollen and make wax and build cells,
+      each step prepares the way for the next. When cells are built, the queen
+      lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood them
+      and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them. When they are
+      hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of themselves. Now we
+      are so familiar with such facts, that we are apt to dismiss them on the
+      ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing anyway. Thus
+      we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the event is; namely,
+      the significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the way
+      each prior event leads into its successor while the successor takes up
+      what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage, until we arrive at
+      the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the process. Since
+      aims relate always to results, the first thing to look to when it is a
+      question of aims, is whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic
+      continuity. Or is it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one
+      thing and then another? To talk about an educational aim when
+      approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the
+      only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the
+      assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is to talk
+      nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or
+      discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim
+      implies an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order consists
+      in the progressive completing of a process. Given an activity having a
+      time span and cumulative growth within the time succession, an aim means
+      foresight in advance of the end or possible termination. If bees
+      anticipated the consequences of their activity, if they perceived their
+      end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary element in an
+      aim. Hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of education&mdash;or any
+      other undertaking&mdash;where conditions do not permit of foresight of
+      results, and do not stimulate a person to look ahead to see what the
+      outcome of a given activity is to be. In the next place the aim as a
+      foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it is not an idle view of a
+      mere spectator, but influences the steps taken to reach the end. The
+      foresight functions in three ways. In the first place, it involves careful
+      observation of the given conditions to see what are the means available
+      for reaching the end, and to discover the hindrances in the way. In the
+      second place, it suggests the proper order or sequence in the use of
+      means. It facilitates an economical selection and arrangement. In the
+      third place, it makes choice of alternatives possible. If we can predict
+      the outcome of acting this way or that, we can then compare the value of
+      the two courses of action; we can pass judgment upon their relative
+      desirability. If we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes and that
+      they are likely to carry disease, we can, disliking that anticipated
+      result, take steps to avert it. Since we do not anticipate results as mere
+      intellectual onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are
+      partakers in the process which produces the result. We intervene to bring
+      about this result or that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course these three points are closely connected with one another. We
+      can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of present
+      conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the motive for
+      observations. The more adequate our observations, the more varied is the
+      scene of conditions and obstructions that presents itself, and the more
+      numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be made. In turn,
+      the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or
+      alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity possess,
+      and the more flexibly controllable is it. Where only a single outcome has
+      been thought of, the mind has nothing else to think of; the meaning
+      attaching to the act is limited. One only steams ahead toward the mark.
+      Sometimes such a narrow course may be effective. But if unexpected
+      difficulties offer themselves, one has not as many resources at command as
+      if he had chosen the same line of action after a broader survey of the
+      possibilities of the field. He cannot make needed readjustments readily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting
+      intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon
+      which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own capacities.
+      To do these things means to have a mind&mdash;for mind is precisely
+      intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of facts and
+      their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a thing is to
+      foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment;
+      it is to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and the
+      obstructions in the way,&mdash;or, if it is really a mind to do the thing
+      and not a vague aspiration&mdash;it is to have a plan which takes account
+      of resources and difficulties. Mind is capacity to refer present
+      conditions to future results, and future consequences to present
+      conditions. And these traits are just what is meant by having an aim or a
+      purpose. A man is stupid or blind or unintelligent&mdash;lacking in mind&mdash;just
+      in the degree in which in any activity he does not know what he is about,
+      namely, the probable consequences of his acts. A man is imperfectly
+      intelligent when he contents himself with looser guesses about the outcome
+      than is needful, just taking a chance with his luck, or when he forms
+      plans apart from study of the actual conditions, including his own
+      capacities. Such relative absence of mind means to make our feelings the
+      measure of what is to happen. To be intelligent we must "stop, look,
+      listen" in making the plan of an activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to show
+      its value&mdash;its function in experience. We are only too given to
+      making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness." We forget that
+      it comes from the adjective "conscious." To be conscious is to be aware of
+      what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning
+      traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes
+      idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon it by
+      physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of an activity,
+      for the fact that it is directed by an aim. Put the other way about, to
+      have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is
+      to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light
+      of that intent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our discussion
+      to a consideration of the criteria involved in a correct establishing of
+      aims. (1) The aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. It
+      must be based upon a consideration of what is already going on; upon the
+      resources and difficulties of the situation. Theories about the proper end
+      of our activities&mdash;educational and moral theories&mdash;often violate
+      this principle. They assume ends lying outside our activities; ends
+      foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which issue from
+      some outside source. Then the problem is to bring our activities to bear
+      upon the realization of these externally supplied ends. They are something
+      for which we ought to act. In any case such "aims" limit intelligence;
+      they are not the expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice
+      of the better among alternative possibilities. They limit intelligence
+      because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external
+      to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a mechanical choice of
+      means.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the
+      attempt to realize them. This impression must now be qualified. The aim as
+      it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch. The act of striving to
+      realize it tests its worth. If it suffices to direct activity
+      successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole function is to set
+      a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may suffice. But usually&mdash;at
+      least in complicated situations&mdash;acting upon it brings to light
+      conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision of the
+      original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. An aim must,
+      then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances.
+      An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid.
+      Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed to have a
+      working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation. What
+      happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it.
+      Such an end can only be insisted upon. The failure that results from its
+      lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions,
+      not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under the circumstances.
+      The value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary, lies in the fact that we
+      can use it to change conditions. It is a method for dealing with
+      conditions so as to effect desirable alterations in them. A farmer who
+      should passively accept things just as he finds them would make as great a
+      mistake as he who framed his plans in complete disregard of what soil,
+      climate, etc., permit. One of the evils of an abstract or remote external
+      aim in education is that its very inapplicability in practice is likely to
+      react into a haphazard snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim
+      surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative
+      plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it
+      as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence
+      constantly growing as it is tested in action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The term end in
+      view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination or
+      conclusion of some process. The only way in which we can define an
+      activity is by putting before ourselves the objects in which it terminates&mdash;as
+      one's aim in shooting is the target. But we must remember that the object
+      is only a mark or sign by which the mind specifies the activity one
+      desires to carry out. Strictly speaking, not the target but hitting the
+      target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the target, but also
+      by the sight on the gun. The different objects which are thought of are
+      means of directing the activity. Thus one aims at, say, a rabbit; what he
+      wants is to shoot straight: a certain kind of activity. Or, if it is the
+      rabbit he wants, it is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor
+      in activity; he wants to eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence of his
+      marksmanship&mdash;he wants to do something with it. The doing with the
+      thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end. The object is but a phase
+      of the active end,&mdash;continuing the activity successfully. This is
+      what is meant by the phrase, used above, "freeing activity."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go on,
+      stands the static character of an end which is imposed from without the
+      activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be
+      attained and possessed. When one has such a notion, activity is a mere
+      unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important on
+      its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil;
+      something which must be gone through before one can reach the object which
+      is alone worth while. In other words, the external idea of the aim leads
+      to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows up within an
+      activity as plan for its direction is always both ends and means, the
+      distinction being only one of convenience. Every means is a temporary end
+      until we have attained it. Every end becomes a means of carrying activity
+      further as soon as it is achieved. We call it end when it marks off the
+      future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it
+      marks off the present direction. Every divorce of end from means
+      diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to
+      reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could. A farmer
+      has to use plants and animals to carry on his farming activities. It
+      certainly makes a great difference to his life whether he is fond of them,
+      or whether he regards them merely as means which he has to employ to get
+      something else in which alone he is interested. In the former case, his
+      entire course of activity is significant; each phase of it has its own
+      value. He has the experience of realizing his end at every stage; the
+      postponed aim, or end in view, being merely a sight ahead by which to keep
+      his activity going fully and freely. For if he does not look ahead, he is
+      more likely to find himself blocked. The aim is as definitely a means of
+      action as is any other portion of an activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about educational
+      aims. They are just like aims in any directed occupation. The educator,
+      like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain resources with which to
+      do, and certain obstacles with which to contend. The conditions with which
+      the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own
+      structure and operation independently of any purpose of his. Seeds sprout,
+      rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, the seasons
+      change. His aim is simply to utilize these various conditions; to make his
+      activities and their energies work together, instead of against one
+      another. It would be absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming,
+      without any reference to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristic
+      of plant growth, etc. His purpose is simply a foresight of the
+      consequences of his energies connected with those of the things about him,
+      a foresight used to direct his movements from day to day. Foresight of
+      possible consequences leads to more careful and extensive observation of
+      the nature and performances of the things he had to do with, and to laying
+      out a plan&mdash;that is, of a certain order in the acts to be performed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as
+      absurd for the latter to set up his "own" aims as the proper objects of
+      the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an
+      ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Aims mean acceptance of
+      responsibility for the observations, anticipations, and arrangements
+      required in carrying on a function&mdash;whether farming or educating. Any
+      aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and planning in
+      carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it gets in
+      the way of the individual's own common sense (as it will surely do if
+      imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims.
+      Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract idea
+      like education. And consequently their purposes are indefinitely varied,
+      differing with different children, changing as children grow and with the
+      growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even the most
+      valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than
+      good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions
+      to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to choose in
+      liberating and directing the energies of the concrete situations in which
+      they find themselves. As a recent writer has said: "To lead this boy to
+      read Scott's novels instead of old Sleuth's stories; to teach this girl to
+      sew; to root out the habit of bullying from John's make-up; to prepare
+      this class to study medicine,&mdash;these are samples of the millions of
+      aims we have actually before us in the concrete work of education."
+      Bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state some of
+      the characteristics found in all good educational aims. (1) An educational
+      aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs (including
+      original instincts and acquired habits) of the given individual to be
+      educated. The tendency of such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen,
+      to omit existing powers, and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or
+      responsibility. In general, there is a disposition to take considerations
+      which are dear to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends
+      irrespective of the capacities of those educated. There is also an
+      inclination to propound aims which are so uniform as to neglect the
+      specific powers and requirements of an individual, forgetting that all
+      learning is something which happens to an individual at a given time and
+      place. The larger range of perception of the adult is of great value in
+      observing the abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they
+      may amount to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what
+      certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have the
+      adult achievements we should be without assurance as to the significance
+      of the drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring activities of childhood.
+      So if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to see the
+      import of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use
+      adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the doings
+      of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a fixed aim
+      without regard to the concrete activities of those educated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating
+      with the activities of those undergoing instruction. It must suggest the
+      kind of environment needed to liberate and to organize their capacities.
+      Unless it lends itself to the construction of specific procedures, and
+      unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter is
+      worthless. Instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it prevents
+      the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the situation. It
+      operates to exclude recognition of everything except what squares up with
+      the fixed end in view. Every rigid aim just because it is rigidly given
+      seems to render it unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete
+      conditions. Since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting details
+      which do not count?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them
+      from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is
+      current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As a
+      first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is
+      confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is the
+      individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor,
+      textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his
+      mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter.
+      This distrust of the teacher's experience is then reflected in lack of
+      confidence in the responses of pupils. The latter receive their aims
+      through a double or treble external imposition, and are constantly
+      confused by the conflict between the aims which are natural to their own
+      experience at the time and those in which they are taught to acquiesce.
+      Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every
+      growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by
+      the demand for adaptation to external aims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged to
+      be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific, is, of course,
+      general in its ramified connections, for it leads out indefinitely into
+      other things. So far as a general idea makes us more alive to these
+      connections, it cannot be too general. But "general" also means
+      "abstract," or detached from all specific context. And such abstractness
+      means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and
+      learning as mere means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the
+      means. That education is literally and all the time its own reward means
+      that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worth while
+      in its own immediate having. A truly general aim broadens the outlook; it
+      stimulates one to take more consequences (connections) into account. This
+      means a wider and more flexible observation of means. The more interacting
+      forces, for example, the farmer takes into account, the more varied will
+      be his immediate resources. He will see a greater number of possible
+      starting places, and a greater number of ways of getting at what he wants
+      to do. The fuller one's conception of possible future achievements, the
+      less his present activity is tied down to a small number of alternatives.
+      If one knew enough, one could start almost anywhere and sustain his
+      activities continuously and fruitfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the
+      sense of a broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall take
+      up some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational theories
+      of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the immediate concrete
+      and diversified aims which are always the educator's real concern. We
+      premise (as indeed immediately follows from what has been said) that there
+      is no need of making a choice among them or regarding them as competitors.
+      When we come to act in a tangible way we have to select or choose a
+      particular act at a particular time, but any number of comprehensive ends
+      may exist without competition, since they mean simply different ways of
+      looking at the same scene. One cannot climb a number of different
+      mountains simultaneously, but the views had when different mountains are
+      ascended supplement one another: they do not set up incompatible,
+      competing worlds. Or, putting the matter in a slightly different way, one
+      statement of an end may suggest certain questions and observations, and
+      another statement another set of questions, calling for other
+      observations. Then the more general ends we have, the better. One
+      statement will emphasize what another slurs over. What a plurality of
+      hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a plurality of stated
+      aims may do for the instructor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM8">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. An aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      consciousness and made a factor in determining present observation and
+      choice of ways of acting. It signifies that an activity has become
+      intelligent. Specifically it means foresight of the alternative
+      consequences attendant upon acting in a given situation in different ways,
+      and the use of what is anticipated to direct observation and experiment. A
+      true aim is thus opposed at every point to an aim which is imposed upon a
+      process of action from without. The latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a
+      stimulus to intelligence in the given situation, but is an externally
+      dictated order to do such and such things. Instead of connecting directly
+      with present activities, it is remote, divorced from the means by which it
+      is to be reached. Instead of suggesting a freer and better balanced
+      activity, it is a limit set to activity. In education, the currency of
+      these externally imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the
+      notion of preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of
+      both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Nature as Supplying the Aim. We have just pointed out the futility of
+      trying to establish the aim of education&mdash;some one final aim which
+      subordinates all others to itself. We have indicated that since general
+      aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey the existing
+      conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might have any number of
+      them, all consistent with one another. As matter of fact, a large number
+      have been stated at different times, all having great local value. For the
+      statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time. And we do not
+      emphasize things which do not require emphasis&mdash;that is, such things
+      as are taking care of themselves fairly well. We tend rather to frame our
+      statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary
+      situation; we take for granted, without explicit statement which would be
+      of no use, whatever is right or approximately so. We frame our explicit
+      aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about. It is, then, DO
+      paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or generation tends to
+      emphasize in its conscious projections just the things which it has least
+      of in actual fact. A time of domination by authority will call out as
+      response the desirability of great individual freedom; one of disorganized
+      individual activities the need of social control as an educational aim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus
+      balance each other. At different times such aims as complete living,
+      better methods of language study, substitution of things for words, social
+      efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete development of
+      personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, a esthetic contemplation,
+      utility, etc., have served. The following discussion takes up three
+      statements of recent influence; certain others have been incidentally
+      discussed in the previous chapters, and others will be considered later in
+      a discussion of knowledge and of the values of studies. We begin with a
+      consideration that education is a process of development in accordance
+      with nature, taking Rousseau's statement, which opposed natural to social
+      (See ante, p. 91); and then pass over to the antithetical conception of
+      social efficiency, which often opposes social to natural.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and
+      artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone to
+      resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the law and
+      the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her ways. The
+      positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way in which it
+      calls attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have regard to the
+      natural endowment of those educated. Its weakness is the ease with which
+      natural in the sense of normal is confused with the physical. The
+      constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and contriving, is then
+      discounted; we are just to get out of the way and allow nature to do the
+      work. Since no one has stated in the doctrine both its truth and falsity
+      better than Rousseau, we shall turn to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Education," he says, "we receive from three sources&mdash;Nature, men,
+      and things. The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities
+      constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which we are taught to put
+      this development constitutes that education given us by Men. The
+      acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects constitutes
+      that of things. Only when these three kinds of education are consonant and
+      make for the same end, does a man tend towards his true goal. If we are
+      asked what is this end, the answer is that of Nature. For since the
+      concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their
+      completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our control must
+      necessarily regulate us in determining the other two." Then he defines
+      Nature to mean the capacities and dispositions which are inborn, "as they
+      exist prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the
+      influence of the opinion of others."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as
+      fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction
+      with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say better what is said in
+      the first sentences. The three factors of educative development are (a)
+      the native structure of our bodily organs and their functional activities;
+      (b) the uses to which the activities of these organs are put under the
+      influence of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with the
+      environment. This statement certainly covers the ground. His other two
+      propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the three
+      factors of education are consonant and cooperative does adequate
+      development of the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities of
+      the organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But it
+      requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other
+      statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these three
+      things as factors which must work together to some extent in order that
+      any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as separate and
+      independent operations. Especially does he believe that there is an
+      independent and, as he says, "spontaneous" development of the native
+      organs and faculties. He thinks that this development can go on
+      irrespective of the use to which they are put. And it is to this separate
+      development that education coming from social contact is to be
+      subordinated. Now there is an immense difference between a use of native
+      activities in accord with those activities themselves&mdash;as distinct
+      from forcing them and perverting them&mdash;and supposing that they have a
+      normal development apart from any use, which development furnishes the
+      standard and norm of all learning by use. To recur to our previous
+      illustration, the process of acquiring language is a practically perfect
+      model of proper educative growth. The start is from native activities of
+      the vocal apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose
+      that these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself
+      would evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle would
+      mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and noises of
+      children not merely as the beginnings of the development of articulate
+      speech&mdash;which they are&mdash;but as furnishing language itself&mdash;the
+      standard for all teaching of language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right, introducing
+      a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the structure and
+      activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all teaching of the use
+      of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating that they supply not
+      only the conditions but also the ends of their development. As matter of
+      fact, the native activities develop, in contrast with random and
+      capricious exercise, through the uses to which they are put. And the
+      office of the social medium is, as we have seen, to direct growth through
+      putting powers to the best possible use. The instinctive activities may be
+      called, metaphorically, spontaneous, in the sense that the organs give a
+      strong bias for a certain sort of operation,&mdash;a bias so strong that
+      we cannot go contrary to it, though by trying to go contrary we may
+      pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. But the notion of a spontaneous normal
+      development of these activities is pure mythology. The natural, or native,
+      powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces in all education; they
+      do not furnish its ends or aims. There is no learning except from a
+      beginning in unlearned powers, but learning is not a matter of the
+      spontaneous overflow of the unlearned powers. Rousseau's contrary opinion
+      is doubtless due to the fact that he identified God with Nature; to him
+      the original powers are wholly good, coming directly from a wise and good
+      creator. To paraphrase the old saying about the country and the town, God
+      made the original human organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which
+      they are put. Consequently the development of the former furnishes the
+      standard to which the latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to
+      determine the uses to which the original activities shall be put, they
+      interfere with a divine plan. The interference by social arrangements with
+      Nature, God's work, is the primary source of corruption in individuals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all natural
+      tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total
+      depravity of innate human nature, and has had a powerful influence in
+      modifying the attitude towards children's interests. But it is hardly
+      necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good
+      nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects for which
+      they are employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing of
+      some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many
+      avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not to leave them
+      alone to follow their own "spontaneous development," but to provide an
+      environment which shall organize them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's statements, we
+      find that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point the means
+      of correcting many evils in current practices, and to indicate a number of
+      desirable specific aims. (1) Natural development as an aim fixes attention
+      upon the bodily organs and the need of health and vigor. The aim of
+      natural development says to parents and teachers: Make health an aim;
+      normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of the body&mdash;an
+      obvious enough fact and yet one whose due recognition in practice would
+      almost automatically revolutionize many of our educational practices.
+      "Nature" is indeed a vague and metaphorical term, but one thing that
+      "Nature" may be said to utter is that there are conditions of educational
+      efficiency, and that till we have learned what these conditions are and
+      have learned to make our practices accord with them, the noblest and most
+      ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer&mdash;are verbal and sentimental
+      rather than efficacious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect for
+      physical mobility. In Rousseau's words: "Children are always in motion; a
+      sedentary life is injurious." When he says that "Nature's intention is to
+      strengthen the body before exercising the mind" he hardly states the fact
+      fairly. But if he had said that nature's "intention" (to adopt his
+      poetical form of speech) is to develop the mind especially by exercise of
+      the muscles of the body he would have stated a positive fact. In other
+      words, the aim of following nature means, in the concrete, regard for the
+      actual part played by use of the bodily organs in explorations, in
+      handling of materials, in plays and games. (3) The general aim translates
+      into the aim of regard for individual differences among children. Nobody
+      can take the principle of consideration of native powers into account
+      without being struck by the fact that these powers differ in different
+      individuals. The difference applies not merely to their intensity, but
+      even more to their quality and arrangement. As Rouseau said: "Each
+      individual is born with a distinctive temperament. We indiscriminately
+      employ children of different bents on the same exercises; their education
+      destroys the special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we
+      have wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the
+      short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while
+      the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the waxing,
+      and waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and bloom
+      irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. We must strike
+      while the iron is hot. Especially precious are the first dawnings of
+      power. More than we imagine, the ways in which the tendencies of early
+      childhood are treated fix fundamental dispositions and condition the turn
+      taken by powers that show themselves later. Educational concern with the
+      early years of life&mdash;as distinct from inculcation of useful arts&mdash;dates
+      almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi and Froebel,
+      following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth. The irregularity of
+      growth and its significance is indicated in the following passage of a
+      student of the growth of the nervous system. "While growth continues,
+      things bodily and mental are lopsided, for growth is never general, but is
+      accentuated now at one spot, now at another. The methods which shall
+      recognize in the presence of these enormous differences of endowment the
+      dynamic values of natural inequalities of growth, and utilize them,
+      preferring irregularity to the rounding out gained by pruning will most
+      closely follow that which takes place in the body and thus prove most
+      effective." 1 Observation of natural tendencies is difficult under
+      conditions of restraint. They show themselves most readily in a child's
+      spontaneous sayings and doings,&mdash;that is, in those he engages in when
+      not put at set tasks and when not aware of being under observation. It
+      does not follow that these tendencies are all desirable because they are
+      natural; but it does follow that since they are there, they are operative
+      and must be taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones
+      have an environment which keeps them active, and that their activity shall
+      control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of the
+      latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble parents
+      when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much
+      direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them. At all
+      events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes as standards,
+      and regard all deviations of children's impulses as evils to be
+      eliminated. That artificiality against which the conception of following
+      nature is so largely a protest, is the outcome of attempts to force
+      children directly into the mold of grown-up standards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following
+      nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one
+      another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been
+      inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically
+      unlimited power to it. All the differences between peoples and between
+      classes and persons among the same people were said to be due to
+      differences of training, of exercise, and practice. Originally, mind,
+      reason, understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all.
+      This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and
+      the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As a protest
+      against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less
+      formal and abstract view of mind and its powers. It substituted specific
+      instincts and impulses and physiological capacities, differing from
+      individual to individual (just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out,
+      even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment,
+      memory, and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative
+      accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of modern
+      biology, physiology, and psychology. It means, in effect, that great as is
+      the significance of nurture, of modification, and transformation through
+      direct educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities, affords the
+      foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. On the other hand, the
+      doctrine of following nature was a political dogma. It meant a rebellion
+      against existing social institutions, customs, and ideals (See ante, p.
+      91). Rousseau's statement that everything is good as it comes from the
+      hands of the Creator has its signification only in its contrast with the
+      concluding part of the same sentence: "Everything degenerates in the hands
+      of man." And again he says: "Natural man has an absolute value; he is a
+      numerical unit, a complete integer and has no relation save to himself and
+      to his fellow man. Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator of
+      a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its relation to the
+      integral body of society. Good political institutions are those which make
+      a man unnatural." It is upon this conception of the artificial and harmful
+      character of organized social life as it now exists 2 that he rested the
+      notion that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which initiate growth
+      but also its plan and goal. That evil institutions and customs work almost
+      automatically to give a wrong education which the most careful schooling
+      cannot offset is true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart
+      from the environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers
+      will be put to better uses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the end
+      of a true education and society the end of an evil one, could hardly fail
+      to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the form of a doctrine
+      that the business of education is to supply precisely what nature fails to
+      secure; namely, habituation of an individual to social control;
+      subordination of natural powers to social rules. It is not surprising to
+      find that the value in the idea of social efficiency resides largely in
+      its protest against the points at which the doctrine of natural
+      development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is employed to
+      slur over the truth in that conception. It is a fact that we must look to
+      the activities and achievements of associated life to find what the
+      development of power&mdash;that is to say, efficiency&mdash;means. The
+      error is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather
+      than of utilization to secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered adequate
+      when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by negative
+      constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in
+      occupations having a social meaning. (1) Translated into specific aims,
+      social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency.
+      Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these
+      means are employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the
+      relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not able to
+      earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a
+      drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He misses for himself one
+      of the most educative experiences of life. If he is not trained in the
+      right use of the products of industry, there is grave danger that he may
+      deprave himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme
+      of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the
+      name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher
+      education have often not only neglected them, but looked at them with
+      scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from an
+      oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance
+      of an education which should have as a result ability to make one's way
+      economically in the world, and to manage economic resources usefully
+      instead of for mere display and luxury, should receive emphasis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing
+      economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A democratic
+      criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to
+      choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the
+      attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial
+      callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on
+      that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact,
+      industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through
+      the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old ones
+      are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train for too specific a
+      mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. When the occupation changes
+      its methods, such individuals are left behind with even less ability to
+      readjust themselves than if they had a less definite training. But, most
+      of all, the present industrial constitution of society is, like every
+      society which has ever existed, full of inequities. It is the aim of
+      progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and
+      unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. Wherever social control means
+      subordination of individual activities to class authority, there is danger
+      that industrial education will be dominated by acceptance of the status
+      quo. Differences of economic opportunity then dictate what the future
+      callings of individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the
+      defects of the Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened
+      method of selection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary to
+      separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. But the
+      latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications which are
+      vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from whatever make an
+      individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political
+      sense: it denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take a
+      determining part in making as well as obeying laws. The aim of civic
+      efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the notion of a
+      training of mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that
+      power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the things
+      which most need to be done are things which involve one's relationships
+      with others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too
+      narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain periods have
+      excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last
+      analysis security of social progress depends upon them. For scientific men
+      would have been thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally lacking
+      in social efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately social
+      efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share in a give
+      and take of experience. It covers all that makes one's own experience more
+      worth while to others, and all that enables one to participate more richly
+      in the worthwhile experiences of others. Ability to produce and to enjoy
+      art, capacity for recreation, the significant utilization of leisure, are
+      more important elements in it than elements conventionally associated
+      oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest sense, social efficiency is
+      nothing less than that socialization of mind which is actively concerned
+      in making experiences more communicable; in breaking down the barriers of
+      social stratification which make individuals impervious to the interests
+      of others. When social efficiency is confined to the service rendered by
+      overt acts, its chief constituent (because its only guarantee) is omitted,&mdash;intelligent
+      sympathy or good will. For sympathy as a desirable quality is something
+      more than mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have
+      in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them. What is
+      sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an unwitting
+      mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall be, instead
+      of an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find the good of
+      their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service, are hard and
+      metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgment of the
+      diversity of goods which life may afford to different persons, and from
+      faith in the social utility of encouraging every individual to make his
+      own choice intelligent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is
+      consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means at
+      least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw
+      and crude. When the "natural" is identified with this rawness, culture is
+      opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is also something
+      personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art
+      and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with a narrow
+      range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture
+      is opposed to efficiency. Whether called culture or complete development
+      of personality, the outcome is identical with the true meaning of social
+      efficiency whenever attention is given to what is unique in an individual&mdash;and
+      he would not be an individual if there were not something incommensurable
+      about him. Its opposite is the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive
+      quality is developed, distinction of personality results, and with it
+      greater promise for a social service which goes beyond the supply in
+      quantity of material commodities. For how can there be a society really
+      worth serving unless it is constituted of individuals of significant
+      personal qualities?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social
+      efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its rigid
+      division of inferior and superior. The latter are supposed to have time
+      and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the former are
+      confined to providing external products. When social efficiency as
+      measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be
+      democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the masses
+      characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried over.
+      But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social return
+      be demanded from all and that opportunity for development of distinctive
+      capacities be afforded all. The separation of the two aims in education is
+      fatal to democracy; the adoption of the narrower meaning of efficiency
+      deprives it of its essential justification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within
+      the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external
+      products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable experience,
+      it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities which may be
+      the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense,
+      by-products of education: by-products which are inevitable and important,
+      but nevertheless by-products. To set up an external aim strengthens by
+      reaction the false conception of culture which identifies it with
+      something purely "inner." And the idea of perfecting an "inner"
+      personality is a sure sign of social divisions. What is called inner is
+      simply that which does not connect with others&mdash;which is not capable
+      of free and full communication. What is termed spiritual culture has
+      usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has
+      been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally&mdash;and
+      therefore exclusively. What one is as a person is what one is as
+      associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse. This
+      transcends both the efficiency which consists in supplying products to
+      others and the culture which is an exclusive refinement and polish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher,
+      student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value to
+      others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently worth
+      while. Why then should it be thought that one must take his choice between
+      sacrificing himself to doing useful things for others, or sacrificing them
+      to pursuit of his own exclusive ends, whether the saving of his own soul
+      or the building of an inner spiritual life and personality? What happens
+      is that since neither of these things is persistently possible, we get a
+      compromise and an alternation. One tries each course by turns. There is no
+      greater tragedy than that so much of the professedly spiritual and
+      religious thought of the world has emphasized the two ideals of
+      self-sacrifice and spiritual self-perfecting instead of throwing its
+      weight against this dualism of life. The dualism is too deeply established
+      to be easily overthrown; for that reason, it is the particular task of
+      education at the present time to struggle in behalf of an aim in which
+      social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead of
+      antagonists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM9">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      the specific problems of education. Consequently it is a test of the value
+      of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it will translate
+      readily and consistently into the procedures which are suggested by
+      another. We have applied this test to three general aims: Development
+      according to nature, social efficiency, and culture or personal mental
+      enrichment. In each case we have seen that the aims when partially stated
+      come into conflict with each other. The partial statement of natural
+      development takes the primitive powers in an alleged spontaneous
+      development as the end-all. From this point of view training which renders
+      them useful to others is an abnormal constraint; one which profoundly
+      modifies them through deliberate nurture is corrupting. But when we
+      recognize that natural activities mean native activities which develop
+      only through the uses in which they are nurtured, the conflict disappears.
+      Similarly a social efficiency which is defined in terms of rendering
+      external service to others is of necessity opposed to the aim of enriching
+      the meaning of experience, while a culture which is taken to consist in an
+      internal refinement of a mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But
+      social efficiency as an educational purpose should mean cultivation of
+      power to join freely and fully in shared or common activities. This is
+      impossible without culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because
+      one cannot share in intercourse with others without learning&mdash;without
+      getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which one would
+      otherwise be ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of
+      culture than that it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range
+      and accuracy of one's perception of meanings.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      1 Donaldson, Growth of Brain, p. 356.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      2 We must not forget that Rousseau had the idea of a radically different
+      sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should be identical with
+      the good of all its members, which he thought to be as much better than
+      existing states as these are worse than the state of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Meaning of the Terms. We have already noticed the difference in the
+      attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former is
+      indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another,
+      since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what
+      is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him. His fortunes are more
+      or less at stake in the issue of events. Consequently he does whatever he
+      can to influence the direction present occurrences take. One is like a man
+      in a prison cell watching the rain out of the window; it is all the same
+      to him. The other is like a man who has planned an outing for the next day
+      which continuing rain will frustrate. He cannot, to be sure, by his
+      present reactions affect to-morrow's weather, but he may take some steps
+      which will influence future happenings, if only to postpone the proposed
+      picnic. If a man sees a carriage coming which may run over him, if he
+      cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the way if he
+      foresees the consequence in time. In many instances, he can intervene even
+      more directly. The attitude of a participant in the course of affairs is
+      thus a double one: there is solicitude, anxiety concerning future
+      consequences, and a tendency to act to assure better, and avert worse,
+      consequences. There are words which denote this attitude: concern,
+      interest. These words suggest that a person is bound up with the
+      possibilities inhering in objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout
+      for what they are likely to do to him; and that, on the basis of his
+      expectation or foresight, he is eager to act so as to give things one turn
+      rather than another. Interest and aims, concern and purpose, are
+      necessarily connected. Such words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the
+      results which are wanted and striven for; they take for granted the
+      personal attitude of solicitude and attentive eagerness. Such words as
+      interest, affection, concern, motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is
+      foreseen upon the individual's fortunes, and his active desire to act to
+      secure a possible result. They take for granted the objective changes. But
+      the difference is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in one
+      set of words is illuminated in the other. What is anticipated is objective
+      and impersonal; to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being run over. But
+      for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of
+      standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response.
+      The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference, which
+      finds expression in solicitude and effort. While such words as affection,
+      concern, and motive indicate an attitude of personal preference, they are
+      always attitudes toward objects&mdash;toward what is foreseen. We may call
+      the phase of objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal
+      concern emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in the facts
+      of the situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran their
+      course in a world by themselves. But they are always responses to what is
+      going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their successful
+      or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction with other
+      changes. Life activities flourish and fail only in connection with changes
+      of the environment. They are literally bound up with these changes; our
+      desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in which our doings
+      are tied up with the doings of things and persons about us. Instead of
+      marking a purely personal or subjective realm, separated from the
+      objective and impersonal, they indicate the non-existence of such a
+      separate world. They afford convincing evidence that changes in things are
+      not alien to the activities of a self, and that the career and welfare of
+      the self are bound up with the movement of persons and things. Interest,
+      concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a
+      developing situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole state of
+      active development, (ii) the objective results that are foreseen and
+      wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional inclination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (I) An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often referred to as
+      an interest. Thus we say that a man's interest is politics, or journalism,
+      or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting Japanese prints, or
+      banking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object touches or
+      engages a man; the point where it influences him. In some legal
+      transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to have a standing at
+      court. He has to show that some proposed step concerns his affairs. A
+      silent partner has an interest in a business, although he takes no active
+      part in its conduct because its prosperity or decline affects his profits
+      and liabilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iii) When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the emphasis
+      falls directly upon his personal attitude. To be interested is to be
+      absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an
+      interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. We say of
+      an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and that
+      he has found himself in it. Both terms express the engrossment of the self
+      in an object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory
+      way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first
+      exaggerated and then isolated. Interest is taken to mean merely the effect
+      of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure.
+      Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are reduced to
+      mere personal states of pleasure or pain. Educationally, it then follows
+      that to attach importance to interest means to attach some feature of
+      seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and
+      effort by offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is properly
+      stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the objection is based upon the fact&mdash;or assumption&mdash;that
+      the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be
+      appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other words, they
+      are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils. The
+      remedy is not in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more
+      than it is to search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the
+      alien material. It is to discover objects and modes of action, which are
+      connected with present powers. The function of this material in engaging
+      activity and carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest.
+      If the material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for
+      devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary,
+      semi-coerced effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,&mdash;that
+      which connects two things otherwise distant. In education, the distance
+      covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a process takes time
+      to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. We
+      overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between an
+      initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is
+      something intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are
+      the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
+      Between the two lie means&mdash;that is middle conditions:&mdash;acts to
+      be performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used. Only
+      through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial activities reach
+      a satisfactory consummation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because the
+      development of existing activities into the foreseen and desired end
+      depends upon them. To be means for the achieving of present tendencies, to
+      be "between" the agent and his end, to be of interest, are different names
+      for the same thing. When material has to be made interesting, it signifies
+      that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present power: or
+      that if the connection be there, it is not perceived. To make it
+      interesting by leading one to realize the connection that exists is simply
+      good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous and artificial
+      inducements deserves all the bad names which have been applied to the
+      doctrine of interest in education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the meaning of the term interest. Now for that of discipline.
+      Where an activity takes time, where many means and obstacles lie between
+      its initiation and completion, deliberation and persistence are required.
+      It is obvious that a very large part of the everyday meaning of will is
+      precisely the deliberate or conscious disposition to persist and endure in
+      a planned course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary
+      solicitations. A man of strong will, in the popular usage of the words, is
+      a man who is neither fickle nor half-hearted in achieving chosen ends. His
+      ability is executive; that is, he persistently and energetically strives
+      to execute or carry out his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clearly there are two factors in will. One has to do with the foresight of
+      results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has upon
+      the person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition. Obstinacy
+      may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps on doing a
+      thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly
+      thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally declines
+      (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to
+      himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed
+      himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while.
+      Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize ends which
+      present themselves than it does in persistence and energy in use of means
+      to achieve the end. The really executive man is a man who ponders his
+      ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as clear and full
+      as possible. The people we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always
+      deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts. They pick out
+      some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances.
+      When they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to
+      show themselves. They are discouraged, or complain of being thwarted in
+      their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action.
+      That the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is
+      intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and fullness
+      with which consequences are thought out, cannot be over-emphasized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of
+      results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of a
+      person. They are something to look at and for curiosity to play with
+      rather than something to achieve. There is no such thing as
+      over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-sided
+      intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as we say in considering the
+      consequences of proposed lines of action. A certain flabbiness of fiber
+      prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in
+      action. And most persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course of
+      action by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of inducements
+      to an action that is directly more agreeable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them
+      deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power
+      to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of distraction,
+      confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.
+      Discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources available for
+      carrying through the action undertaken. To know what one is to do and to
+      move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means is to be
+      disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind. Discipline is
+      positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to compel obedience,
+      to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an uncongenial task&mdash;these
+      things are or are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to
+      the development of power to recognize what one is about and to persistence
+      in accomplishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline are
+      connected, not opposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (i) Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained power&mdash;apprehension
+      of what one is doing as exhibited in consequences&mdash;is not possible
+      without interest. Deliberation will be perfunctory and superficial where
+      there is no interest. Parents and teachers often complain&mdash;and
+      correctly&mdash;that children "do not want to hear, or want to
+      understand." Their minds are not upon the subject precisely because it
+      does not touch them; it does not enter into their concerns. This is a
+      state of things that needs to be remedied, but the remedy is not in the
+      use of methods which increase indifference and aversion. Even punishing a
+      child for inattention is one way of trying to make him realize that the
+      matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one way of arousing
+      "interest," or bringing about a sense of connection. In the long run, its
+      value is measured by whether it supplies a mere physical excitation to act
+      in the way desired by the adult or whether it leads the child "to think"&mdash;that
+      is, to reflect upon his acts and impregnate them with aims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even more
+      obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who are not interested in
+      what they are doing. If one were engaging a lawyer or a doctor, it would
+      never occur to one to reason that the person engaged would stick to his
+      work more conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he did it
+      merely from a sense of obligation. Interest measures&mdash;or rather is&mdash;the
+      depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one, moving one to act
+      for its realization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education. Interest
+      represents the moving force of objects&mdash;whether perceived or
+      presented in imagination&mdash;in any experience having a purpose. In the
+      concrete, the value of recognizing the dynamic place of interest in an
+      educative development is that it leads to considering individual children
+      in their specific capabilities, needs, and preferences. One who recognizes
+      the importance of interest will not assume that all minds work in the same
+      way because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook. Attitudes
+      and methods of approach and response vary with the specific appeal the
+      same material makes, this appeal itself varying with difference of natural
+      aptitude, of past experience, of plan of life, and so on. But the facts of
+      interest also supply considerations of general value to the philosophy of
+      education. Rightly understood, they put us on our guard against certain
+      conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have had great vogue in
+      philosophic thought in the past, and which exercise a serious hampering
+      influence upon the conduct of instruction and discipline. Too frequently
+      mind is set over the world of things and facts to be known; it is regarded
+      as something existing in isolation, with mental states and operations that
+      exist independently. Knowledge is then regarded as an external application
+      of purely mental existences to the things to be known, or else as a result
+      of the impressions which this outside subject matter makes on mind, or as
+      a combination of the two. Subject matter is then regarded as something
+      complete in itself; it is just something to be learned or known, either by
+      the voluntary application of mind to it or through the impressions it
+      makes on mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind
+      appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the
+      basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view to
+      controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place. The things,
+      the subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a
+      bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether assisting or
+      retarding it. These statements are too formal to be very intelligible. An
+      illustration may clear up their significance. You are engaged in a certain
+      occupation, say writing with a typewriter. If you are an expert, your
+      formed habits take care of the physical movements and leave your thoughts
+      free to consider your topic. Suppose, however, you are not skilled, or
+      that, even if you are, the machine does not work well. You then have to
+      use intelligence. You do not wish to strike the keys at random and let the
+      consequences be what they may; you wish to record certain words in a given
+      order so as to make sense. You attend to the keys, to what you have
+      written, to your movements, to the ribbon or the mechanism of the machine.
+      Your attention is not distributed indifferently and miscellaneously to any
+      and every detail. It is centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the
+      effective pursuit of your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are
+      concerned to note the existing facts because and in so far as they are
+      factors in the achievement of the result intended. You have to find out
+      what your resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the
+      difficulties and obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with
+      reference to what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not
+      involve such a forecast of results and such an examination of means and
+      hindrances is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither
+      case is it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended
+      and careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to be, in
+      that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical
+      manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the
+      case is the same. There is an activity in process; one is taken up with
+      the development of a theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph talks, this
+      means intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various
+      conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending, together
+      with continually renewed observation and recollection to get hold of the
+      subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be reached. The whole
+      attitude is one of concern with what is to be, and with what is so far as
+      the latter enters into the movement toward the end. Leave out the
+      direction which depends upon foresight of possible future results, and
+      there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let there be imaginative
+      forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its attainment
+      depends, and there is self-deception or idle dreaming&mdash;abortive
+      intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something complete
+      by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as that is
+      intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims, ends, enter
+      into it, with selection of means to further the attainment of aims.
+      Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns; but a
+      person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he plays a part
+      have the qualities mentioned. Nor are the activities in which a person
+      engages, whether intelligently or not, exclusive properties of himself;
+      they are something in which he engages and partakes. Other things, the
+      independent changes of other things and persons, cooperate and hinder. The
+      individual's act may be initial in a course of events, but the outcome
+      depends upon the interaction of his response with energies supplied by
+      other agencies. Conceive mind as anything but one factor partaking along
+      with others in the production of consequences, and it becomes meaningless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will
+      engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment
+      or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic appliances
+      but as conditions for the attainment of ends. The remedy for the evils
+      attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously spoken of, is not
+      to be found by substituting a doctrine of specialized disciplines, but by
+      reforming the notion of mind and its training. Discovery of typical modes
+      of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in which individuals are
+      concerned, in whose outcome they recognize they have something at stake,
+      and which cannot be carried through without reflection and use of judgment
+      to select material of observation and recollection, is the remedy. In
+      short, the root of the error long prevalent in the conception of training
+      of mind consists in leaving out of account movements of things to future
+      results in which an individual shares, and in the direction of which
+      observation, imagination, and memory are enlisted. It consists in
+      regarding mind as complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to a
+      present material.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In historic practice the error has cut two ways. On one hand, it has
+      screened and protected traditional studies and methods of teaching from
+      intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say that they are
+      "disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all inquiry. It has not been
+      enough to show that they were of no use in life or that they did not
+      really contribute to the cultivation of the self. That they were
+      "disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed
+      the subject from the realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the
+      allegation could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue as
+      matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and lost
+      power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not with the
+      study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof that he needed
+      more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the old methods.
+      The responsibility was transferred from the educator to the pupil because
+      the material did not have to meet specific tests; it did not have to be
+      shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served any specific end. It
+      was designed to discipline in general, and if it failed, it was because
+      the individual was unwilling to be disciplined. In the other direction,
+      the tendency was towards a negative conception of discipline, instead of
+      an identification of it with growth in constructive power of achievement.
+      As we have already seen, will means an attitude toward the future, toward
+      the production of possible consequences, an attitude involving effort to
+      foresee clearly and comprehensively the probable results of ways of
+      acting, and an active identification with some anticipated consequences.
+      Identification of will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a mind
+      is set up, endowed with powers that are only to be applied to existing
+      material. A person just either will or will not apply himself to the
+      matter in hand. The more indifferent the subject matter, the less concern
+      it has for the habits and preferences of the individual, the more demand
+      there is for an effort to bring the mind to bear upon it&mdash;and hence
+      the more discipline of will. To attend to material because there is
+      something to be done in which the person is concerned is not disciplinary
+      in this view; not even if it results in a desirable increase of
+      constructive power. Application just for the sake of application, for the
+      sake of training, is alone disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if
+      the subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive
+      (so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of
+      discipline. The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the
+      words of an American humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a
+      boy so long as he doesn't like it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing with
+      objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject matter to be
+      learned. In the traditional schemes of education, subject matter means so
+      much material to be studied. Various branches of study represent so many
+      independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement complete
+      within itself. History is one such group of facts; algebra another;
+      geography another, and so on till we have run through the entire
+      curriculum. Having a ready-made existence on their own account, their
+      relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire. This
+      idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program of
+      school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists of
+      "studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be
+      complete by itself&mdash;for educational purposes at least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the meaning
+      of the subject matter of instruction. At this point, we need only to say
+      that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything which intelligence
+      studies represents things in the part which they play in the carrying
+      forward of active lines of interest. Just as one "studies" his typewriter
+      as part of the operation of putting it to use to effect results, so with
+      any fact or truth. It becomes an object of study&mdash;that is, of inquiry
+      and reflection&mdash;when it figures as a factor to be reckoned with in
+      the completion of a course of events in which one is engaged and by whose
+      outcome one is affected. Numbers are not objects of study just because
+      they are numbers already constituting a branch of learning called
+      mathematics, but because they represent qualities and relations of the
+      world in which our action goes on, because they are factors upon which the
+      accomplishment of our purposes depends. Stated thus broadly, the formula
+      may appear abstract. Translated into details, it means that the act of
+      learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which
+      pupils are merely presented with a lesson to be learned. Study is
+      effectual in the degree in which the pupil realizes the place of the
+      numerical truth he is dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in
+      which he is concerned. This connection of an object and a topic with the
+      promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the last word
+      of a genuine theory of interest in education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Some Social Aspects of the Question. While the theoretical errors of
+      which we have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of
+      schools, they are themselves the outcome of conditions of social life. A
+      change confined to the theoretical conviction of educators will not remove
+      the difficulties, though it should render more effective efforts to modify
+      social conditions. Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed
+      by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake. The
+      ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic attitude. Art is neither
+      merely internal nor merely external; merely mental nor merely physical.
+      Like every mode of action, it brings about changes in the world. The
+      changes made by some actions (those which by contrast may be called
+      mechanical) are external; they are shifting things about. No ideal reward,
+      no enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them. Others
+      contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external adornment and
+      display. Many of our existing social activities, industrial and political,
+      fall in these two classes. Neither the people who engage in them, nor
+      those who are directly affected by them, are capable of full and free
+      interest in their work. Because of the lack of any purpose in the work for
+      the one doing it, or because of the restricted character of its aim,
+      intelligence is not adequately engaged. The same conditions force many
+      people back upon themselves. They take refuge in an inner play of
+      sentiment and fancies. They are aesthetic but not artistic, since their
+      feelings and ideas are turned upon themselves, instead of being methods in
+      acts which modify conditions. Their mental life is sentimental; an
+      enjoyment of an inner landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become an
+      asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life&mdash;not a temporary
+      retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification in future dealings
+      with the world. The very word art may become associated not with specific
+      transformation of things, making them more significant for mind, but with
+      stimulations of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The
+      separation and mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of
+      theory or culture, the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are
+      indications of this situation. Thus interest and mind are either narrowed,
+      or else made perverse. Compare what was said in an earlier chapter about
+      the one-sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of
+      efficiency and of culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a basis
+      of division between laboring classes and leisure classes. The intelligence
+      of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting struggle with
+      things; that of those freed from the discipline of occupation becomes
+      luxurious and effeminate. Moreover, the majority of human beings still
+      lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are fixed by accident and necessity
+      of circumstance; they are not the normal expression of their own powers
+      interacting with the needs and resources of the environment. Our economic
+      conditions still relegate many men to a servile status. As a consequence,
+      the intelligence of those in control of the practical situation is not
+      liberal. Instead of playing freely upon the subjugation of the world for
+      human ends, it is devoted to the manipulation of other men for ends that
+      are non-human in so far as they are exclusive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational
+      traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in different
+      portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian character of most
+      elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character
+      of most higher education. It accounts for the tendency to isolate
+      intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and
+      professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that liberal
+      education is opposed to the requirements of an education which shall count
+      in the vocations of life. But it also helps define the peculiar problem of
+      present education. The school cannot immediately escape from the ideals
+      set by prior social conditions. But it should contribute through the type
+      of intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the
+      improvement of those conditions. And just here the true conceptions of
+      interest and discipline are full of significance. Persons whose interests
+      have been enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with things and
+      facts in active occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work)
+      will be those most likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and
+      aloof knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice. To
+      organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully
+      enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the doing requires
+      observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of a constructive
+      imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve social conditions.
+      To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in
+      outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of
+      knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that
+      education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby
+      takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A
+      reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection
+      with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow
+      work. It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a step at a time. But this is
+      not a reason for nominally accepting one educational philosophy and
+      accommodating ourselves in practice to another. It is a challenge to
+      undertake the task of reorganization courageously and to keep at it
+      persistently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM10">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      having an aim. Interest means that one is identified with the objects
+      which define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to its
+      realization. Any activity with an aim implies a distinction between an
+      earlier incomplete phase and later completing phase; it implies also
+      intermediate steps. To have an interest is to take things as entering into
+      such a continuously developing situation, instead of taking them in
+      isolation. The time difference between the given incomplete state of
+      affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort in transformation, it
+      demands continuity of attention and endurance. This attitude is what is
+      practically meant by will. Discipline or development of power of
+      continuous attention is its fruit. The significance of this doctrine for
+      the theory of education is twofold. On the one hand it protects us from
+      the notion that mind and mental states are something complete in
+      themselves, which then happen to be applied to some ready-made objects and
+      topics so that knowledge results. It shows that mind and intelligent or
+      purposeful engagement in a course of action into which things enter are
+      identical. Hence to develop and train mind is to provide an environment
+      which induces such activity. On the other side, it protects us from the
+      notion that subject matter on its side is something isolated and
+      independent. It shows that subject matter of learning is identical with
+      all the objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or
+      obstacles into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of action.
+      The developing course of action, whose end and conditions are perceived,
+      is the unity which holds together what are often divided into an
+      independent mind on one side and an independent world of objects and facts
+      on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Nature of Experience. The nature of experience can be understood
+      only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element peculiarly
+      combined. On the active hand, experience is trying&mdash;a meaning which
+      is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On the passive, it is
+      undergoing. When we experience something we act upon it, we do something
+      with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. We do something to
+      the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is the peculiar
+      combination. The connection of these two phases of experience measures the
+      fruitfulness or value of the experience. Mere activity does not constitute
+      experience. It is dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating. Experience as
+      trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is
+      consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from
+      it. When an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences,
+      when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made in us,
+      the mere flux is loaded with significance. We learn something. It is not
+      experience when a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is
+      experience when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes
+      in consequence. Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame means a
+      burn. Being burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick
+      of wood, if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action.
+      Blind and capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to
+      another. So far as this happens, everything is writ in water. There is
+      none of that cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital
+      sense of that term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way
+      of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of
+      our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is no
+      before or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and
+      consequently no meaning. We get nothing which may be carried over to
+      foresee what is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust
+      ourselves to what is coming&mdash;no added control. Only by courtesy can
+      such an experience be called experience. To "learn from experience" is to
+      make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and
+      what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions,
+      doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it
+      is like; the undergoing becomes instruction&mdash;discovery of the
+      connection of things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience is
+      primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive. But (2)
+      the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception of
+      relationships or continuities to which it leads up. It includes cognition
+      in the degree in which it is cumulative or amounts to something, or has
+      meaning. In schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked
+      upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which
+      appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect. The very word pupil
+      has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful
+      experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly. Something which is called
+      mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity. The
+      former is then thought to be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter
+      to be an irrelevant and intruding physical factor. The intimate union of
+      activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to recognition of
+      meaning is broken; instead we have two fragments: mere bodily action on
+      one side, and meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity on the
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have
+      flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate them.
+      Some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated. (a) In
+      part bodily activity becomes an intruder. Having nothing, so it is
+      thought, to do with mental activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil to
+      be contended with. For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along
+      with his mind. And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it
+      has to do something. But its activities, not being utilized in occupation
+      with things which yield significant results, have to be frowned upon. They
+      lead the pupil away from the lesson with which his "mind" ought to be
+      occupied; they are sources of mischief. The chief source of the "problem
+      of discipline" in schools is that the teacher has often to spend the
+      larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take
+      the mind away from its material. A premium is put on physical quietude; on
+      silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like
+      simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest. The teachers'
+      business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the
+      inevitable deviations which occur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil
+      are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which
+      bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning. Callous
+      indifference and explosions from strain alternate. The neglected body,
+      having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without
+      knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into
+      equally meaningless fooling&mdash;both very different from the normal play
+      of children. Physically active children become restless and unruly; the
+      more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend what energy they have
+      in the negative task of keeping their instincts and active tendencies
+      suppressed, instead of in a positive one of constructive planning and
+      execution; they are thus educated not into responsibility for the
+      significant and graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty
+      not to give them free play. It may be seriously asserted that a chief
+      cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that it was
+      never misled by false notions into an attempted separation of mind and
+      body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned by
+      the application of "mind," some bodily activities have to be used. The
+      senses&mdash;especially the eye and ear&mdash;have to be employed to take
+      in what the book, the map, the blackboard, and the teacher say. The lips
+      and vocal organs, and the hands, have to be used to reproduce in speech
+      and writing what has been stowed away. The senses are then regarded as a
+      kind of mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from the
+      external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways and avenues
+      of knowledge. To keep the eyes on the book and the ears open to the
+      teacher's words is a mysterious source of intellectual grace. Moreover,
+      reading, writing, and figuring&mdash;important school arts&mdash;demand
+      muscular or motor training. The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs
+      accordingly have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back
+      out of the mind into external action. For it happens that using the
+      muscles repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an automatic tendency to
+      repeat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which (in
+      spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering character of the body in
+      mental action) have to be employed more or less. For the senses and
+      muscles are used not as organic participants in having an instructive
+      experience, but as external inlets and outlets of mind. Before the child
+      goes to school, he learns with his hand, eye, and ear, because they are
+      organs of the process of doing something from which meaning results. The
+      boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite, and has to note the
+      various pressures of the string on his hand. His senses are avenues of
+      knowledge not because external facts are somehow "conveyed" to the brain,
+      but because they are used in doing something with a purpose. The qualities
+      of seen and touched things have a bearing on what is done, and are alertly
+      perceived; they have a meaning. But when pupils are expected to use their
+      eyes to note the form of words, irrespective of their meaning, in order to
+      reproduce them in spelling or reading, the resulting training is simply of
+      isolated sense organs and muscles. It is such isolation of an act from a
+      purpose which makes it mechanical. It is customary for teachers to urge
+      children to read with expression, so as to bring out the meaning. But if
+      they originally learned the sensory-motor technique of reading&mdash;the
+      ability to identify forms and to reproduce the sounds they stand for&mdash;by
+      methods which did not call for attention to meaning, a mechanical habit
+      was established which makes it difficult to read subsequently with
+      intelligence. The vocal organs have been trained to go their own way
+      automatically in isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will.
+      Drawing, singing, and writing may be taught in the same mechanical way;
+      for, we repeat, any way is mechanical which narrows down the bodily
+      activity so that a separation of body from mind&mdash;that is, from
+      recognition of meaning&mdash;is set up. Mathematics, even in its higher
+      branches, when undue emphasis is put upon the technique of calculation,
+      and science, when laboratory exercises are given for their own sake,
+      suffer from the same evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from direct
+      occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the expense of
+      relations or connections. It is altogether too common to separate
+      perceptions and even ideas from judgments. The latter are thought to come
+      after the former in order to compare them. It is alleged that the mind
+      perceives things apart from relations; that it forms ideas of them in
+      isolation from their connections&mdash;with what goes before and comes
+      after. Then judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated
+      items of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection shall
+      be brought out. As matter of fact, every perception and every idea is a
+      sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a thing. We do not really know a
+      chair or have an idea of it by inventorying and enumerating its various
+      isolated qualities, but only by bringing these qualities into connection
+      with something else&mdash;the purpose which makes it a chair and not a
+      table; or its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or
+      the "period" which it represents, and so on. A wagon is not perceived when
+      all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic connection of the
+      parts which makes it a wagon. And these connections are not those of mere
+      physical juxtaposition; they involve connection with the animals that draw
+      it, the things that are carried on it, and so on. Judgment is employed in
+      the perception; otherwise the perception is mere sensory excitation or
+      else a recognition of the result of a prior judgment, as in the case of
+      familiar objects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for ideas. And
+      in just the degree in which mental activity is separated from active
+      concern with the world, from doing something and connecting the doing with
+      what is undergone, words, symbols, come to take the place of ideas. The
+      substitution is the more subtle because some meaning is recognized. But we
+      are very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning, and to
+      fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations which
+      confer significance. We get so thoroughly used to a kind of pseudo-idea, a
+      half perception, that we are not aware how half-dead our mental action is,
+      and how much keener and more extensive our observations and ideas would be
+      if we formed them under conditions of a vital experience which required us
+      to use judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with.
+      There is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter. All
+      authorities agree that that discernment of relationships is the genuinely
+      intellectual matter; hence, the educative matter. The failure arises in
+      supposing that relationships can become perceptible without experience&mdash;without
+      that conjoint trying and undergoing of which we have spoken. It is assumed
+      that "mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that this
+      attention may be given at will irrespective of the situation. Hence the
+      deluge of half-observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated
+      "knowledge" which afflicts the world. An ounce of experience is better
+      than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any
+      theory has vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble
+      experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or
+      intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be
+      definitely grasped even as theory. It tends to become a mere verbal
+      formula, a set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine
+      theorizing, unnecessary and impossible. Because of our education we use
+      words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal
+      being in reality simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us
+      from seeing any longer the difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Reflection in Experience. Thought or reflection, as we have already
+      seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation
+      between what we try to do and what happens in consequence. No experience
+      having a meaning is possible without some element of thought. But we may
+      contrast two types of experience according to the proportion of reflection
+      found in them. All our experiences have a phase of "cut and try" in them&mdash;what
+      psychologists call the method of trial and error. We simply do something,
+      and when it fails, we do something else, and keep on trying till we hit
+      upon something which works, and then we adopt that method as a rule of
+      thumb measure in subsequent procedure. Some experiences have very little
+      else in them than this hit and miss or succeed process. We see that a
+      certain way of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do
+      not see how they are. We do not see the details of the connection; the
+      links are missing. Our discernment is very gross. In other cases we push
+      our observation farther. We analyze to see just what lies between so as to
+      bind together cause and effect, activity and consequence. This extension
+      of our insight makes foresight more accurate and comprehensive. The action
+      which rests simply upon the trial and error method is at the mercy of
+      circumstances; they may change so that the act performed does not operate
+      in the way it was expected to. But if we know in detail upon what the
+      result depends, we can look to see whether the required conditions are
+      there. The method extends our practical control. For if some of the
+      conditions are missing, we may, if we know what the needed antecedents for
+      an effect are, set to work to supply them; or, if they are such as to
+      produce undesirable effects as well, we may eliminate some of the
+      superfluous causes and economize effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what
+      happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience is
+      made explicit. Its quantity increases so that its proportionate value is
+      very different. Hence the quality of the experience changes; the change is
+      so significant that we may call this type of experience reflective&mdash;that
+      is, reflective par excellence. The deliberate cultivation of this phase of
+      thought constitutes thinking as a distinctive experience. Thinking, in
+      other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections
+      between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that
+      the two become continuous. Their isolation, and consequently their purely
+      arbitrary going together, is canceled; a unified developing situation
+      takes its place. The occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is
+      reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the intelligent
+      element in our experience. It makes it possible to act with an end in
+      view. It is the condition of our having aims. As soon as an infant begins
+      to expect he begins to use something which is now going on as a sign of
+      something to follow; he is, in however simple a fashion, judging. For he
+      takes one thing as evidence of something else, and so recognizes a
+      relationship. Any future development, however elaborate it may be, is only
+      an extending and a refining of this simple act of inference. All that the
+      wisest man can do is to observe what is going on more widely and more
+      minutely and then select more carefully from what is noted just those
+      factors which point to something to happen. The opposites, once more, to
+      thoughtful action are routine and capricious behavior. The former accepts
+      what has been customary as a full measure of possibility and omits to take
+      into account the connections of the particular things done. The latter
+      makes the momentary act a measure of value, and ignores the connections of
+      our personal action with the energies of the environment. It says,
+      virtually, "things are to be just as I happen to like them at this
+      instant," as routine says in effect "let things continue just as I have
+      found them in the past." Both refuse to acknowledge responsibility for the
+      future consequences which flow from present action. Reflection is the
+      acceptance of such responsibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on,
+      something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled. Its point,
+      its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it is going
+      to turn out. As this is written, the world is filled with the clang of
+      contending armies. For an active participant in the war, it is clear that
+      the momentous thing is the issue, the future consequences, of this and
+      that happening. He is identified, for the time at least, with the issue;
+      his fate hangs upon the course things are taking. But even for an onlooker
+      in a neutral country, the significance of every move made, of every
+      advance here and retreat there, lies in what it portends. To think upon
+      the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is indicated as
+      probable or possible regarding an outcome. To fill our heads, like a
+      scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is
+      not to think. It is to turn ourselves into a piece of registering
+      apparatus. To consider the bearing of the occurrence upon what may be, but
+      is not yet, is to think. Nor will the reflective experience be different
+      in kind if we substitute distance in time for separation in space. Imagine
+      the war done with, and a future historian giving an account of it. The
+      episode is, by assumption, past. But he cannot give a thoughtful account
+      of the war save as he preserves the time sequence; the meaning of each
+      occurrence, as he deals with it, lies in what was future for it, though
+      not for the historian. To take it by itself as a complete existence is to
+      take it unreflectively. Reflection also implies concern with the issue&mdash;a
+      certain sympathetic identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic,
+      with the outcome of the course of events. For the general in the war, or a
+      common soldier, or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the
+      stimulus to thinking is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is indirect
+      and dependent upon imagination. But the flagrant partisanship of human
+      nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves
+      with one possible course of events, and to reject the other as foreign. If
+      we cannot take sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to
+      help determine the final balance, we take sides emotionally and
+      imaginatively. We desire this or that outcome. One wholly indifferent to
+      the outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all. From
+      this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the
+      consequences of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought.
+      Born in partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a
+      certain detached impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and
+      desires to affect his observations and interpretations of the existing
+      situation will surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes and fears
+      may be the chief motive for a thoughtful following of the war on the part
+      of an onlooker in a neutral country, he too will think ineffectively in
+      the degree in which his preferences modify the stuff of his observations
+      and reasonings. There is, however, no incompatibility between the fact
+      that the occasion of reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is
+      going on and the fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping
+      one's self out of the data. The almost insurmountable difficulty of
+      achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in
+      situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of
+      events and is designed to influence the result. Only gradually and with a
+      widening of the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does
+      thinking develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact
+      of great significance for education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which are still
+      going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking occurs when things are
+      uncertain or doubtful or problematic. Only what is finished, completed, is
+      wholly assured. Where there is reflection there is suspense. The object of
+      thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to project a possible termination
+      on the basis of what is already given. Certain other facts about thinking
+      accompany this feature. Since the situation in which thinking occurs is a
+      doubtful one, thinking is a process of inquiry, of looking into things, of
+      investigating. Acquiring is always secondary, and instrumental to the act
+      of inquiring. It is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand.
+      We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of
+      scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research,
+      and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if
+      everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking
+      for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be
+      guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an
+      adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. The conclusions of thinking, till
+      confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or
+      hypothetical. Their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of
+      the issue, in fact. The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we
+      learn? For either we know already what we are after, or else we do not
+      know. In neither case is learning possible; on the first alternative
+      because we know already; on the second, because we do not know what to
+      look for, nor if, by chance, we find it can we tell that it is what we
+      were after. The dilemma makes no provision for coming to know, for
+      learning; it assumes either complete knowledge or complete ignorance.
+      Nevertheless the twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists. The
+      possibility of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact
+      which the Greek dilemma overlooked. The perplexities of the situation
+      suggest certain ways out. We try these ways, and either push our way out,
+      in which case we know we have found what we were looking for, or the
+      situation gets darker and more confused&mdash;in which case, we know we
+      are still ignorant. Tentative means trying out, feeling one's way along
+      provisionally. Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice piece of
+      formal logic. But it is also true that as long as men kept a sharp
+      disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science made only slow and
+      accidental advance. Systematic advance in invention and discovery began
+      when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry
+      by forming conjectures to guide action in tentative explorations, whose
+      development would confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture. While
+      the Greeks made knowledge more than learning, modern science makes
+      conserved knowledge only a means to learning, to discovery. To recur to
+      our illustration. A commanding general cannot base his actions upon either
+      absolute certainty or absolute ignorance. He has a certain amount of
+      information at hand which is, we will assume, reasonably trustworthy. He
+      then infers certain prospective movements, thus assigning meaning to the
+      bare facts of the given situation. His inference is more or less dubious
+      and hypothetical. But he acts upon it. He develops a plan of procedure, a
+      method of dealing with the situation. The consequences which directly
+      follow from his acting this way rather than that test and reveal the worth
+      of his reflections. What he already knows functions and has value in what
+      he learns. But will this account apply in the case of the one in a neutral
+      country who is thoughtfully following as best he can the progress of
+      events? In form, yes, though not of course in content. It is self-evident
+      that his guesses about the future indicated by present facts, guesses by
+      which he attempts to supply meaning to a multitude of disconnected data,
+      cannot be the basis of a method which shall take effect in the campaign.
+      That is not his problem. But in the degree in which he is actively
+      thinking, and not merely passively following the course of events, his
+      tentative inferences will take effect in a method of procedure appropriate
+      to his situation. He will anticipate certain future moves, and will be on
+      the alert to see whether they happen or not. In the degree in which he is
+      intellectually concerned, or thoughtful, he will be actively on the
+      lookout; he will take steps which although they do not affect the
+      campaign, modify in some degree his subsequent actions. Otherwise his
+      later "I told you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does not mark
+      any testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a coincidence that
+      yields emotional satisfaction&mdash;and includes a large factor of
+      self-deception. The case is comparable to that of an astronomer who from
+      given data has been led to foresee (infer) a future eclipse. No matter how
+      great the mathematical probability, the inference is hypothetical&mdash;a
+      matter of probability. 1 The hypothesis as to the date and position of the
+      anticipated eclipse becomes the material of forming a method of future
+      conduct. Apparatus is arranged; possibly an expedition is made to some far
+      part of the globe. In any case, some active steps are taken which actually
+      change some physical conditions. And apart from such steps and the
+      consequent modification of the situation, there is no completion of the
+      act of thinking. It remains suspended. Knowledge, already attained
+      knowledge, controls thinking and makes it fruitful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the general features of a reflective experience. They are (i)
+      perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in an
+      incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined; (ii) a
+      conjectural anticipation&mdash;a tentative interpretation of the given
+      elements, attributing to them a tendency to effect certain consequences;
+      (iii) a careful survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of
+      all attainable consideration which will define and clarify the problem in
+      hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it
+      more precise and more consistent, because squaring with a wider range of
+      facts; (v) taking one stand upon the projected hypothesis as a plan of
+      action which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing something
+      overtly to bring about the anticipated result, and thereby testing the
+      hypothesis. It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which
+      mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and
+      error plane. They make thinking itself into an experience. Nevertheless,
+      we never get wholly beyond the trial and error situation. Our most
+      elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be tried in the world
+      and thereby tried out. And since it can never take into account all the
+      connections, it can never cover with perfect accuracy all the
+      consequences. Yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is so careful, and the
+      guessing at results so controlled, that we have a right to mark off the
+      reflective experience from the grosser trial and error forms of action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM11">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. In determining the place of thinking in experience we first
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with
+      something which is undergone in consequence. A separation of the active
+      doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning
+      of an experience. Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of
+      connections between what is done and its consequences. It notes not only
+      that they are connected, but the details of the connection. It makes
+      connecting links explicit in the form of relationships. The stimulus to
+      thinking is found when we wish to determine the significance of some act,
+      performed or to be performed. Then we anticipate consequences. This
+      implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us,
+      incomplete and hence indeterminate. The projection of consequences means a
+      proposed or tentative solution. To perfect this hypothesis, existing
+      conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of the
+      hypothesis developed&mdash;an operation called reasoning. Then the
+      suggested solution&mdash;the idea or theory&mdash;has to be tested by
+      acting upon it. If it brings about certain consequences, certain
+      determinate changes, in the world, it is accepted as valid. Otherwise it
+      is modified, and another trial made. Thinking includes all of these steps,&mdash;the
+      sense of a problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and
+      rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active
+      experimental testing. While all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately
+      the value of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking. For we live
+      not in a settled and finished world, but in one which is going on, and
+      where our main task is prospective, and where retrospect&mdash;and all
+      knowledge as distinct from thought is retrospect&mdash;is of value in the
+      solidity, security, and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 It is most important for the practice of science that men in many cases
+      can calculate the degree of probability and the amount of probable error
+      involved, but that does alter the features of the situation as described.
+      It refines them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Essentials of Method. No one doubts, theoretically, the importance
+      of fostering in school good habits of thinking. But apart from the fact
+      that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as in theory, there is
+      not adequate theoretical recognition that all which the school can or need
+      do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned (that is, leaving out
+      certain specialized muscular abilities), is to develop their ability to
+      think. The parceling out of instruction among various ends such as
+      acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling, writing, drawing, reciting);
+      acquiring information (in history and geography), and training of thinking
+      is a measure of the ineffective way in which we accomplish all three.
+      Thinking which is not connected with increase of efficiency in action, and
+      with learning more about ourselves and the world in which we live, has
+      something the matter with it just as thought (See ante, p. 147). And skill
+      obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of the
+      purposes for which it is to be used. It consequently leaves a man at the
+      mercy of his routine habits and of the authoritative control of others,
+      who know what they are about and who are not especially scrupulous as to
+      their means of achievement. And information severed from thoughtful action
+      is dead, a mind-crushing load. Since it simulates knowledge and thereby
+      develops the poison of conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to further
+      growth in the grace of intelligence. The sole direct path to enduring
+      improvement in the methods of instruction and learning consists in
+      centering upon the conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking.
+      Thinking is the method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs
+      and rewards mind. We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of
+      thinking, but the important thing to bear in mind about method is that
+      thinking is method, the method of intelligent experience in the course
+      which it takes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. The initial stage of that developing experience which is called
+      thinking is experience. This remark may sound like a silly truism. It
+      ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not. On the contrary, thinking is
+      often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice as
+      something cut off from experience, and capable of being cultivated in
+      isolation. In fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often urged
+      as the sufficient ground for attention to thinking. Experience is then
+      thought to be confined to the senses and appetites; to a mere material
+      world, while thinking proceeds from a higher faculty (of reason), and is
+      occupied with spiritual or at least literary things. So, oftentimes, a
+      sharp distinction is made between pure mathematics as a peculiarly fit
+      subject matter of thought (since it has nothing to do with physical
+      existences) and applied mathematics, which has utilitarian but not mental
+      value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Speaking generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of instruction lies
+      in supposing that experience on the part of pupils may be assumed. What is
+      here insisted upon is the necessity of an actual empirical situation as
+      the initiating phase of thought. Experience is here taken as previously
+      defined: trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly do
+      something to one in return. The fallacy consists in supposing that we can
+      begin with ready-made subject matter of arithmetic, or geography, or
+      whatever, irrespective of some direct personal experience of a situation.
+      Even the kindergarten and Montessori techniques are so anxious to get at
+      intellectual distinctions, without "waste of time," that they tend to
+      ignore&mdash;or reduce&mdash;the immediate crude handling of the familiar
+      material of experience, and to introduce pupils at once to material which
+      expresses the intellectual distinctions which adults have made. But the
+      first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever age of maturity,
+      must inevitably be of the trial and error sort. An individual must
+      actually try, in play or work, to do something with material in carrying
+      out his own impulsive activity, and then note the interaction of his
+      energy and that of the material employed. This is what happens when a
+      child at first begins to build with blocks, and it is equally what happens
+      when a scientific man in his laboratory begins to experiment with
+      unfamiliar objects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be
+      aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible. To
+      realize what an experience, or empirical situation, means, we have to call
+      to mind the sort of situation that presents itself outside of school; the
+      sort of occupations that interest and engage activity in ordinary life.
+      And careful inspection of methods which are permanently successful in
+      formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to read, or studying
+      geography, or learning physics or a foreign language, will reveal that
+      they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go back to the
+      type of the situation which causes reflection out of school in ordinary
+      life. They give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and
+      the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional
+      noting of connections; learning naturally results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse thinking means
+      of course that it should suggest something to do which is not either
+      routine or capricious&mdash;something, in other words, presenting what is
+      new (and hence uncertain or problematic) and yet sufficiently connected
+      with existing habits to call out an effective response. An effective
+      response means one which accomplishes a perceptible result, in distinction
+      from a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences cannot be
+      mentally connected with what is done. The most significant question which
+      can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or experience proposed to
+      induce learning is what quality of problem it involves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods measured well
+      up to the standard here set. The giving of problems, the putting of
+      questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is a
+      large part of school work. But it is indispensable to discriminate between
+      genuine and simulated or mock problems. The following questions may aid in
+      making such discrimination. (a) Is there anything but a problem? Does the
+      question naturally suggest itself within some situation or personal
+      experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem only for the purposes of
+      conveying instruction in some school topic? Is it the sort of trying that
+      would arouse observation and engage experimentation outside of school? (b)
+      Is it the pupil's own problem, or is it the teacher's or textbook's
+      problem, made a problem for the pupil only because he cannot get the
+      required mark or be promoted or win the teacher's approval, unless he
+      deals with it? Obviously, these two questions overlap. They are two ways
+      of getting at the same point: Is the experience a personal thing of such a
+      nature as inherently to stimulate and direct observation of the
+      connections involved, and to lead to inference and its testing? Or is it
+      imposed from without, and is the pupil's problem simply to meet the
+      external requirement? Such questions may give us pause in deciding upon
+      the extent to which current practices are adapted to develop reflective
+      habits. The physical equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom
+      are hostile to the existence of real situations of experience. What is
+      there similar to the conditions of everyday life which will generate
+      difficulties? Almost everything testifies to the great premium put upon
+      listening, reading, and the reproduction of what is told and read. It is
+      hardly possible to overstate the contrast between such conditions and the
+      situations of active contact with things and persons in the home, on the
+      playground, in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life. Much of it
+      is not even comparable with the questions which may arise in the mind of a
+      boy or girl in conversing with others or in reading books outside of the
+      school. No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions
+      outside of the school (so that they pester grown-up persons if they get
+      any encouragement), and the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity
+      about the subject matter of school lessons. Reflection on this striking
+      contrast will throw light upon the question of how far customary school
+      conditions supply a context of experience in which problems naturally
+      suggest themselves. No amount of improvement in the personal technique of
+      the instructor will wholly remedy this state of things. There must be more
+      actual material, more stuff, more appliances, and more opportunities for
+      doing things, before the gap can be overcome. And where children are
+      engaged in doing things and in discussing what arises in the course of
+      their doing, it is found, even with comparatively indifferent modes of
+      instruction, that children's inquiries are spontaneous and numerous, and
+      the proposals of solution advanced, varied, and ingenious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which
+      generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his; or, rather, they
+      are his only as a pupil, not as a human being. Hence the lamentable waste
+      in carrying over such expertness as is achieved in dealing with them to
+      the affairs of life beyond the schoolroom. A pupil has a problem, but it
+      is the problem of meeting the peculiar requirements set by the teacher.
+      His problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher wants, what will
+      satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and outward deportment.
+      Relationship to subject matter is no longer direct. The occasions and
+      material of thought are not found in the arithmetic or the history or
+      geography itself, but in skillfully adapting that material to the
+      teacher's requirements. The pupil studies, but unconsciously to himself
+      the objects of his study are the conventions and standards of the school
+      system and school authority, not the nominal "studies." The thinking thus
+      evoked is artificially one-sided at the best. At its worst, the problem of
+      the pupil is not how to meet the requirements of school life, but how to
+      seem to meet them&mdash;or, how to come near enough to meeting them to
+      slide along without an undue amount of friction. The type of judgment
+      formed by these devices is not a desirable addition to character. If these
+      statements give too highly colored a picture of usual school methods, the
+      exaggeration may at least serve to illustrate the point: the need of
+      active pursuits, involving the use of material to accomplish purposes, if
+      there are to be situations which normally generate problems occasioning
+      thoughtful inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II. There must be data at command to supply the considerations required in
+      dealing with the specific difficulty which has presented itself. Teachers
+      following a "developing" method sometimes tell children to think things
+      out for themselves as if they could spin them out of their own heads. The
+      material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the
+      relations of things. In other words, to think effectively one must have
+      had, or now have, experiences which will furnish him resources for coping
+      with the difficulty at hand. A difficulty is an indispensable stimulus to
+      thinking, but not all difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they
+      overwhelm and submerge and discourage. The perplexing situation must be
+      sufficiently like situations which have already been dealt with so that
+      pupils will have some control of the meanings of handling it. A large part
+      of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems
+      large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition
+      to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be
+      luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what psychological means
+      the subject matter for reflection is provided. Memory, observation,
+      reading, communication, are all avenues for supplying data. The relative
+      proportion to be obtained from each is a matter of the specific features
+      of the particular problem in hand. It is foolish to insist upon
+      observation of objects presented to the senses if the student is so
+      familiar with the objects that he could just as well recall the facts
+      independently. It is possible to induce undue and crippling dependence
+      upon sense-presentations. No one can carry around with him a museum of all
+      the things whose properties will assist the conduct of thought. A
+      well-trained mind is one that has a maximum of resources behind it, so to
+      speak, and that is accustomed to go over its past experiences to see what
+      they yield. On the other hand, a quality or relation of even a familiar
+      object may previously have been passed over, and be just the fact that is
+      helpful in dealing with the question. In this case direct observation is
+      called for. The same principle applies to the use to be made of
+      observation on one hand and of reading and "telling" on the other. Direct
+      observation is naturally more vivid and vital. But it has its limitations;
+      and in any case it is a necessary part of education that one should
+      acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his immediately
+      personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of others. Excessive
+      reliance upon others for data (whether got from reading or listening) is
+      to be depreciated. Most objectionable of all is the probability that
+      others, the book or the teacher, will supply solutions ready-made, instead
+      of giving material that the student has to adapt and apply to the question
+      in hand for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is usually both
+      too much and too little information supplied by others. The accumulation
+      and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction in recitation
+      and examination is made too much of. "Knowledge," in the sense of
+      information, means the working capital, the indispensable resources, of
+      further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things. Frequently it
+      is treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and
+      display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge
+      is inimical to educative development. It not only lets occasions for
+      thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one could construct a house
+      on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk. Pupils who have stored their
+      "minds" with all kinds of material which they have never put to
+      intellectual uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think. They
+      have no practice in selecting what is appropriate, and no criterion to go
+      by; everything is on the same dead static level. On the other hand, it is
+      quite open to question whether, if information actually functioned in
+      experience through use in application to the student's own purposes, there
+      would not be need of more varied resources in books, pictures, and talks
+      than are usually at command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III. The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already acquired,
+      is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings, suppositions, tentative
+      explanations:&mdash;ideas, in short. Careful observation and recollection
+      determine what is given, what is already there, and hence assured. They
+      cannot furnish what is lacking. They define, clarify, and locate the
+      question; they cannot supply its answer. Projection, invention, ingenuity,
+      devising come in for that purpose. The data arouse suggestions, and only
+      by reference to the specific data can we pass upon the appropriateness of
+      the suggestions. But the suggestions run beyond what is, as yet, actually
+      given in experience. They forecast possible results, things to do, not
+      facts (things already done). Inference is always an invasion of the
+      unknown, a leap from the known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is
+      presented) is creative,&mdash;an incursion into the novel. It involves
+      some inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some
+      context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light in
+      which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton
+      thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought
+      was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of them
+      commonplaces&mdash;sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of
+      numbers. These were not original ideas; they were established facts. His
+      originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances were put
+      by introduction into an unfamiliar context. The same is true of every
+      striking scientific discovery, every great invention, every admirable
+      artistic production. Only silly folk identify creative originality with
+      the extraordinary and fanciful; others recognize that its measure lies in
+      putting everyday things to uses which had not occurred to others. The
+      operation is novel, not the materials out of which it is constructed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is original
+      in a projection of considerations which have not been previously
+      apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be done with
+      blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and
+      five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though everybody else in
+      the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of experience; not
+      another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a new quality. The
+      charm which the spontaneity of little children has for sympathetic
+      observers is due to perception of this intellectual originality. The joy
+      which children themselves experience is the joy of intellectual
+      constructiveness&mdash;of creativeness, if the word may be used without
+      misunderstanding. The educational moral I am chiefly concerned to draw is
+      not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of a grind and
+      strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense of discovery and
+      not in that of storing away what others pour into them; nor that it would
+      be possible to give even children and youth the delights of personal
+      intellectual productiveness&mdash;true and important as are these things.
+      It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from
+      one person to another. When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is
+      told, another given fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the
+      other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like
+      idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning
+      effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by
+      wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and
+      finding his own way out, does he think. When the parent or teacher has
+      provided the conditions which stimulate thinking and has taken a
+      sympathetic attitude toward the activities of the learner by entering into
+      a common or conjoint experience, all has been done which a second party
+      can do to instigate learning. The rest lies with the one directly
+      concerned. If he cannot devise his own solution (not of course in
+      isolation, but in correspondence with the teacher and other pupils) and
+      find his own way out he will not learn, not even if he can recite some
+      correct answer with one hundred per cent accuracy. We can and do supply
+      ready-made "ideas" by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to
+      see that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own
+      activities generate, support, and clinch ideas&mdash;that is, perceived
+      meanings or connections. This does not mean that the teacher is to stand
+      off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject matter
+      and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not
+      quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared
+      activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing
+      it, a teacher&mdash;and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is,
+      on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better. IV.
+      Ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble guesses or dignified
+      theories, are anticipations of possible solutions. They are anticipations
+      of some continuity or connection of an activity and a consequence which
+      has not as yet shown itself. They are therefore tested by the operation of
+      acting upon them. They are to guide and organize further observations,
+      recollections, and experiments. They are intermediate in learning, not
+      final. All educational reformers, as we have had occasion to remark, are
+      given to attacking the passivity of traditional education. They have
+      opposed pouring in from without, and absorbing like a sponge; they have
+      attacked drilling in material as into hard and resisting rock. But it is
+      not easy to secure conditions which will make the getting of an idea
+      identical with having an experience which widens and makes more precise
+      our contact with the environment. Activity, even self-activity, is too
+      easily thought of as something merely mental, cooped up within the head,
+      or finding expression only through the vocal organs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the need of application of ideas gained in study is acknowledged by
+      all the more successful methods of instruction, the exercises in
+      application are sometimes treated as devices for fixing what has already
+      been learned and for getting greater practical skill in its manipulation.
+      These results are genuine and not to be despised. But practice in applying
+      what has been gained in study ought primarily to have an intellectual
+      quality. As we have already seen, thoughts just as thoughts are
+      incomplete. At best they are tentative; they are suggestions, indications.
+      They are standpoints and methods for dealing with situations of
+      experience. Till they are applied in these situations they lack full point
+      and reality. Only application tests them, and only testing confers full
+      meaning and a sense of their reality. Short of use made of them, they tend
+      to segregate into a peculiar world of their own. It may be seriously
+      questioned whether the philosophies (to which reference has been made in
+      section 2 of chapter X) which isolate mind and set it over against the
+      world did not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or
+      theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social
+      conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. Consequently men were
+      thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar artificiality
+      attaches to much of what is learned in schools. It can hardly be said that
+      many students consciously think of the subject matter as unreal; but it
+      assuredly does not possess for them the kind of reality which the subject
+      matter of their vital experiences possesses. They learn not to expect that
+      sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating it as having
+      reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and examinations. That
+      it should remain inert for the experiences of daily life is more or less a
+      matter of course. The bad effects are twofold. Ordinary experience does
+      not receive the enrichment which it should; it is not fertilized by school
+      learning. And the attitudes which spring from getting used to and
+      accepting half-understood and ill-digested material weaken vigor and
+      efficiency of thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the sake of
+      suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual development of
+      thought. Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops, and gardens,
+      where dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used, opportunities
+      exist for reproducing situations of life, and for acquiring and applying
+      information and ideas in the carrying forward of progressive experiences.
+      Ideas are not segregated, they do not form an isolated island. They
+      animate and enrich the ordinary course of life. Information is vitalized
+      by its function; by the place it occupies in direction of action. The
+      phrase "opportunities exist" is used purposely. They may not be taken
+      advantage of; it is possible to employ manual and constructive activities
+      in a physical way, as means of getting just bodily skill; or they may be
+      used almost exclusively for "utilitarian," i.e., pecuniary, ends. But the
+      disposition on the part of upholders of "cultural" education to assume
+      that such activities are merely physical or professional in quality, is
+      itself a product of the philosophies which isolate mind from direction of
+      the course of experience and hence from action upon and with things. When
+      the "mental" is regarded as a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart
+      fate befalls bodily activity and movements. They are regarded as at the
+      best mere external annexes to mind. They may be necessary for the
+      satisfaction of bodily needs and the attainment of external decency and
+      comfort, but they do not occupy a necessary place in mind nor enact an
+      indispensable role in the completion of thought. Hence they have no place
+      in a liberal education&mdash;i.e., one which is concerned with the
+      interests of intelligence. If they come in at all, it is as a concession
+      to the material needs of the masses. That they should be allowed to invade
+      the education of the elite is unspeakable. This conclusion follows
+      irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind, but by the same logic
+      it disappears when we perceive what mind really is&mdash;namely, the
+      purposive and directive factor in the development of experience. While it
+      is desirable that all educational institutions should be equipped so as to
+      give students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and
+      information in active pursuits typifying important social situations, it
+      will, doubtless, be a long time before all of them are thus furnished. But
+      this state of affairs does not afford instructors an excuse for folding
+      their hands and persisting in methods which segregate school knowledge.
+      Every recitation in every subject gives an opportunity for establishing
+      cross connections between the subject matter of the lesson and the wider
+      and more direct experiences of everyday life. Classroom instruction falls
+      into three kinds. The least desirable treats each lesson as an independent
+      whole. It does not put upon the student the responsibility of finding
+      points of contact between it and other lessons in the same subject, or
+      other subjects of study. Wiser teachers see to it that the student is
+      systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons to help understand the
+      present one, and also to use the present to throw additional light upon
+      what has already been acquired. Results are better, but school subject
+      matter is still isolated. Save by accident, out-of-school experience is
+      left in its crude and comparatively irreflective state. It is not subject
+      to the refining and expanding influences of the more accurate and
+      comprehensive material of direct instruction. The latter is not motivated
+      and impregnated with a sense of reality by being intermingled with the
+      realities of everyday life. The best type of teaching bears in mind the
+      desirability of affecting this interconnection. It puts the student in the
+      habitual attitude of finding points of contact and mutual bearings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM12">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      they center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may
+      speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is
+      that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials of
+      method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection. They are
+      first that the pupil have a genuine situation of experience&mdash;that
+      there be a continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake;
+      secondly, that a genuine problem develop within this situation as a
+      stimulus to thought; third, that he possess the information and make the
+      observations needed to deal with it; fourth, that suggested solutions
+      occur to him which he shall be responsible for developing in an orderly
+      way; fifth, that he have opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by
+      application, to make their meaning clear and to discover for himself their
+      validity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Unity of Subject Matter and Method.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The trinity of school topics is subject matter, methods, and
+      administration or government. We have been concerned with the two former
+      in recent chapters. It remains to disentangle them from the context in
+      which they have been referred to, and discuss explicitly their nature. We
+      shall begin with the topic of method, since that lies closest to the
+      considerations of the last chapter. Before taking it up, it may be well,
+      however, to call express attention to one implication of our theory; the
+      connection of subject matter and method with each other. The idea that
+      mind and the world of things and persons are two separate and independent
+      realms&mdash;a theory which philosophically is known as dualism&mdash;carries
+      with it the conclusion that method and subject matter of instruction are
+      separate affairs. Subject matter then becomes a ready-made systematized
+      classification of the facts and principles of the world of nature and man.
+      Method then has for its province a consideration of the ways in which this
+      antecedent subject matter may be best presented to and impressed upon the
+      mind; or, a consideration of the ways in which the mind may be externally
+      brought to bear upon the matter so as to facilitate its acquisition and
+      possession. In theory, at least, one might deduce from a science of the
+      mind as something existing by itself a complete theory of methods of
+      learning, with no knowledge of the subjects to which the methods are to be
+      applied. Since many who are actually most proficient in various branches
+      of subject matter are wholly innocent of these methods, this state of
+      affairs gives opportunity for the retort that pedagogy, as an alleged
+      science of methods of the mind in learning, is futile;&mdash;a mere screen
+      for concealing the necessity a teacher is under of profound and accurate
+      acquaintance with the subject in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But since thinking is a directed movement of subject matter to a
+      completing issue, and since mind is the deliberate and intentional phase
+      of the process, the notion of any such split is radically false. The fact
+      that the material of a science is organized is evidence that it has
+      already been subjected to intelligence; it has been methodized, so to say.
+      Zoology as a systematic branch of knowledge represents crude, scattered
+      facts of our ordinary acquaintance with animals after they have been
+      subjected to careful examination, to deliberate supplementation, and to
+      arrangement to bring out connections which assist observation, memory, and
+      further inquiry. Instead of furnishing a starting point for learning, they
+      mark out a consummation. Method means that arrangement of subject matter
+      which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of
+      the material.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How about method from the standpoint of an individual who is dealing with
+      subject matter? Again, it is not something external. It is simply an
+      effective treatment of material&mdash;efficiency meaning such treatment as
+      utilizes the material (puts it to a purpose) with a minimum of waste of
+      time and energy. We can distinguish a way of acting, and discuss it by
+      itself; but the way exists only as way-of-dealing-with-material. Method is
+      not antithetical to subject matter; it is the effective direction of
+      subject matter to desired results. It is antithetical to random and
+      ill-considered action,&mdash;ill-considered signifying ill-adapted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The statement that method means directed movement of subject matter
+      towards ends is formal. An illustration may give it content. Every artist
+      must have a method, a technique, in doing his work. Piano playing is not
+      hitting the keys at random. It is an orderly way of using them, and the
+      order is not something which exists ready-made in the musician's hands or
+      brain prior to an activity dealing with the piano. Order is found in the
+      disposition of acts which use the piano and the hands and brain so as to
+      achieve the result intended. It is the action of the piano directed to
+      accomplish the purpose of the piano as a musical instrument. It is the
+      same with "pedagogical" method. The only difference is that the piano is a
+      mechanism constructed in advance for a single end; while the material of
+      study is capable of indefinite uses. But even in this regard the
+      illustration may apply if we consider the infinite variety of kinds of
+      music which a piano may produce, and the variations in technique required
+      in the different musical results secured. Method in any case is but an
+      effective way of employing some material for some end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These considerations may be generalized by going back to the conception of
+      experience. Experience as the perception of the connection between
+      something tried and something undergone in consequence is a process. Apart
+      from effort to control the course which the process takes, there is no
+      distinction of subject matter and method. There is simply an activity
+      which includes both what an individual does and what the environment does.
+      A piano player who had perfect mastery of his instrument would have no
+      occasion to distinguish between his contribution and that of the piano. In
+      well-formed, smooth-running functions of any sort,&mdash;skating,
+      conversing, hearing music, enjoying a landscape,&mdash;there is no
+      consciousness of separation of the method of the person and of the subject
+      matter. In whole-hearted play and work there is the same phenomenon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we reflect upon an experience instead of just having it, we
+      inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects toward
+      which we sustain the attitude. When a man is eating, he is eating food. He
+      does not divide his act into eating and food. But if he makes a scientific
+      investigation of the act, such a discrimination is the first thing he
+      would effect. He would examine on the one hand the properties of the
+      nutritive material, and on the other hand the acts of the organism in
+      appropriating and digesting. Such reflection upon experience gives rise to
+      a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing&mdash;the
+      how. When we give names to this distinction we have subject matter and
+      method as our terms. There is the thing seen, heard, loved, hated,
+      imagined, and there is the act of seeing, hearing, loving, hating,
+      imagining, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This distinction is so natural and so important for certain purposes, that
+      we are only too apt to regard it as a separation in existence and not as a
+      distinction in thought. Then we make a division between a self and the
+      environment or world. This separation is the root of the dualism of method
+      and subject matter. That is, we assume that knowing, feeling, willing,
+      etc., are things which belong to the self or mind in its isolation, and
+      which then may be brought to bear upon an independent subject matter. We
+      assume that the things which belong in isolation to the self or mind have
+      their own laws of operation irrespective of the modes of active energy of
+      the object. These laws are supposed to furnish method. It would be no less
+      absurd to suppose that men can eat without eating something, or that the
+      structure and movements of the jaws, throat muscles, the digestive
+      activities of stomach, etc., are not what they are because of the material
+      with which their activity is engaged. Just as the organs of the organism
+      are a continuous part of the very world in which food materials exist, so
+      the capacities of seeing, hearing, loving, imagining are intrinsically
+      connected with the subject matter of the world. They are more truly ways
+      in which the environment enters into experience and functions there than
+      they are independent acts brought to bear upon things. Experience, in
+      short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method
+      and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great
+      diversity (literally countless in number) of energies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the purpose of controlling the course or direction which the moving
+      unity of experience takes we draw a mental distinction between the how and
+      the what. While there is no way of walking or of eating or of learning
+      over and above the actual walking, eating, and studying, there are certain
+      elements in the act which give the key to its more effective control.
+      Special attention to these elements makes them more obvious to perception
+      (letting other factors recede for the time being from conspicuous
+      recognition). Getting an idea of how the experience proceeds indicates to
+      us what factors must be secured or modified in order that it may go on
+      more successfully. This is only a somewhat elaborate way of saying that if
+      a man watches carefully the growth of several plants, some of which do
+      well and some of which amount to little or nothing, he may be able to
+      detect the special conditions upon which the prosperous development of a
+      plant depends. These conditions, stated in an orderly sequence, would
+      constitute the method or way or manner of its growth. There is no
+      difference between the growth of a plant and the prosperous development of
+      an experience. It is not easy, in either case, to seize upon just the
+      factors which make for its best movement. But study of cases of success
+      and failure and minute and extensive comparison, helps to seize upon
+      causes. When we have arranged these causes in order, we have a method of
+      procedure or a technique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A consideration of some evils in education that flow from the isolation of
+      method from subject matter will make the point more definite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (I) In the first place, there is the neglect (of which we have spoken) of
+      concrete situations of experience. There can be no discovery of a method
+      without cases to be studied. The method is derived from observation of
+      what actually happens, with a view to seeing that it happen better next
+      time. But in instruction and discipline, there is rarely sufficient
+      opportunity for children and youth to have the direct normal experiences
+      from which educators might derive an idea of method or order of best
+      development. Experiences are had under conditions of such constraint that
+      they throw little or no light upon the normal course of an experience to
+      its fruition. "Methods" have then to be authoritatively recommended to
+      teachers, instead of being an expression of their own intelligent
+      observations. Under such circumstances, they have a mechanical uniformity,
+      assumed to be alike for all minds. Where flexible personal experiences are
+      promoted by providing an environment which calls out directed occupations
+      in work and play, the methods ascertained will vary with individuals&mdash;for
+      it is certain that each individual has something characteristic in his way
+      of going at things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) In the second place, the notion of methods isolated from subject
+      matter is responsible for the false conceptions of discipline and interest
+      already noted. When the effective way of managing material is treated as
+      something ready-made apart from material, there are just three possible
+      ways in which to establish a relationship lacking by assumption. One is to
+      utilize excitement, shock of pleasure, tickling the palate. Another is to
+      make the consequences of not attending painful; we may use the menace of
+      harm to motivate concern with the alien subject matter. Or a direct appeal
+      may be made to the person to put forth effort without any reason. We may
+      rely upon immediate strain of "will." In practice, however, the latter
+      method is effectual only when instigated by fear of unpleasant results.
+      (iii) In the third place, the act of learning is made a direct and
+      conscious end in itself. Under normal conditions, learning is a product
+      and reward of occupation with subject matter. Children do not set out,
+      consciously, to learn walking or talking. One sets out to give his
+      impulses for communication and for fuller intercourse with others a show.
+      He learns in consequence of his direct activities. The better methods of
+      teaching a child, say, to read, follow the same road. They do not fix his
+      attention upon the fact that he has to learn something and so make his
+      attitude self-conscious and constrained. They engage his activities, and
+      in the process of engagement he learns: the same is true of the more
+      successful methods in dealing with number or whatever. But when the
+      subject matter is not used in carrying forward impulses and habits to
+      significant results, it is just something to be learned. The pupil's
+      attitude to it is just that of having to learn it. Conditions more
+      unfavorable to an alert and concentrated response would be hard to devise.
+      Frontal attacks are even more wasteful in learning than in war. This does
+      not mean, however, that students are to be seduced unaware into
+      preoccupation with lessons. It means that they shall be occupied with them
+      for real reasons or ends, and not just as something to be learned. This is
+      accomplished whenever the pupil perceives the place occupied by the
+      subject matter in the fulfilling of some experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iv) In the fourth place, under the influence of the conception of the
+      separation of mind and material, method tends to be reduced to a cut and
+      dried routine, to following mechanically prescribed steps. No one can tell
+      in how many schoolrooms children reciting in arithmetic or grammar are
+      compelled to go through, under the alleged sanction of method, certain
+      preordained verbal formulae. Instead of being encouraged to attack their
+      topics directly, experimenting with methods that seem promising and
+      learning to discriminate by the consequences that accrue, it is assumed
+      that there is one fixed method to be followed. It is also naively assumed
+      that if the pupils make their statements and explanations in a certain
+      form of "analysis," their mental habits will in time conform. Nothing has
+      brought pedagogical theory into greater disrepute than the belief that it
+      is identified with handing out to teachers recipes and models to be
+      followed in teaching. Flexibility and initiative in dealing with problems
+      are characteristic of any conception to which method is a way of managing
+      material to develop a conclusion. Mechanical rigid woodenness is an
+      inevitable corollary of any theory which separates mind from activity
+      motivated by a purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Method as General and as Individual. In brief, the method of teaching
+      is the method of an art, of action intelligently directed by ends. But the
+      practice of a fine art is far from being a matter of extemporized
+      inspirations. Study of the operations and results of those in the past who
+      have greatly succeeded is essential. There is always a tradition, or
+      schools of art, definite enough to impress beginners, and often to take
+      them captive. Methods of artists in every branch depend upon thorough
+      acquaintance with materials and tools; the painter must know canvas,
+      pigments, brushes, and the technique of manipulation of all his
+      appliances. Attainment of this knowledge requires persistent and
+      concentrated attention to objective materials. The artist studies the
+      progress of his own attempts to see what succeeds and what fails. The
+      assumption that there are no alternatives between following ready-made
+      rules and trusting to native gifts, the inspiration of the moment and
+      undirected "hard work," is contradicted by the procedures of every art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such matters as knowledge of the past, of current technique, of materials,
+      of the ways in which one's own best results are assured, supply the
+      material for what may be called general method. There exists a cumulative
+      body of fairly stable methods for reaching results, a body authorized by
+      past experience and by intellectual analysis, which an individual ignores
+      at his peril. As was pointed out in the discussion of habit-forming (ante,
+      p. 49), there is always a danger that these methods will become mechanized
+      and rigid, mastering an agent instead of being powers at command for his
+      own ends. But it is also true that the innovator who achieves anything
+      enduring, whose work is more than a passing sensation, utilizes classic
+      methods more than may appear to himself or to his critics. He devotes them
+      to new uses, and in so far transforms them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Education also has its general methods. And if the application of this
+      remark is more obvious in the case of the teacher than of the pupil, it is
+      equally real in the case of the latter. Part of his learning, a very
+      important part, consists in becoming master of the methods which the
+      experience of others has shown to be more efficient in like cases of
+      getting knowledge. 1 These general methods are in no way opposed to
+      individual initiative and originality&mdash;to personal ways of doing
+      things. On the contrary they are reinforcements of them. For there is
+      radical difference between even the most general method and a prescribed
+      rule. The latter is a direct guide to action; the former operates
+      indirectly through the enlightenment it supplies as to ends and means. It
+      operates, that is to say, through intelligence, and not through conformity
+      to orders externally imposed. Ability to use even in a masterly way an
+      established technique gives no warranty of artistic work, for the latter
+      also depends upon an animating idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If knowledge of methods used by others does not directly tell us what to
+      do, or furnish ready-made models, how does it operate? What is meant by
+      calling a method intellectual? Take the case of a physician. No mode of
+      behavior more imperiously demands knowledge of established modes of
+      diagnosis and treatment than does his. But after all, cases are like, not
+      identical. To be used intelligently, existing practices, however
+      authorized they may be, have to be adapted to the exigencies of particular
+      cases. Accordingly, recognized procedures indicate to the physician what
+      inquiries to set on foot for himself, what measures to try. They are
+      standpoints from which to carry on investigations; they economize a survey
+      of the features of the particular case by suggesting the things to be
+      especially looked into. The physician's own personal attitudes, his own
+      ways (individual methods) of dealing with the situation in which he is
+      concerned, are not subordinated to the general principles of procedure,
+      but are facilitated and directed by the latter. The instance may serve to
+      point out the value to the teacher of a knowledge of the psychological
+      methods and the empirical devices found useful in the past. When they get
+      in the way of his own common sense, when they come between him and the
+      situation in which he has to act, they are worse than useless. But if he
+      has acquired them as intellectual aids in sizing up the needs, resources,
+      and difficulties of the unique experiences in which he engages, they are
+      of constructive value. In the last resort, just because everything depends
+      upon his own methods of response, much depends upon how far he can
+      utilize, in making his own response, the knowledge which has accrued in
+      the experience of others. As already intimated, every word of this account
+      is directly applicable also to the method of the pupil, the way of
+      learning. To suppose that students, whether in the primary school or in
+      the university, can be supplied with models of method to be followed in
+      acquiring and expounding a subject is to fall into a self-deception that
+      has lamentable consequences. (See ante, p. 169.) One must make his own
+      reaction in any case. Indications of the standardized or general methods
+      used in like cases by others&mdash;particularly by those who are already
+      experts&mdash;are of worth or of harm according as they make his personal
+      reaction more intelligent or as they induce a person to dispense with
+      exercise of his own judgment. If what was said earlier (See p. 159) about
+      originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding more of education
+      than the capacities of average human nature permit, the difficulty is that
+      we lie under the incubus of a superstition. We have set up the notion of
+      mind at large, of intellectual method that is the same for all. Then we
+      regard individuals as differing in the quantity of mind with which they
+      are charged. Ordinary persons are then expected to be ordinary. Only the
+      exceptional are allowed to have originality. The measure of difference
+      between the average student and the genius is a measure of the absence of
+      originality in the former. But this notion of mind in general is a
+      fiction. How one person's abilities compare in quantity with those of
+      another is none of the teacher's business. It is irrelevant to his work.
+      What is required is that every individual shall have opportunities to
+      employ his own powers in activities that have meaning. Mind, individual
+      method, originality (these are convertible terms) signify the quality of
+      purposive or directed action. If we act upon this conviction, we shall
+      secure more originality even by the conventional standard than now
+      develops. Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds
+      mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by
+      deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them. Thus we stifle the
+      distinctive quality of the many, and save in rare instances (like, say,
+      that of Darwin) infect the rare geniuses with an unwholesome quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Traits of Individual Method. The most general features of the
+      method of knowing have been given in our chapter on thinking. They are the
+      features of the reflective situation: Problem, collection and analysis of
+      data, projection and elaboration of suggestions or ideas, experimental
+      application and testing; the resulting conclusion or judgment. The
+      specific elements of an individual's method or way of attack upon a
+      problem are found ultimately in his native tendencies and his acquired
+      habits and interests. The method of one will vary from that of another
+      (and properly vary) as his original instinctive capacities vary, as his
+      past experiences and his preferences vary. Those who have already studied
+      these matters are in possession of information which will help teachers in
+      understanding the responses different pupils make, and help them in
+      guiding these responses to greater efficiency. Child-study, psychology,
+      and a knowledge of social environment supplement the personal acquaintance
+      gained by the teacher. But methods remain the personal concern, approach,
+      and attack of an individual, and no catalogue can ever exhaust their
+      diversity of form and tint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some attitudes may be named, however,-which are central in effective
+      intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter. Among the most important
+      are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or whole-heartedness),
+      and responsibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. It is easier to indicate what is meant by directness through negative
+      terms than in positive ones. Self-consciousness, embarrassment, and
+      constraint are its menacing foes. They indicate that a person is not
+      immediately concerned with subject matter. Something has come between
+      which deflects concern to side issues. A self-conscious person is partly
+      thinking about his problem and partly about what others think of his
+      performances. Diverted energy means loss of power and confusion of ideas.
+      Taking an attitude is by no means identical with being conscious of one's
+      attitude. The former is spontaneous, naive, and simple. It is a sign of
+      whole-souled relationship between a person and what he is dealing with.
+      The latter is not of necessity abnormal. It is sometimes the easiest way
+      of correcting a false method of approach, and of improving the
+      effectiveness of the means one is employing,&mdash;as golf players, piano
+      players, public speakers, etc., have occasionally to give especial
+      attention to their position and movements. But this need is occasional and
+      temporary. When it is effectual a person thinks of himself in terms of
+      what is to be done, as one means among others of the realization of an end&mdash;as
+      in the case of a tennis player practicing to get the "feel" of a stroke.
+      In abnormal cases, one thinks of himself not as part of the agencies of
+      execution, but as a separate object&mdash;as when the player strikes an
+      attitude thinking of the impression it will make upon spectators, or is
+      worried because of the impression he fears his movements give rise to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Confidence is a good name for what is intended by the term directness. It
+      should not be confused, however, with self-confidence which may be a form
+      of self-consciousness&mdash;or of "cheek." Confidence is not a name for
+      what one thinks or feels about his attitude it is not reflex. It denotes
+      the straightforwardness with which one goes at what he has to do. It
+      denotes not conscious trust in the efficacy of one's powers but
+      unconscious faith in the possibilities of the situation. It signifies
+      rising to the needs of the situation. We have already pointed out (See p.
+      169) the objections to making students emphatically aware of the fact that
+      they are studying or learning. Just in the degree in which they are
+      induced by the conditions to be so aware, they are not studying and
+      learning. They are in a divided and complicated attitude. Whatever methods
+      of a teacher call a pupil's attention off from what he has to do and
+      transfer it to his own attitude towards what he is doing impair directness
+      of concern and action. Persisted in, the pupil acquires a permanent
+      tendency to fumble, to gaze about aimlessly, to look for some clew of
+      action beside that which the subject matter supplies. Dependence upon
+      extraneous suggestions and directions, a state of foggy confusion, take
+      the place of that sureness with which children (and grown-up people who
+      have not been sophisticated by "education") confront the situations of
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Open-mindedness. Partiality is, as we have seen, an accompaniment of
+      the existence of interest, since this means sharing, partaking, taking
+      sides in some movement. All the more reason, therefore, for an attitude of
+      mind which actively welcomes suggestions and relevant information from all
+      sides. In the chapter on Aims it was shown that foreseen ends are factors
+      in the development of a changing situation. They are the means by which
+      the direction of action is controlled. They are subordinate to the
+      situation, therefore, not the situation to them. They are not ends in the
+      sense of finalities to which everything must be bent and sacrificed. They
+      are, as foreseen, means of guiding the development of a situation. A
+      target is not the future goal of shooting; it is the centering factor in a
+      present shooting. Openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and
+      every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to
+      be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting
+      this way or that. Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled
+      upon as unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But
+      intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent
+      formation of new purposes and new responses. These are impossible without
+      an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active
+      desire to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes.
+      Retention of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual
+      hospitality. The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices,
+      is that they arrest development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli.
+      Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude;
+      closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external
+      results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in school.
+      The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of operation in
+      dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils&mdash;restricting
+      their vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens to approve.
+      Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however,
+      that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable, correct results.
+      The zeal for "answers" is the explanation of much of the zeal for rigid
+      and mechanical methods. Forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and
+      the same result upon alert and varied intellectual interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign
+      saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent of
+      hospitality. But there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let
+      experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which is an essential of
+      development. Results (external answers or solutions) may be hurried;
+      processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were all
+      instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the
+      production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth
+      something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Single-mindedness. So far as the word is concerned, much that was said
+      under the head of "directness" is applicable. But what the word is here
+      intended to convey is completeness of interest, unity of purpose; the
+      absence of suppressed but effectual ulterior aims for which the professed
+      aim is but a mask. It is equivalent to mental integrity. Absorption,
+      engrossment, full concern with subject matter for its own sake, nurture
+      it. Divided interest and evasion destroy it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intellectual integrity, honesty, and sincerity are at bottom not matters
+      of conscious purpose but of quality of active response. Their acquisition
+      is fostered of course by conscious intent, but self-deception is very
+      easy. Desires are urgent. When the demands and wishes of others forbid
+      their direct expression they are easily driven into subterranean and deep
+      channels. Entire surrender, and wholehearted adoption of the course of
+      action demanded by others are almost impossible. Deliberate revolt or
+      deliberate attempts to deceive others may result. But the more frequent
+      outcome is a confused and divided state of interest in which one is fooled
+      as to one's own real intent. One tries to serve two masters at once.
+      Social instincts, the strong desire to please others and get their
+      approval, social training, the general sense of duty and of authority,
+      apprehension of penalty, all lead to a half-hearted effort to conform, to
+      "pay attention to the lesson," or whatever the requirement is. Amiable
+      individuals want to do what they are expected to do. Consciously the pupil
+      thinks he is doing this. But his own desires are not abolished. Only their
+      evident exhibition is suppressed. Strain of attention to what is hostile
+      to desire is irksome; in spite of one's conscious wish, the underlying
+      desires determine the main course of thought, the deeper emotional
+      responses. The mind wanders from the nominal subject and devotes itself to
+      what is intrinsically more desirable. A systematized divided attention
+      expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result. One has
+      only to recall his own experiences in school or at the present time when
+      outwardly employed in actions which do not engage one's desires and
+      purposes, to realize how prevalent is this attitude of divided attention&mdash;double-mindedness.
+      We are so used to it that we take it for granted that a considerable
+      amount of it is necessary. It may be; if so, it is the more important to
+      face its bad intellectual effects. Obvious is the loss of energy of
+      thought immediately available when one is consciously trying (or trying to
+      seem to try) to attend to one matter, while unconsciously one's
+      imagination is spontaneously going out to more congenial affairs. More
+      subtle and more permanently crippling to efficiency of intellectual
+      activity is a fostering of habitual self-deception, with the confused
+      sense of reality which accompanies it. A double standard of reality, one
+      for our own private and more or less concealed interests, and another for
+      public and acknowledged concerns, hampers, in most of us, integrity and
+      completeness of mental action. Equally serious is the fact that a split is
+      set up between conscious thought and attention and impulsive blind
+      affection and desire. Reflective dealings with the material of instruction
+      is constrained and half-hearted; attention wanders. The topics to which it
+      wanders are unavowed and hence intellectually illicit; transactions with
+      them are furtive. The discipline that comes from regulating response by
+      deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails; worse than that, the deepest
+      concern and most congenial enterprises of the imagination (since they
+      center about the things dearest to desire) are casual, concealed. They
+      enter into action in ways which are unacknowledged. Not subject to
+      rectification by consideration of consequences, they are demoralizing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      School conditions favorable to this division of mind between avowed,
+      public, and socially responsible undertakings, and private, ill-regulated,
+      and suppressed indulgences of thought are not hard to find. What is
+      sometimes called "stern discipline," i.e., external coercive pressure, has
+      this tendency. Motivation through rewards extraneous to the thing to be
+      done has a like effect. Everything that makes schooling merely preparatory
+      (See ante, p. 55) works in this direction. Ends being beyond the pupil's
+      present grasp, other agencies have to be found to procure immediate
+      attention to assigned tasks. Some responses are secured, but desires and
+      affections not enlisted must find other outlets. Not less serious is
+      exaggerated emphasis upon drill exercises designed to produce skill in
+      action, independent of any engagement of thought&mdash;exercises have no
+      purpose but the production of automatic skill. Nature abhors a mental
+      vacuum. What do teachers imagine is happening to thought and emotion when
+      the latter get no outlet in the things of immediate activity? Were they
+      merely kept in temporary abeyance, or even only calloused, it would not be
+      a matter of so much moment. But they are not abolished; they are not
+      suspended; they are not suppressed&mdash;save with reference to the task
+      in question. They follow their own chaotic and undisciplined course. What
+      is native, spontaneous, and vital in mental reaction goes unused and
+      untested, and the habits formed are such that these qualities become less
+      and less available for public and avowed ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. Responsibility. By responsibility as an element in intellectual
+      attitude is meant the disposition to consider in advance the probable
+      consequences of any projected step and deliberately to accept them: to
+      accept them in the sense of taking them into account, acknowledging them
+      in action, not yielding a mere verbal assent. Ideas, as we have seen, are
+      intrinsically standpoints and methods for bringing about a solution of a
+      perplexing situation; forecasts calculated to influence responses. It is
+      only too easy to think that one accepts a statement or believes a
+      suggested truth when one has not considered its implications; when one has
+      made but a cursory and superficial survey of what further things one is
+      committed to by acceptance. Observation and recognition, belief and
+      assent, then become names for lazy acquiescence in what is externally
+      presented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be much better to have fewer facts and truths in instruction&mdash;that
+      is, fewer things supposedly accepted,&mdash;if a smaller number of
+      situations could be intellectually worked out to the point where
+      conviction meant something real&mdash;some identification of the self with
+      the type of conduct demanded by facts and foresight of results. The most
+      permanent bad results of undue complication of school subjects and
+      congestion of school studies and lessons are not the worry, nervous
+      strain, and superficial acquaintance that follow (serious as these are),
+      but the failure to make clear what is involved in really knowing and
+      believing a thing. Intellectual responsibility means severe standards in
+      this regard. These standards can be built up only through practice in
+      following up and acting upon the meaning of what is acquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intellectual thoroughness is thus another name for the attitude we are
+      considering. There is a kind of thoroughness which is almost purely
+      physical: the kind that signifies mechanical and exhausting drill upon all
+      the details of a subject. Intellectual thoroughness is seeing a thing
+      through. It depends upon a unity of purpose to which details are
+      subordinated, not upon presenting a multitude of disconnected details. It
+      is manifested in the firmness with which the full meaning of the purpose
+      is developed, not in attention, however "conscientious" it may be, to the
+      steps of action externally imposed and directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM13">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Method is a statement of the way the subject matter of an
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      experience develops most effectively and fruitfully. It is derived,
+      accordingly, from observation of the course of experiences where there is
+      no conscious distinction of personal attitude and manner from material
+      dealt with. The assumption that method is something separate is connected
+      with the notion of the isolation of mind and self from the world of
+      things. It makes instruction and learning formal, mechanical, constrained.
+      While methods are individualized, certain features of the normal course of
+      an experience to its fruition may be discriminated, because of the fund of
+      wisdom derived from prior experiences and because of general similarities
+      in the materials dealt with from time to time. Expressed in terms of the
+      attitude of the individual the traits of good method are
+      straightforwardness, flexible intellectual interest or open-minded will to
+      learn, integrity of purpose, and acceptance of responsibility for the
+      consequences of one's activity including thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 This point is developed below in a discussion of what are termed
+      psychological and logical methods respectively. See p. 219.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Subject Matter of Educator and of Learner. So far as the nature of
+      subject matter in principle is concerned, there is nothing to add to what
+      has been said (See ante, p. 134). It consists of the facts observed,
+      recalled, read, and talked about, and the ideas suggested, in course of a
+      development of a situation having a purpose. This statement needs to be
+      rendered more specific by connecting it with the materials of school
+      instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. What is the
+      significance of our definition in application to reading, writing,
+      mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing, physics, chemistry,
+      modern and foreign languages, and so on? Let us recur to two of the points
+      made earlier in our discussion. The educator's part in the enterprise of
+      education is to furnish the environment which stimulates responses and
+      directs the learner's course. In last analysis, all that the educator can
+      do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely as is possible result
+      in the formation of desirable intellectual and emotional dispositions.
+      Obviously studies or the subject matter of the curriculum have intimately
+      to do with this business of supplying an environment. The other point is
+      the necessity of a social environment to give meaning to habits formed. In
+      what we have termed informal education, subject matter is carried directly
+      in the matrix of social intercourse. It is what the persons with whom an
+      individual associates do and say. This fact gives a clew to the
+      understanding of the subject matter of formal or deliberate instruction. A
+      connecting link is found in the stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies
+      which accompany the doings and rites of a primitive social group. They
+      represent the stock of meanings which have been precipitated out of
+      previous experience, which are so prized by the group as to be identified
+      with their conception of their own collective life. Not being obviously a
+      part of the skill exhibited in the daily occupations of eating, hunting,
+      making war and peace, constructing rugs, pottery, and baskets, etc., they
+      are consciously impressed upon the young; often, as in the initiation
+      ceremonies, with intense emotional fervor. Even more pains are consciously
+      taken to perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal formulae of the
+      group than to transmit the directly useful customs of the group just
+      because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in the ordinary
+      processes of association.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the social group grows more complex, involving a greater number of
+      acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or in the belief of
+      the group, upon standard ideas deposited from past experience, the content
+      of social life gets more definitely formulated for purposes of
+      instruction. As we have previously noted, probably the chief motive for
+      consciously dwelling upon the group life, extracting the meanings which
+      are regarded as most important and systematizing them in a coherent
+      arrangement, is just the need of instructing the young so as to perpetuate
+      group life. Once started on this road of selection, formulation, and
+      organization, no definite limit exists. The invention of writing and of
+      printing gives the operation an immense impetus. Finally, the bonds which
+      connect the subject matter of school study with the habits and ideals of
+      the social group are disguised and covered up. The ties are so loosened
+      that it often appears as if there were none; as if subject matter existed
+      simply as knowledge on its own independent behoof, and as if study were
+      the mere act of mastering it for its own sake, irrespective of any social
+      values. Since it is highly important for practical reasons to counter-act
+      this tendency (See ante, p. 8) the chief purposes of our theoretical
+      discussion are to make clear the connection which is so readily lost from
+      sight, and to show in some detail the social content and function of the
+      chief constituents of the course of study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The points need to be considered from the standpoint of instructor and of
+      student. To the former, the significance of a knowledge of subject matter,
+      going far beyond the present knowledge of pupils, is to supply definite
+      standards and to reveal to him the possibilities of the crude activities
+      of the immature. (i) The material of school studies translates into
+      concrete and detailed terms the meanings of current social life which it
+      is desirable to transmit. It puts clearly before the instructor the
+      essential ingredients of the culture to be perpetuated, in such an
+      organized form as to protect him from the haphazard efforts he would be
+      likely to indulge in if the meanings had not been standardized. (ii) A
+      knowledge of the ideas which have been achieved in the past as the outcome
+      of activity places the educator in a position to perceive the meaning of
+      the seeming impulsive and aimless reactions of the young, and to provide
+      the stimuli needed to direct them so that they will amount to something.
+      The more the educator knows of music the more he can perceive the
+      possibilities of the inchoate musical impulses of a child. Organized
+      subject matter represents the ripe fruitage of experiences like theirs,
+      experiences involving the same world, and powers and needs similar to
+      theirs. It does not represent perfection or infallible wisdom; but it is
+      the best at command to further new experiences which may, in some respects
+      at least, surpass the achievements embodied in existing knowledge and
+      works of art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various studies
+      represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness from the
+      experience of the young is not, however, seeming; it is real. The subject
+      matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical with the
+      formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the
+      adult; the material as found in books and in works of art, etc. The latter
+      represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing state. It
+      enters directly into the activities of the expert and the educator, not
+      into that of the beginner, the learner. Failure to bear in mind the
+      difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of teacher
+      and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the use of
+      texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The need for a knowledge of the constitution and functions, in the
+      concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's attitude to
+      subject matter is so different from that of the pupil. The teacher
+      presents in actuality what the pupil represents only in posse. That is,
+      the teacher already knows the things which the student is only learning.
+      Hence the problem of the two is radically unlike. When engaged in the
+      direct act of teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter at his
+      fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and response of
+      the pupil. To understand the latter in its interplay with subject matter
+      is his task, while the pupil's mind, naturally, should be not on itself
+      but on the topic in hand. Or to state the same point in a somewhat
+      different manner: the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter
+      in itself but in its interaction with the pupils' present needs and
+      capacities. Hence simple scholarship is not enough. In fact, there are
+      certain features of scholarship or mastered subject matter&mdash;taken by
+      itself&mdash;which get in the way of effective teaching unless the
+      instructor's habitual attitude is one of concern with its interplay in the
+      pupil's own experience. In the first place, his knowledge extends
+      indefinitely beyond the range of the pupil's acquaintance. It involves
+      principles which are beyond the immature pupil's understanding and
+      interest. In and of itself, it may no more represent the living world of
+      the pupil's experience than the astronomer's knowledge of Mars represents
+      a baby's acquaintance with the room in which he stays. In the second
+      place, the method of organization of the material of achieved scholarship
+      differs from that of the beginner. It is not true that the experience of
+      the young is unorganized&mdash;that it consists of isolated scraps. But it
+      is organized in connection with direct practical centers of interest. The
+      child's home is, for example, the organizing center of his geographical
+      knowledge. His own movements about the locality, his journeys abroad, the
+      tales of his friends, give the ties which hold his items of information
+      together. But the geography of the geographer, of the one who has already
+      developed the implications of these smaller experiences, is organized on
+      the basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to one another&mdash;not
+      the relations which they bear to his house, bodily movements, and friends.
+      To the one who is learned, subject matter is extensive, accurately
+      defined, and logically interrelated. To the one who is learning, it is
+      fluid, partial, and connected through his personal occupations. 1 The
+      problem of teaching is to keep the experience of the student moving in the
+      direction of what the expert already knows. Hence the need that the
+      teacher know both subject matter and the characteristic needs and
+      capacities of the student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Development of Subject Matter in the Learner. It is possible,
+      without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three fairly typical
+      stages in the growth of subject matter in the experience of the learner.
+      In its first estate, knowledge exists as the content of intelligent
+      ability&mdash;power to do. This kind of subject matter, or known material,
+      is expressed in familiarity or acquaintance with things. Then this
+      material gradually is surcharged and deepened through communicated
+      knowledge or information. Finally, it is enlarged and worked over into
+      rationally or logically organized material&mdash;that of the one who,
+      relatively speaking, is expert in the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains most
+      deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read,
+      write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine, calculate, drive a horse,
+      sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely. The popular tendency to
+      regard instinctive acts which are adapted to an end as a sort of
+      miraculous knowledge, while unjustifiable, is evidence of the strong
+      tendency to identify intelligent control of the means of action with
+      knowledge. When education, under the influence of a scholastic conception
+      of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically formulated facts
+      and truths, fails to recognize that primary or initial subject matter
+      always exists as matter of an active doing, involving the use of the body
+      and the handling of material, the subject matter of instruction is
+      isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and so becomes just a
+      something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand. Recognition of the
+      natural course of development, on the contrary, always sets out with
+      situations which involve learning by doing. Arts and occupations form the
+      initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding as they do to knowing how
+      to go about the accomplishment of ends. Popular terms denoting knowledge
+      have always retained the connection with ability in action lost by
+      academic philosophies. Ken and can are allied words. Attention means
+      caring for a thing, in the sense of both affection and of looking out for
+      its welfare. Mind means carrying out instructions in action&mdash;as a
+      child minds his mother&mdash;and taking care of something&mdash;as a nurse
+      minds the baby. To be thoughtful, considerate, means to heed the claims of
+      others. Apprehension means dread of undesirable consequences, as well as
+      intellectual grasp. To have good sense or judgment is to know the conduct
+      a situation calls for; discernment is not making distinctions for the sake
+      of making them, an exercise reprobated as hair splitting, but is insight
+      into an affair with reference to acting. Wisdom has never lost its
+      association with the proper direction of life. Only in education, never in
+      the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory
+      experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof
+      from doing. Having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in
+      acquaintance or familiarity. The things we are best acquainted with are
+      the things we put to frequent use&mdash;such things as chairs, tables,
+      pen, paper, clothes, food, knives and forks on the commonplace level,
+      differentiating into more special objects according to a person's
+      occupations in life. Knowledge of things in that intimate and emotional
+      sense suggested by the word acquaintance is a precipitate from our
+      employing them with a purpose. We have acted with or upon the thing so
+      frequently that we can anticipate how it will act and react&mdash;such is
+      the meaning of familiar acquaintance. We are ready for a familiar thing;
+      it does not catch us napping, or play unexpected tricks with us. This
+      attitude carries with it a sense of congeniality or friendliness, of ease
+      and illumination; while the things with which we are not accustomed to
+      deal are strange, foreign, cold, remote, "abstract."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II. But it is likely that elaborate statements regarding this primary
+      stage of knowledge will darken understanding. It includes practically all
+      of our knowledge which is not the result of deliberate technical study.
+      Modes of purposeful doing include dealings with persons as well as things.
+      Impulses of communication and habits of intercourse have to be adapted to
+      maintaining successful connections with others; a large fund of social
+      knowledge accrues. As a part of this intercommunication one learns much
+      from others. They tell of their experiences and of the experiences which,
+      in turn, have been told them. In so far as one is interested or concerned
+      in these communications, their matter becomes a part of one's own
+      experience. Active connections with others are such an intimate and vital
+      part of our own concerns that it is impossible to draw sharp lines, such
+      as would enable us to say, "Here my experience ends; there yours begins."
+      In so far as we are partners in common undertakings, the things which
+      others communicate to us as the consequences of their particular share in
+      the enterprise blend at once into the experience resulting from our own
+      special doings. The ear is as much an organ of experience as the eye or
+      hand; the eye is available for reading reports of what happens beyond its
+      horizon. Things remote in space and time affect the issue of our actions
+      quite as much as things which we can smell and handle. They really concern
+      us, and, consequently, any account of them which assists us in dealing
+      with things at hand falls within personal experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Information is the name usually given to this kind of subject matter. The
+      place of communication in personal doing supplies us with a criterion for
+      estimating the value of informational material in school. Does it grow
+      naturally out of some question with which the student is concerned? Does
+      it fit into his more direct acquaintance so as to increase its efficacy
+      and deepen its meaning? If it meets these two requirements, it is
+      educative. The amount heard or read is of no importance&mdash;the more the
+      better, provided the student has a need for it and can apply it in some
+      situation of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is not so easy to fulfill these requirements in actual practice as
+      it is to lay them down in theory. The extension in modern times of the
+      area of intercommunication; the invention of appliances for securing
+      acquaintance with remote parts of the heavens and bygone events of
+      history; the cheapening of devices, like printing, for recording and
+      distributing information&mdash;genuine and alleged&mdash;have created an
+      immense bulk of communicated subject matter. It is much easier to swamp a
+      pupil with this than to work it into his direct experiences. All too
+      frequently it forms another strange world which just overlies the world of
+      personal acquaintance. The sole problem of the student is to learn, for
+      school purposes, for purposes of recitations and promotions, the
+      constituent parts of this strange world. Probably the most conspicuous
+      connotation of the word knowledge for most persons to-day is just the body
+      of facts and truths ascertained by others; the material found in the rows
+      and rows of atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books of travel,
+      scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously influenced
+      men's notions of the nature of knowledge itself. The statements, the
+      propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active concern with
+      problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves knowledge. The record
+      of knowledge, independent of its place as an outcome of inquiry and a
+      resource in further inquiry, is taken to be knowledge. The mind of man is
+      taken captive by the spoils of its prior victories; the spoils, not the
+      weapons and the acts of waging the battle against the unknown, are used to
+      fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact, and truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If this identification of knowledge with propositions stating information
+      has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers, it is not surprising
+      that the same ideal has almost dominated instruction. The "course of
+      study" consists largely of information distributed into various branches
+      of study, each study being subdivided into lessons presenting in serial
+      cutoff portions of the total store. In the seventeenth century, the store
+      was still small enough so that men set up the ideal of a complete
+      encyclopedic mastery of it. It is now so bulky that the impossibility of
+      any one man's coming into possession of it all is obvious. But the
+      educational ideal has not been much affected. Acquisition of a modicum of
+      information in each branch of learning, or at least in a selected group,
+      remains the principle by which the curriculum, from elementary school
+      through college, is formed; the easier portions being assigned to the
+      earlier years, the more difficult to the later. The complaints of
+      educators that learning does not enter into character and affect conduct;
+      the protests against memoriter work, against cramming, against gradgrind
+      preoccupation with "facts," against devotion to wire-drawn distinctions
+      and ill-understood rules and principles, all follow from this state of
+      affairs. Knowledge which is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge,
+      tends to become merely verbal. It is no objection to information that it
+      is clothed in words; communication necessarily takes place through words.
+      But in the degree in which what is communicated cannot be organized into
+      the existing experience of the learner, it becomes mere words: that is,
+      pure sense-stimuli, lacking in meaning. Then it operates to call out
+      mechanical reactions, ability to use the vocal organs to repeat
+      statements, or the hand to write or to do "sums."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the subject
+      matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem, and for giving
+      added significance to the search for solution and to the solution itself.
+      Informational knowledge is the material which can be fallen back upon as
+      given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation. It is a kind
+      of bridge for mind in its passage from doubt to discovery. It has the
+      office of an intellectual middleman. It condenses and records in available
+      form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as an agency of
+      enhancing the meaning of new experiences. When one is told that Brutus
+      assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the year is three hundred
+      sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the ratio of the diameter of the
+      circle to its circumference is 3.1415. . . one receives what is indeed
+      knowledge for others, but for him it is a stimulus to knowing. His
+      acquisition of knowledge depends upon his response to what is
+      communicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Science or Rationalized Knowledge. Science is a name for knowledge in
+      its most characteristic form. It represents in its degree, the perfected
+      outcome of learning,&mdash;its consummation. What is known, in a given
+      case, is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think
+      with rather than that which we think about. In its honorable sense,
+      knowledge is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere
+      tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and not
+      dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is
+      difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our
+      certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is natural. The
+      undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual hesitation; it
+      is prone to assertion. It likes things undisturbed, settled, and treats
+      them as such without due warrant. Familiarity, common repute, and
+      congeniality to desire are readily made measuring rods of truth. Ignorance
+      gives way to opinionated and current error,&mdash;a greater foe to
+      learning than ignorance itself. A Socrates is thus led to declare that
+      consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective love of wisdom,
+      and a Descartes to say that science is born of doubting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data, and
+      ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in themselves
+      they are tentative and provisional. Our predilection for premature
+      acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs
+      that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are
+      satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. If
+      these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose
+      that our assumptions have been confirmed. Even in the case of failure, we
+      are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness of
+      our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of
+      circumstance. We charge the evil consequence not to the error of our
+      schemes and our incomplete inquiry into conditions (thereby getting
+      material for revising the former and stimulus for extending the latter)
+      but to untoward fate. We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in
+      clinging to our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science represents the safeguard of the race against these natural
+      propensities and the evils which flow from them. It consists of the
+      special appliances and methods which the race has slowly worked out in
+      order to conduct reflection under conditions whereby its procedures and
+      results are tested. It is artificial (an acquired art), not spontaneous;
+      learned, not native. To this fact is due the unique, the invaluable place
+      of science in education, and also the dangers which threaten its right
+      use. Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in
+      possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for
+      effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts
+      inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails to
+      understand the full meaning of knowledge. For he does not become
+      acquainted with the traits that mark off opinion and assent from
+      authorized conviction. On the other hand, the fact that science marks the
+      perfecting of knowing in highly specialized conditions of technique
+      renders its results, taken by themselves, remote from ordinary experience&mdash;a
+      quality of aloofness that is popularly designated by the term abstract.
+      When this isolation appears in instruction, scientific information is even
+      more exposed to the dangers attendant upon presenting ready-made subject
+      matter than are other forms of information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science has been defined in terms of method of inquiry and testing. At
+      first sight, this definition may seem opposed to the current conception
+      that science is organized or systematized knowledge. The opposition,
+      however, is only seeming, and disappears when the ordinary definition is
+      completed. Not organization but the kind of organization effected by
+      adequate methods of tested discovery marks off science. The knowledge of a
+      farmer is systematized in the degree in which he is competent. It is
+      organized on the basis of relation of means to ends&mdash;practically
+      organized. Its organization as knowledge (that is, in the eulogistic sense
+      of adequately tested and confirmed) is incidental to its organization with
+      reference to securing crops, live-stock, etc. But scientific subject
+      matter is organized with specific reference to the successful conduct of
+      the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a specialized undertaking.
+      Reference to the kind of assurance attending science will shed light upon
+      this statement. It is rational assurance,&mdash;logical warranty. The
+      ideal of scientific organization is, therefore, that every conception and
+      statement shall be of such a kind as to follow from others and to lead to
+      others. Conceptions and propositions mutually imply and support one
+      another. This double relation of "leading to and confirming" is what is
+      meant by the terms logical and rational. The everyday conception of water
+      is more available for ordinary uses of drinking, washing, irrigation,
+      etc., than the chemist's notion of it. The latter's description of it as
+      H20 is superior from the standpoint of place and use in inquiry. It states
+      the nature of water in a way which connects it with knowledge of other
+      things, indicating to one who understands it how the knowledge is arrived
+      at and its bearings upon other portions of knowledge of the structure of
+      things. Strictly speaking, it does not indicate the objective relations of
+      water any more than does a statement that water is transparent, fluid,
+      without taste or odor, satisfying to thirst, etc. It is just as true that
+      water has these relations as that it is constituted by two molecules of
+      hydrogen in combination with one of oxygen. But for the particular purpose
+      of conducting discovery with a view to ascertainment of fact, the latter
+      relations are fundamental. The more one emphasizes organization as a mark
+      of science, then, the more he is committed to a recognition of the primacy
+      of method in the definition of science. For method defines the kind of
+      organization in virtue of which science is science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. Subject Matter as Social. Our next chapters will take up various school
+      activities and studies and discuss them as successive stages in that
+      evolution of knowledge which we have just been discussing. It remains to
+      say a few words upon subject matter as social, since our prior remarks
+      have been mainly concerned with its intellectual aspect. A difference in
+      breadth and depth exists even in vital knowledge; even in the data and
+      ideas which are relevant to real problems and which are motivated by
+      purposes. For there is a difference in the social scope of purposes and
+      the social importance of problems. With the wide range of possible
+      material to select from, it is important that education (especially in all
+      its phases short of the most specialized) should use a criterion of social
+      worth. All information and systematized scientific subject matter have
+      been worked out under the conditions of social life and have been
+      transmitted by social means. But this does not prove that all is of equal
+      value for the purposes of forming the disposition and supplying the
+      equipment of members of present society. The scheme of a curriculum must
+      take account of the adaptation of studies to the needs of the existing
+      community life; it must select with the intention of improving the life we
+      live in common so that the future shall be better than the past. Moreover,
+      the curriculum must be planned with reference to placing essentials first,
+      and refinements second. The things which are socially most fundamental,
+      that is, which have to do with the experiences in which the widest groups
+      share, are the essentials. The things which represent the needs of
+      specialized groups and technical pursuits are secondary. There is truth in
+      the saying that education must first be human and only after that
+      professional. But those who utter the saying frequently have in mind in
+      the term human only a highly specialized class: the class of learned men
+      who preserve the classic traditions of the past. They forget that material
+      is humanized in the degree in which it connects with the common interests
+      of men as men. Democratic society is peculiarly dependent for its
+      maintenance upon the use in forming a course of study of criteria which
+      are broadly human. Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in
+      selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly
+      conceived for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the
+      traditions of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the
+      "essentials" of elementary education are the three R's mechanically
+      treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization
+      of democratic ideals. Unconsciously it assumes that these ideals are
+      unrealizable; it assumes that in the future, as in the past, getting a
+      livelihood, "making a living," must signify for most men and women doing
+      things which are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those
+      who do them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged
+      in them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of
+      pecuniary reward. For preparation of large numbers for a life of this
+      sort, and only for this purpose, are mechanical efficiency in reading,
+      writing, spelling and figuring, together with attainment of a certain
+      amount of muscular dexterity, "essentials." Such conditions also infect
+      the education called liberal, with illiberality. They imply a somewhat
+      parasitic cultivation bought at the expense of not having the
+      enlightenment and discipline which come from concern with the deepest
+      problems of common humanity. A curriculum which acknowledges the social
+      responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are
+      relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and
+      information are calculated to develop social insight and interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM14">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The subject matter of education consists primarily of the
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      meanings which supply content to existing social life. The continuity of
+      social life means that many of these meanings are contributed to present
+      activity by past collective experience. As social life grows more complex,
+      these factors increase in number and import. There is need of special
+      selection, formulation, and organization in order that they may be
+      adequately transmitted to the new generation. But this very process tends
+      to set up subject matter as something of value just by itself, apart from
+      its function in promoting the realization of the meanings implied in the
+      present experience of the immature. Especially is the educator exposed to
+      the temptation to conceive his task in terms of the pupil's ability to
+      appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set statements,
+      irrespective of its organization into his activities as a developing
+      social member. The positive principle is maintained when the young begin
+      with active occupations having a social origin and use, and proceed to a
+      scientific insight in the materials and laws involved, through
+      assimilating into their more direct experience the ideas and facts
+      communicated by others who have had a larger experience. 1 Since the
+      learned man should also still be a learner, it will be understood that
+      these contrasts are relative, not absolute. But in the earlier stages of
+      learning at least they are practically all-important.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Place of Active Occupations in Education. In consequence partly of
+      the efforts of educational reformers, partly of increased interest in
+      child-psychology, and partly of the direct experience of the schoolroom,
+      the course of study has in the past generation undergone considerable
+      modification. The desirability of starting from and with the experience
+      and capacities of learners, a lesson enforced from all three quarters, has
+      led to the introduction of forms of activity, in play and work, similar to
+      those in which children and youth engage outside of school. Modern
+      psychology has substituted for the general, ready-made faculties of older
+      theory a complex group of instinctive and impulsive tendencies. Experience
+      has shown that when children have a chance at physical activities which
+      bring their natural impulses into play, going to school is a joy,
+      management is less of a burden, and learning is easier. Sometimes,
+      perhaps, plays, games, and constructive occupations are resorted to only
+      for these reasons, with emphasis upon relief from the tedium and strain of
+      "regular" school work. There is no reason, however, for using them merely
+      as agreeable diversions. Study of mental life has made evident the
+      fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and
+      materials, to construct, to give expression to joyous emotion, etc. When
+      exercises which are prompted by these instincts are a part of the regular
+      school program, the whole pupil is engaged, the artificial gap between
+      life in school and out is reduced, motives are afforded for attention to a
+      large variety of materials and processes distinctly educative in effect,
+      and cooperative associations which give information in a social setting
+      are provided. In short, the grounds for assigning to play and active work
+      a definite place in the curriculum are intellectual and social, not
+      matters of temporary expediency and momentary agreeableness. Without
+      something of the kind, it is not possible to secure the normal estate of
+      effective learning; namely, that knowledge-getting be an outgrowth of
+      activities having their own end, instead of a school task. More
+      specifically, play and work correspond, point for point, with the traits
+      of the initial stage of knowing, which consists, as we saw in the last
+      chapter, in learning how to do things and in acquaintance with things and
+      processes gained in the doing. It is suggestive that among the Greeks,
+      till the rise of conscious philosophy, the same word, techne, was used for
+      art and science. Plato gave his account of knowledge on the basis of an
+      analysis of the knowledge of cobblers, carpenters, players of musical
+      instruments, etc., pointing out that their art (so far as it was not mere
+      routine) involved an end, mastery of material or stuff worked upon,
+      control of appliances, and a definite order of procedure&mdash;all of
+      which had to be known in order that there be intelligent skill or art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubtless the fact that children normally engage in play and work out of
+      school has seemed to many educators a reason why they should concern
+      themselves in school with things radically different. School time seemed
+      too precious to spend in doing over again what children were sure to do
+      any way. In some social conditions, this reason has weight. In pioneer
+      times, for example, outside occupations gave a definite and valuable
+      intellectual and moral training. Books and everything concerned with them
+      were, on the other hand, rare and difficult of access; they were the only
+      means of outlet from a narrow and crude environment. Wherever such
+      conditions obtain, much may be said in favor of concentrating school
+      activity upon books. The situation is very different, however, in most
+      communities to-day. The kinds of work in which the young can engage,
+      especially in cities, are largely anti-educational. That prevention of
+      child labor is a social duty is evidence on this point. On the other hand,
+      printed matter has been so cheapened and is in such universal circulation,
+      and all the opportunities of intellectual culture have been so multiplied,
+      that the older type of book work is far from having the force it used to
+      possess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it must not be forgotten that an educational result is a by-product of
+      play and work in most out-of-school conditions. It is incidental, not
+      primary. Consequently the educative growth secured is more or less
+      accidental. Much work shares in the defects of existing industrial society&mdash;defects
+      next to fatal to right development. Play tends to reproduce and affirm the
+      crudities, as well as the excellencies, of surrounding adult life. It is
+      the business of the school to set up an environment in which play and work
+      shall be conducted with reference to facilitating desirable mental and
+      moral growth. It is not enough just to introduce plays and games, hand
+      work and manual exercises. Everything depends upon the way in which they
+      are employed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Available Occupations. A bare catalogue of the list of activities which
+      have already found their way into schools indicates what a rich field is
+      at hand. There is work with paper, cardboard, wood, leather, cloth, yarns,
+      clay and sand, and the metals, with and without tools. Processes employed
+      are folding, cutting, pricking, measuring, molding, modeling,
+      pattern-making, heating and cooling, and the operations characteristic of
+      such tools as the hammer, saw, file, etc. Outdoor excursions, gardening,
+      cooking, sewing, printing, book-binding, weaving, painting, drawing,
+      singing, dramatization, story-telling, reading and writing as active
+      pursuits with social aims (not as mere exercises for acquiring skill for
+      future use), in addition to a countless variety of plays and games,
+      designate some of the modes of occupation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The problem of the educator is to engage pupils in these activities in
+      such ways that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained and
+      immediate satisfaction found in the work, together with preparation for
+      later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated to education&mdash;that
+      is, to intellectual results and the forming of a socialized disposition.
+      What does this principle signify? In the first place, the principle rules
+      out certain practices. Activities which follow definite prescription and
+      dictation or which reproduce without modification ready-made models, may
+      give muscular dexterity, but they do not require the perception and
+      elaboration of ends, nor (what is the same thing in other words) do they
+      permit the use of judgment in selecting and adapting means. Not merely
+      manual training specifically so called but many traditional kindergarten
+      exercises have erred here. Moreover, opportunity for making mistakes is an
+      incidental requirement. Not because mistakes are ever desirable, but
+      because overzeal to select material and appliances which forbid a chance
+      for mistakes to occur, restricts initiative, reduces judgment to a
+      minimum, and compels the use of methods which are so remote from the
+      complex situations of life that the power gained is of little
+      availability. It is quite true that children tend to exaggerate their
+      powers of execution and to select projects that are beyond them. But
+      limitation of capacity is one of the things which has to be learned; like
+      other things, it is learned through the experience of consequences. The
+      danger that children undertaking too complex projects will simply muddle
+      and mess, and produce not merely crude results (which is a minor matter)
+      but acquire crude standards (which is an important matter) is great. But
+      it is the fault of the teacher if the pupil does not perceive in due
+      season the inadequacy of his performances, and thereby receive a stimulus
+      to attempt exercises which will perfect his powers. Meantime it is more
+      important to keep alive a creative and constructive attitude than to
+      secure an external perfection by engaging the pupil's action in too minute
+      and too closely regulated pieces of work. Accuracy and finish of detail
+      can be insisted upon in such portions of a complex work as are within the
+      pupil's capacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unconscious suspicion of native experience and consequent overdoing of
+      external control are shown quite as much in the material supplied as in
+      the matter of the teacher's orders. The fear of raw material is shown in
+      laboratory, manual training shop, Froebelian kindergarten, and Montessori
+      house of childhood. The demand is for materials which have already been
+      subjected to the perfecting work of mind: a demand which shows itself in
+      the subject matter of active occupations quite as well as in academic book
+      learning. That such material will control the pupil's operations so as to
+      prevent errors is true. The notion that a pupil operating with such
+      material will somehow absorb the intelligence that went originally to its
+      shaping is fallacious. Only by starting with crude material and subjecting
+      it to purposeful handling will he gain the intelligence embodied in
+      finished material. In practice, overemphasis upon formed material leads to
+      an exaggeration of mathematical qualities, since intellect finds its
+      profit in physical things from matters of size, form, and proportion and
+      the relations that flow from them. But these are known only when their
+      perception is a fruit of acting upon purposes which require attention to
+      them. The more human the purpose, or the more it approximates the ends
+      which appeal in daily experience, the more real the knowledge. When the
+      purpose of the activity is restricted to ascertaining these qualities, the
+      resulting knowledge is only technical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say that active occupations should be concerned primarily with wholes
+      is another statement of the same principle. Wholes for purposes of
+      education are not, however, physical affairs. Intellectually the existence
+      of a whole depends upon a concern or interest; it is qualitative, the
+      completeness of appeal made by a situation. Exaggerated devotion to
+      formation of efficient skill irrespective of present purpose always shows
+      itself in devising exercises isolated from a purpose. Laboratory work is
+      made to consist of tasks of accurate measurement with a view to acquiring
+      knowledge of the fundamental units of physics, irrespective of contact
+      with the problems which make these units important; or of operations
+      designed to afford facility in the manipulation of experimental apparatus.
+      The technique is acquired independently of the purposes of discovery and
+      testing which alone give it meaning. Kindergarten employments are
+      calculated to give information regarding cubes, spheres, etc., and to form
+      certain habits of manipulation of material (for everything must always be
+      done "just so"), the absence of more vital purposes being supposedly
+      compensated for by the alleged symbolism of the material used. Manual
+      training is reduced to a series of ordered assignments calculated to
+      secure the mastery of one tool after another and technical ability in the
+      various elements of construction&mdash;like the different joints. It is
+      argued that pupils must know how to use tools before they attack actual
+      making,&mdash;assuming that pupils cannot learn how in the process of
+      making. Pestalozzi's just insistence upon the active use of the senses, as
+      a substitute for memorizing words, left behind it in practice schemes for
+      "object lessons" intended to acquaint pupils with all the qualities of
+      selected objects. The error is the same: in all these cases it is assumed
+      that before objects can be intelligently used, their properties must be
+      known. In fact, the senses are normally used in the course of intelligent
+      (that is, purposeful) use of things, since the qualities perceived are
+      factors to be reckoned with in accomplishment. Witness the different
+      attitude of a boy in making, say, a kite, with respect to the grain and
+      other properties of wood, the matter of size, angles, and proportion of
+      parts, to the attitude of a pupil who has an object-lesson on a piece of
+      wood, where the sole function of wood and its properties is to serve as
+      subject matter for the lesson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The failure to realize that the functional development of a situation
+      alone constitutes a "whole" for the purpose of mind is the cause of the
+      false notions which have prevailed in instruction concerning the simple
+      and the complex. For the person approaching a subject, the simple thing is
+      his purpose&mdash;the use he desires to make of material, tool, or
+      technical process, no matter how complicated the process of execution may
+      be. The unity of the purpose, with the concentration upon details which it
+      entails, confers simplicity upon the elements which have to be reckoned
+      with in the course of action. It furnishes each with a single meaning
+      according to its service in carrying on the whole enterprise. After one
+      has gone through the process, the constituent qualities and relations are
+      elements, each possessed with a definite meaning of its own. The false
+      notion referred to takes the standpoint of the expert, the one for whom
+      elements exist; isolates them from purposeful action, and presents them to
+      beginners as the "simple" things. But it is time for a positive statement.
+      Aside from the fact that active occupations represent things to do, not
+      studies, their educational significance consists in the fact that they may
+      typify social situations. Men's fundamental common concerns center about
+      food, shelter, clothing, household furnishings, and the appliances
+      connected with production, exchange, and consumption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Representing both the necessities of life and the adornments with which
+      the necessities have been clothed, they tap instincts at a deep level;
+      they are saturated with facts and principles having a social quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving, construction
+      in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc., which carry over these
+      fundamental human concerns into school resources, have a merely bread and
+      butter value is to miss their point. If the mass of mankind has usually
+      found in its industrial occupations nothing but evils which had to be
+      endured for the sake of maintaining existence, the fault is not in the
+      occupations, but in the conditions under which they are carried on. The
+      continually increasing importance of economic factors in contemporary life
+      makes it the more needed that education should reveal their scientific
+      content and their social value. For in schools, occupations are not
+      carried on for pecuniary gain but for their own content. Freed from
+      extraneous associations and from the pressure of wage-earning, they supply
+      modes of experience which are intrinsically valuable; they are truly
+      liberalizing in quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of
+      preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time. It
+      affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place farming and
+      horticulture have had in the history of the race and which they occupy in
+      present social organization. Carried on in an environment educationally
+      controlled, they are means for making a study of the facts of growth, the
+      chemistry of soil, the role of light, air, and moisture, injurious and
+      helpful animal life, etc. There is nothing in the elementary study of
+      botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in connection with caring
+      for the growth of seeds. Instead of the subject matter belonging to a
+      peculiar study called botany, it will then belong to life, and will find,
+      moreover, its natural correlations with the facts of soil, animal life,
+      and human relations. As students grow mature, they will perceive problems
+      of interest which may be pursued for the sake of discovery, independent of
+      the original direct interest in gardening&mdash;problems connected with
+      the germination and nutrition of plants, the reproduction of fruits, etc.,
+      thus making a transition to deliberate intellectual investigations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The illustration is intended to apply, of course, to other school
+      occupations,&mdash;wood-working, cooking, and on through the list. It is
+      pertinent to note that in the history of the race the sciences grew
+      gradually out from useful social occupations. Physics developed slowly out
+      of the use of tools and machines; the important branch of physics known as
+      mechanics testifies in its name to its original associations. The lever,
+      wheel, inclined plane, etc., were among the first great intellectual
+      discoveries of mankind, and they are none the less intellectual because
+      they occurred in the course of seeking for means of accomplishing
+      practical ends. The great advance of electrical science in the last
+      generation was closely associated, as effect and as cause, with
+      application of electric agencies to means of communication,
+      transportation, lighting of cities and houses, and more economical
+      production of goods. These are social ends, moreover, and if they are too
+      closely associated with notions of private profit, it is not because of
+      anything in them, but because they have been deflected to private uses:&mdash;a
+      fact which puts upon the school the responsibility of restoring their
+      connection, in the mind of the coming generation, with public scientific
+      and social interests. In like ways, chemistry grew out of processes of
+      dying, bleaching, metal working, etc., and in recent times has found
+      innumerable new uses in industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mathematics is now a highly abstract science; geometry, however, means
+      literally earth-measuring: the practical use of number in counting to keep
+      track of things and in measuring is even more important to-day than in the
+      times when it was invented for these purposes. Such considerations (which
+      could be duplicated in the history of any science) are not arguments for a
+      recapitulation of the history of the race or for dwelling long in the
+      early rule of thumb stage. But they indicate the possibilities&mdash;greater
+      to-day than ever before&mdash;of using active occupations as opportunities
+      for scientific study. The opportunities are just as great on the social
+      side, whether we look at the life of collective humanity in its past or in
+      its future. The most direct road for elementary students into civics and
+      economics is found in consideration of the place and office of industrial
+      occupations in social life. Even for older students, the social sciences
+      would be less abstract and formal if they were dealt with less as sciences
+      (less as formulated bodies of knowledge) and more in their direct
+      subject-matter as that is found in the daily life of the social groups in
+      which the student shares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Connection of occupations with the method of science is at least as close
+      as with its subject matter. The ages when scientific progress was slow
+      were the ages when learned men had contempt for the material and processes
+      of everyday life, especially for those concerned with manual pursuits.
+      Consequently they strove to develop knowledge out of general principles&mdash;almost
+      out of their heads&mdash;by logical reasons. It seems as absurd that
+      learning should come from action on and with physical things, like
+      dropping acid on a stone to see what would happen, as that it should come
+      from sticking an awl with waxed thread through a piece of leather. But the
+      rise of experimental methods proved that, given control of conditions, the
+      latter operation is more typical of the right way of knowledge than
+      isolated logical reasonings. Experiment developed in the seventeenth and
+      succeeding centuries and became the authorized way of knowing when men's
+      interests were centered in the question of control of nature for human
+      uses. The active occupations in which appliances are brought to bear upon
+      physical things with the intention of effecting useful changes is the most
+      vital introduction to the experimental method.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Work and Play. What has been termed active occupation includes both
+      play and work. In their intrinsic meaning, play and industry are by no
+      means so antithetical to one another as is often assumed, any sharp
+      contrast being due to undesirable social conditions. Both involve ends
+      consciously entertained and the selection and adaptations of materials and
+      processes designed to effect the desired ends. The difference between them
+      is largely one of time-span, influencing the directness of the connection
+      of means and ends. In play, the interest is more direct&mdash;a fact
+      frequently indicated by saying that in play the activity is its own end,
+      instead of its having an ulterior result. The statement is correct, but it
+      is falsely taken, if supposed to mean that play activity is momentary,
+      having no element of looking ahead and none of pursuit. Hunting, for
+      example, is one of the commonest forms of adult play, but the existence of
+      foresight and the direction of present activity by what one is watching
+      for are obvious. When an activity is its own end in the sense that the
+      action of the moment is complete in itself, it is purely physical; it has
+      no meaning (See p. 77). The person is either going through motions quite
+      blindly, perhaps purely imitatively, or else is in a state of excitement
+      which is exhausting to mind and nerves. Both results may be seen in some
+      types of kindergarten games where the idea of play is so highly symbolic
+      that only the adult is conscious of it. Unless the children succeed in
+      reading in some quite different idea of their own, they move about either
+      as if in a hypnotic daze, or they respond to a direct excitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The point of these remarks is that play has an end in the sense of a
+      directing idea which gives point to the successive acts. Persons who play
+      are not just doing something (pure physical movement); they are trying to
+      do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts
+      which stimulate their present responses. The anticipated result, however,
+      is rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific change in
+      things. Consequently play is free, plastic. Where some definite external
+      outcome is wanted, the end has to be held to with some persistence, which
+      increases as the contemplated result is complex and requires a fairly long
+      series of intermediate adaptations. When the intended act is another
+      activity, it is not necessary to look far ahead and it is possible to
+      alter it easily and frequently. If a child is making a toy boat, he must
+      hold on to a single end and direct a considerable number of acts by that
+      one idea. If he is just "playing boat" he may change the material that
+      serves as a boat almost at will, and introduce new factors as fancy
+      suggests. The imagination makes what it will of chairs, blocks, leaves,
+      chips, if they serve the purpose of carrying activity forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From a very early age, however, there is no distinction of exclusive
+      periods of play activity and work activity, but only one of emphasis.
+      There are definite results which even young children desire, and try to
+      bring to pass. Their eager interest in sharing the occupations of others,
+      if nothing else, accomplishes this. Children want to "help"; they are
+      anxious to engage in the pursuits of adults which effect external changes:
+      setting the table, washing dishes, helping care for animals, etc. In their
+      plays, they like to construct their own toys and appliances. With
+      increasing maturity, activity which does not give back results of tangible
+      and visible achievement loses its interest. Play then changes to fooling
+      and if habitually indulged in is demoralizing. Observable results are
+      necessary to enable persons to get a sense and a measure of their own
+      powers. When make-believe is recognized to be make-believe, the device of
+      making objects in fancy alone is too easy to stimulate intense action. One
+      has only to observe the countenance of children really playing to note
+      that their attitude is one of serious absorption; this attitude cannot be
+      maintained when things cease to afford adequate stimulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When fairly remote results of a definite character are foreseen and enlist
+      persistent effort for their accomplishment, play passes into work. Like
+      play, it signifies purposeful activity and differs not in that activity is
+      subordinated to an external result, but in the fact that a longer course
+      of activity is occasioned by the idea of a result. The demand for
+      continuous attention is greater, and more intelligence must be shown in
+      selecting and shaping means. To extend this account would be to repeat
+      what has been said under the caption of aim, interest, and thinking. It is
+      pertinent, however, to inquire why the idea is so current that work
+      involves subordination of an activity to an ulterior material result. The
+      extreme form of this subordination, namely drudgery, offers a clew.
+      Activity carried on under conditions of external pressure or coercion is
+      not carried on for any significance attached to the doing. The course of
+      action is not intrinsically satisfying; it is a mere means for avoiding
+      some penalty, or for gaining some reward at its conclusion. What is
+      inherently repulsive is endured for the sake of averting something still
+      more repulsive or of securing a gain hitched on by others. Under unfree
+      economic conditions, this state of affairs is bound to exist. Work or
+      industry offers little to engage the emotions and the imagination; it is a
+      more or less mechanical series of strains. Only the hold which the
+      completion of the work has upon a person will keep him going. But the end
+      should be intrinsic to the action; it should be its end&mdash;a part of
+      its own course. Then it affords a stimulus to effort very different from
+      that arising from the thought of results which have nothing to do with the
+      intervening action. As already mentioned, the absence of economic pressure
+      in schools supplies an opportunity for reproducing industrial situations
+      of mature life under conditions where the occupation can be carried on for
+      its own sake. If in some cases, pecuniary recognition is also a result of
+      an action, though not the chief motive for it, that fact may well increase
+      the significance of the occupation. Where something approaching drudgery
+      or the need of fulfilling externally imposed tasks exists, the demand for
+      play persists, but tends to be perverted. The ordinary course of action
+      fails to give adequate stimulus to emotion and imagination. So in leisure
+      time, there is an imperious demand for their stimulation by any kind of
+      means; gambling, drink, etc., may be resorted to. Or, in less extreme
+      cases, there is recourse to idle amusement; to anything which passes time
+      with immediate agreeableness. Recreation, as the word indicates, is
+      recuperation of energy. No demand of human nature is more urgent or less
+      to be escaped. The idea that the need can be suppressed is absolutely
+      fallacious, and the Puritanic tradition which disallows the need has
+      entailed an enormous crop of evils. If education does not afford
+      opportunity for wholesome recreation and train capacity for seeking and
+      finding it, the suppressed instincts find all sorts of illicit outlets,
+      sometimes overt, sometimes confined to indulgence of the imagination.
+      Education has no more serious responsibility than making adequate
+      provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure; not only for the sake of
+      immediate health, but still more if possible for the sake of its lasting
+      effect upon habits of mind. Art is again the answer to this demand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM15">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. In the previous chapter we found that the primary subject
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      matter of knowing is that contained in learning how to do things of a
+      fairly direct sort. The educational equivalent of this principle is the
+      consistent use of simple occupations which appeal to the powers of youth
+      and which typify general modes of social activity. Skill and information
+      about materials, tools, and laws of energy are acquired while activities
+      are carried on for their own sake. The fact that they are socially
+      representative gives a quality to the skill and knowledge gained which
+      makes them transferable to out-of-school situations. It is important not
+      to confuse the psychological distinction between play and work with the
+      economic distinction. Psychologically, the defining characteristic of play
+      is not amusement nor aimlessness. It is the fact that the aim is thought
+      of as more activity in the same line, without defining continuity of
+      action in reference to results produced. Activities as they grow more
+      complicated gain added meaning by greater attention to specific results
+      achieved. Thus they pass gradually into work. Both are equally free and
+      intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend
+      to make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into
+      uncongenial labor for the poor. Work is psychologically simply an activity
+      which consciously includes regard for consequences as a part of itself; it
+      becomes constrained labor when the consequences are outside of the
+      activity as an end to which activity is merely a means. Work which remains
+      permeated with the play attitude is art&mdash;in quality if not in
+      conventional designation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Extension of Meaning of Primary Activities. Nothing is more striking
+      than the difference between an activity as merely physical and the wealth
+      of meanings which the same activity may assume. From the outside, an
+      astronomer gazing through a telescope is like a small boy looking through
+      the same tube. In each case, there is an arrangement of glass and metal,
+      an eye, and a little speck of light in the distance. Yet at a critical
+      moment, the activity of an astronomer might be concerned with the birth of
+      a world, and have whatever is known about the starry heavens as its
+      significant content. Physically speaking, what man has effected on this
+      globe in his progress from savagery is a mere scratch on its surface, not
+      perceptible at a distance which is slight in comparison with the reaches
+      even of the solar system. Yet in meaning what has been accomplished
+      measures just the difference of civilization from savagery. Although the
+      activities, physically viewed, have changed somewhat, this change is
+      slight in comparison with the development of the meanings attaching to the
+      activities. There is no limit to the meaning which an action may come to
+      possess. It all depends upon the context of perceived connections in which
+      it is placed; the reach of imagination in realizing connections is
+      inexhaustible. The advantage which the activity of man has in
+      appropriating and finding meanings makes his education something else than
+      the manufacture of a tool or the training of an animal. The latter
+      increase efficiency; they do not develop significance. The final
+      educational importance of such occupations in play and work as were
+      considered in the last chapter is that they afford the most direct
+      instrumentalities for such extension of meaning. Set going under adequate
+      conditions they are magnets for gathering and retaining an indefinitely
+      wide scope of intellectual considerations. They provide vital centers for
+      the reception and assimilation of information. When information is
+      purveyed in chunks simply as information to be retained for its own sake,
+      it tends to stratify over vital experience. Entering as a factor into an
+      activity pursued for its own sake&mdash;whether as a means or as a
+      widening of the content of the aim&mdash;it is informing. The insight
+      directly gained fuses with what is told. Individual experience is then
+      capable of taking up and holding in solution the net results of the
+      experience of the group to which he belongs&mdash;including the results of
+      sufferings and trials over long stretches of time. And such media have no
+      fixed saturation point where further absorption is impossible. The more
+      that is taken in, the greater capacity there is for further assimilation.
+      New receptiveness follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon
+      information gained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature and man.
+      This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning when translated
+      into educational equivalents. So translated, it signifies that geography
+      and history supply subject matter which gives background and outlook,
+      intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow personal
+      actions or mere forms of technical skill. With every increase of ability
+      to place our own doings in their time and space connections, our doings
+      gain in significant content. We realize that we are citizens of no mean
+      city in discovering the scene in space of which we are denizens, and the
+      continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which we are heirs and
+      continuers. Thus our ordinary daily experiences cease to be things of the
+      moment and gain enduring substance. Of course if geography and history are
+      taught as ready-made studies which a person studies simply because he is
+      sent to school, it easily happens that a large number of statements about
+      things remote and alien to everyday experience are learned. Activity is
+      divided, and two separate worlds are built up, occupying activity at
+      divided periods. No transmutation takes place; ordinary experience is not
+      enlarged in meaning by getting its connections; what is studied is not
+      animated and made real by entering into immediate activity. Ordinary
+      experience is not even left as it was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses
+      something of its mobility and sensitiveness to suggestions. It is weighed
+      down and pushed into a corner by a load of unassimilated information. It
+      parts with its flexible responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional
+      meaning. Mere amassing of information apart from the direct interests of
+      life makes mind wooden; elasticity disappears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out beyond its
+      immediate self. It does not passively wait for information to be bestowed
+      which will increase its meaning; it seeks it out. Curiosity is not an
+      accidental isolated possession; it is a necessary consequence of the fact
+      that an experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all kinds of
+      connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency to make these
+      conditions perceptible. It is the business of educators to supply an
+      environment so that this reaching out of an experience may be fruitfully
+      rewarded and kept continuously active. Within a certain kind of
+      environment, an activity may be checked so that the only meaning which
+      accrues is of its direct and tangible isolated outcome. One may cook, or
+      hammer, or walk, and the resulting consequences may not take the mind any
+      farther than the consequences of cooking, hammering, and walking in the
+      literal&mdash;or physical&mdash;sense. But nevertheless the consequences
+      of the act remain far-reaching. To walk involves a displacement and
+      reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is felt wherever there is
+      matter. It involves the structure of the limbs and the nervous system; the
+      principles of mechanics. To cook is to utilize heat and moisture to change
+      the chemical relations of food materials; it has a bearing upon the
+      assimilation of food and the growth of the body. The utmost that the most
+      learned men of science know in physics, chemistry, physiology is not
+      enough to make all these consequences and connections perceptible. The
+      task of education, once more, is to see to it that such activities are
+      performed in such ways and under such conditions as render these
+      conditions as perceptible as possible. To "learn geography" is to gain in
+      power to perceive the spatial, the natural, connections of an ordinary
+      act; to "learn history" is essentially to gain in power to recognize its
+      human connections. For what is called geography as a formulated study is
+      simply the body of facts and principles which have been discovered in
+      other men's experience about the natural medium in which we live, and in
+      connection with which the particular acts of our life have an explanation.
+      So history as a formulated study is but the body of known facts about the
+      activities and sufferings of the social groups with which our own lives
+      are continuous, and through reference to which our own customs and
+      institutions are illuminated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Complementary Nature of History and Geography. History and
+      geography&mdash;including in the latter, for reasons about to be
+      mentioned, nature study&mdash;are the information studies par excellence
+      of the schools. Examination of the materials and the method of their use
+      will make clear that the difference between penetration of this
+      information into living experience and its mere piling up in isolated
+      heaps depends upon whether these studies are faithful to the
+      interdependence of man and nature which affords these studies their
+      justification. Nowhere, however, is there greater danger that subject
+      matter will be accepted as appropriate educational material simply because
+      it has become customary to teach and learn it. The idea of a philosophic
+      reason for it, because of the function of the material in a worthy
+      transformation of experience, is looked upon as a vain fancy, or as
+      supplying a high-sounding phraseology in support of what is already done.
+      The words "history" and "geography" suggest simply the matter which has
+      been traditionally sanctioned in the schools. The mass and variety of this
+      matter discourage an attempt to see what it really stands for, and how it
+      can be so taught as to fulfill its mission in the experience of pupils.
+      But unless the idea that there is a unifying and social direction in
+      education is a farcical pretense, subjects that bulk as large in the
+      curriculum as history and geography, must represent a general function in
+      the development of a truly socialized and intellectualized experience. The
+      discovery of this function must be employed as a criterion for trying and
+      sifting the facts taught and the methods used.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The function of historical and geographical subject matter has been
+      stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal contacts
+      of life by furnishing their context, their background and outlook. While
+      geography emphasizes the physical side and history the social, these are
+      only emphases in a common topic, namely, the associated life of men. For
+      this associated life, with its experiments, its ways and means, its
+      achievements and failures, does not go on in the sky nor yet in a vacuum.
+      It takes place on the earth. This setting of nature does not bear to
+      social activities the relation that the scenery of a theatrical
+      performance bears to a dramatic representation; it enters into the very
+      make-up of the social happenings that form history. Nature is the medium
+      of social occurrences. It furnishes original stimuli; it supplies
+      obstacles and resources. Civilization is the progressive mastery of its
+      varied energies. When this interdependence of the study of history,
+      representing the human emphasis, with the study of geography, representing
+      the natural, is ignored, history sinks to a listing of dates with an
+      appended inventory of events, labeled "important"; or else it becomes a
+      literary phantasy&mdash;for in purely literary history the natural
+      environment is but stage scenery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Geography, of course, has its educative influence in a counterpart
+      connection of natural facts with social events and their consequences. The
+      classic definition of geography as an account of the earth as the home of
+      man expresses the educational reality. But it is easier to give this
+      definition than it is to present specific geographical subject matter in
+      its vital human bearings. The residence, pursuits, successes, and failures
+      of men are the things that give the geographic data their reason for
+      inclusion in the material of instruction. But to hold the two together
+      requires an informed and cultivated imagination. When the ties are broken,
+      geography presents itself as that hodge-podge of unrelated fragments too
+      often found. It appears as a veritable rag-bag of intellectual odds and
+      ends: the height of a mountain here, the course of a river there, the
+      quantity of shingles produced in this town, the tonnage of the shipping in
+      that, the boundary of a county, the capital of a state. The earth as the
+      home of man is humanizing and unified; the earth viewed as a miscellany of
+      facts is scattering and imaginatively inert. Geography is a topic that
+      originally appeals to imagination&mdash;even to the romantic imagination.
+      It shares in the wonder and glory that attach to adventure, travel, and
+      exploration. The variety of peoples and environments, their contrast with
+      familiar scenes, furnishes infinite stimulation. The mind is moved from
+      the monotony of the customary. And while local or home geography is the
+      natural starting point in the reconstructive development of the natural
+      environment, it is an intellectual starting point for moving out into the
+      unknown, not an end in itself. When not treated as a basis for getting at
+      the large world beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as deadly
+      as do object lessons which simply summarize the properties of familiar
+      objects. The reason is the same. The imagination is not fed, but is held
+      down to recapitulating, cataloguing, and refining what is already known.
+      But when the familiar fences that mark the limits of the village
+      proprietors are signs that introduce an understanding of the boundaries of
+      great nations, even fences are lighted with meaning. Sunlight, air,
+      running water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil
+      officers and their duties&mdash;all these things are found in the local
+      environment. Treated as if their meaning began and ended in those
+      confines, they are curious facts to be laboriously learned. As instruments
+      for extending the limits of experience, bringing within its scope peoples
+      and things otherwise strange and unknown, they are transfigured by the use
+      to which they are put. Sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political
+      relations come from afar and lead the thoughts afar. To follow their
+      course is to enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional
+      information, but by remaking the meaning of what was previously a matter
+      of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of geographical study
+      which tend to become specialized and separate. Mathematical or
+      astronomical, physiographic, topographic, political, commercial,
+      geography, all make their claims. How are they to be adjusted? By an
+      external compromise that crowds in so much of each? No other method is to
+      be found unless it be constantly borne in mind that the educational center
+      of gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject. From this
+      center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is needed to help
+      appreciate the significance of human activities and relations. The
+      differences of civilization in cold and tropical regions, the special
+      inventions, industrial and political, of peoples in the temperate regions,
+      cannot be understood without appeal to the earth as a member of the solar
+      system. Economic activities deeply influence social intercourse and
+      political organization on one side, and reflect physical conditions on the
+      other. The specializations of these topics are for the specialists; their
+      interaction concerns man as a being whose experience is social.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced; verbally,
+      it is. But in educational idea there is but one reality, and it is pity
+      that in practice we have two names: for the diversity of names tends to
+      conceal the identity of meaning. Nature and the earth should be equivalent
+      terms, and so should earth study and nature study. Everybody knows that
+      nature study has suffered in schools from scrappiness of subject matter,
+      due to dealing with a large number of isolated points. The parts of a
+      flower have been studied, for example, apart from the flower as an organ;
+      the flower apart from the plant; the plant apart from the soil, air, and
+      light in which and through which it lives. The result is an inevitable
+      deadness of topics to which attention is invited, but which are so
+      isolated that they do not feed imagination. The lack of interest is so
+      great that it was seriously proposed to revive animism, to clothe natural
+      facts and events with myths in order that they might attract and hold the
+      mind. In numberless cases, more or less silly personifications were
+      resorted to. The method was silly, but it expressed a real need for a
+      human atmosphere. The facts had been torn to pieces by being taken out of
+      their context. They no longer belonged to the earth; they had no abiding
+      place anywhere. To compensate, recourse was had to artificial and
+      sentimental associations. The real remedy is to make nature study a study
+      of nature, not of fragments made meaningless through complete removal from
+      the situations in which they are produced and in which they operate. When
+      nature is treated as a whole, like the earth in its relations, its
+      phenomena fall into their natural relations of sympathy and association
+      with human life, and artificial substitutes are not needed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. History and Present Social Life. The segregation which kills the
+      vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social
+      life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly
+      gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward it.
+      Let the dead bury their dead. But knowledge of the past is the key to
+      understanding the present. History deals with the past, but this past is
+      the history of the present. An intelligent study of the discovery,
+      explorations, colonization of America, of the pioneer movement westward,
+      of immigration, etc., should be a study of the United States as it is
+      to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying it in process of formation
+      makes much that is too complex to be directly grasped open to
+      comprehension. Genetic method was perhaps the chief scientific achievement
+      of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its principle is that the
+      way to get insight into any complex product is to trace the process of its
+      making,&mdash;to follow it through the successive stages of its growth. To
+      apply this method to history as if it meant only the truism that the
+      present social state cannot be separated from its past, is one-sided. It
+      means equally that past events cannot be separated from the living present
+      and retain meaning. The true starting point of history is always some
+      present situation with its problems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration of its
+      bearing upon a number of points. The biographical method is generally
+      recommended as the natural mode of approach to historical study. The lives
+      of great men, of heroes and leaders, make concrete and vital historic
+      episodes otherwise abstract and incomprehensible. They condense into vivid
+      pictures complicated and tangled series of events spread over so much
+      space and time that only a highly trained mind can follow and unravel
+      them. There can be no doubt of the psychological soundness of this
+      principle. But it is misused when employed to throw into exaggerated
+      relief the doings of a few individuals without reference to the social
+      situations which they represent. When a biography is related just as an
+      account of the doings of a man isolated from the conditions that aroused
+      him and to which his activities were a response, we do not have a study of
+      history, for we have no study of social life, which is an affair of
+      individuals in association. We get only a sugar coating which makes it
+      easier to swallow certain fragments of information. Much attention has
+      been given of late to primitive life as an introduction to learning
+      history. Here also there is a right and a wrong way of conceiving its
+      value. The seemingly ready-made character and the complexity of present
+      conditions, their apparently hard and fast character, is an almost
+      insuperable obstacle to gaining insight into their nature. Recourse to the
+      primitive may furnish the fundamental elements of the present situation in
+      immensely simplified form. It is like unraveling a cloth so complex and so
+      close to the eyes that its scheme cannot be seen, until the larger coarser
+      features of the pattern appear. We cannot simplify the present situations
+      by deliberate experiment, but resort to primitive life presents us with
+      the sort of results we should desire from an experiment. Social
+      relationships and modes of organized action are reduced to their lowest
+      terms. When this social aim is overlooked, however, the study of primitive
+      life becomes simply a rehearsing of sensational and exciting features of
+      savagery. Primitive history suggests industrial history. For one of the
+      chief reasons for going to more primitive conditions to resolve the
+      present into more easily perceived factors is that we may realize how the
+      fundamental problems of procuring subsistence, shelter, and protection
+      have been met; and by seeing how these were solved in the earlier days of
+      the human race, form some conception of the long road which has had to be
+      traveled, and of the successive inventions by which the race has been
+      brought forward in culture. We do not need to go into disputes regarding
+      the economic interpretation of history to realize that the industrial
+      history of mankind gives insight into two important phases of social life
+      in a way which no other phase of history can possibly do. It presents us
+      with knowledge of the successive inventions by which theoretical science
+      has been applied to the control of nature in the interests of security and
+      prosperity of social life. It thus reveals the successive causes of social
+      progress. Its other service is to put before us the things that
+      fundamentally concern all men in common&mdash;the occupations and values
+      connected with getting a living. Economic history deals with the
+      activities, the career, and fortunes of the common man as does no other
+      branch of history. The one thing every individual must do is to live; the
+      one thing that society must do is to secure from each individual his fair
+      contribution to the general well being and see to it that a just return is
+      made to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more
+      liberalizing than political history. It deals not with the rise and fall
+      of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the effective
+      liberties, through command of nature, of the common man for whom powers
+      and principalities exist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Industrial history also offers a more direct avenue of approach to the
+      realization of the intimate connection of man's struggles, successes, and
+      failures with nature than does political history&mdash;to say nothing of
+      the military history into which political history so easily runs when
+      reduced to the level of youthful comprehension. For industrial history is
+      essentially an account of the way in which man has learned to utilize
+      natural energy from the time when men mostly exploited the muscular
+      energies of other men to the time when, in promise if not in actuality,
+      the resources of nature are so under command as to enable men to extend a
+      common dominion over her. When the history of work, when the conditions of
+      using the soil, forest, mine, of domesticating and cultivating grains and
+      animals, of manufacture and distribution, are left out of account, history
+      tends to become merely literary&mdash;a systematized romance of a mythical
+      humanity living upon itself instead of upon the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education is
+      intellectual history. We are only just beginning to realize that the great
+      heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its politicians, generals,
+      and diplomatists, but the scientific discoverers and inventors who have
+      put into man's hands the instrumentalities of an expanding and controlled
+      experience, and the artists and poets who have celebrated his struggles,
+      triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic, or written,
+      that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to others. One of
+      the advantages of industrial history as a history of man's progressive
+      adaptation of natural forces to social uses is the opportunity which it
+      affords for consideration of advance in the methods and results of
+      knowledge. At present men are accustomed to eulogize intelligence and
+      reason in general terms; their fundamental importance is urged. But pupils
+      often come away from the conventional study of history, and think either
+      that the human intellect is a static quantity which has not progressed by
+      the invention of better methods, or else that intelligence, save as a
+      display of personal shrewdness, is a negligible historic factor. Surely no
+      better way could be devised of instilling a genuine sense of the part
+      which mind has to play in life than a study of history which makes plain
+      how the entire advance of humanity from savagery to civilization has been
+      dependent upon intellectual discoveries and inventions, and the extent to
+      which the things which ordinarily figure most largely in historical
+      writings have been side issues, or even obstructions for intelligence to
+      overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pursued in this fashion, history would most naturally become of ethical
+      value in teaching. Intelligent insight into present forms of associated
+      life is necessary for a character whose morality is more than colorless
+      innocence. Historical knowledge helps provide such insight. It is an organ
+      for analysis of the warp and woof of the present social fabric, of making
+      known the forces which have woven the pattern. The use of history for
+      cultivating a socialized intelligence constitutes its moral significance.
+      It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of anecdotes to be
+      drawn on to inculcate special moral lessons on this virtue or that vice.
+      But such teaching is not so much an ethical use of history as it is an
+      effort to create moral impressions by means of more or less authentic
+      material. At best, it produces a temporary emotional glow; at worst,
+      callous indifference to moralizing. The assistance which may be given by
+      history to a more intelligent sympathetic understanding of the social
+      situations of the present in which individuals share is a permanent and
+      constructive moral asset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM16">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. It is the nature of an experience to have implications which
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. Bringing these
+      connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the
+      experience. Any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is
+      capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending
+      its range of perceived connections. Normal communication with others is
+      the readiest way of effecting this development, for it links up the net
+      results of the experience of the group and even the race with the
+      immediate experience of an individual. By normal communication is meant
+      that in which there is a joint interest, a common interest, so that one is
+      eager to give and the other to take. It contrasts with telling or stating
+      things simply for the sake of impressing them upon another, merely in
+      order to test him to see how much he has retained and can literally
+      reproduce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Geography and history are the two great school resources for bringing
+      about the enlargement of the significance of a direct personal experience.
+      The active occupations described in the previous chapter reach out in
+      space and time with respect to both nature and man. Unless they are taught
+      for external reasons or as mere modes of skill their chief educational
+      value is that they provide the most direct and interesting roads out into
+      the larger world of meanings stated in history and geography. While
+      history makes human implications explicit and geography natural
+      connections, these subjects are two phases of the same living whole, since
+      the life of men in association goes on in nature, not as an accidental
+      setting, but as the material and medium of development.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Logical and the Psychological. By science is meant, as already
+      stated, that knowledge which is the outcome of methods of observation,
+      reflection, and testing which are deliberately adopted to secure a
+      settled, assured subject matter. It involves an intelligent and persistent
+      endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to
+      add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the
+      dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as
+      possible. It is, like all knowledge, an outcome of activity bringing about
+      certain changes in the environment. But in its case, the quality of the
+      resulting knowledge is the controlling factor and not an incident of the
+      activity. Both logically and educationally, science is the perfecting of
+      knowing, its last stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science, in short, signifies a realization of the logical implications of
+      any knowledge. Logical order is not a form imposed upon what is known; it
+      is the proper form of knowledge as perfected. For it means that the
+      statement of subject matter is of a nature to exhibit to one who
+      understands it the premises from which it follows and the conclusions to
+      which it points (See ante, p. 190). As from a few bones the competent
+      zoologist reconstructs an animal; so from the form of a statement in
+      mathematics or physics the specialist in the subject can form an idea of
+      the system of truths in which it has its place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the non-expert, however, this perfected form is a stumbling block. Just
+      because the material is stated with reference to the furtherance of
+      knowledge as an end in itself, its connections with the material of
+      everyday life are hidden. To the layman the bones are a mere curiosity.
+      Until he had mastered the principles of zoology, his efforts to make
+      anything out of them would be random and blind. From the standpoint of the
+      learner scientific form is an ideal to be achieved, not a starting point
+      from which to set out. It is, nevertheless, a frequent practice to start
+      in instruction with the rudiments of science somewhat simplified. The
+      necessary consequence is an isolation of science from significant
+      experience. The pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning. He
+      acquires a technical body of information without ability to trace its
+      connections with the objects and operations with which he is familiar&mdash;often
+      he acquires simply a peculiar vocabulary. There is a strong temptation to
+      assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a
+      royal road to learning. What more natural than to suppose that the
+      immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless
+      error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? The outcome
+      is written large in the history of education. Pupils begin their study of
+      science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according
+      to the order of the specialist. Technical concepts, with their
+      definitions, are introduced at the outset. Laws are introduced at a very
+      early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were
+      arrived at. The pupils learn a "science" instead of learning the
+      scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience.
+      The method of the advanced student dominates college teaching; the
+      approach of the college is transferred into the high school, and so down
+      the line, with such omissions as may make the subject easier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chronological method which begins with the experience of the learner
+      and develops from that the proper modes of scientific treatment is often
+      called the "psychological" method in distinction from the logical method
+      of the expert or specialist. The apparent loss of time involved is more
+      than made up for by the superior understanding and vital interest secured.
+      What the pupil learns he at least understands. Moreover by following, in
+      connection with problems selected from the material of ordinary
+      acquaintance, the methods by which scientific men have reached their
+      perfected knowledge, he gains independent power to deal with material
+      within his range, and avoids the mental confusion and intellectual
+      distaste attendant upon studying matter whose meaning is only symbolic.
+      Since the mass of pupils are never going to become scientific specialists,
+      it is much more important that they should get some insight into what
+      scientific method means than that they should copy at long range and
+      second hand the results which scientific men have reached. Students will
+      not go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered," but they will be sure and
+      intelligent as far as they do go. And it is safe to say that the few who
+      go on to be scientific experts will have a better preparation than if they
+      had been swamped with a large mass of purely technical and symbolically
+      stated information. In fact, those who do become successful men of science
+      are those who by their own power manage to avoid the pitfalls of a
+      traditional scholastic introduction into it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The contrast between the expectations of the men who a generation or two
+      ago strove, against great odds, to secure a place for science in
+      education, and the result generally achieved is painful. Herbert Spencer,
+      inquiring what knowledge is of most worth, concluded that from all points
+      of view scientific knowledge is most valuable. But his argument
+      unconsciously assumed that scientific knowledge could be communicated in a
+      ready-made form. Passing over the methods by which the subject matter of
+      our ordinary activities is transmuted into scientific form, it ignored the
+      method by which alone science is science. Instruction has too often
+      proceeded upon an analogous plan. But there is no magic attached to
+      material stated in technically correct scientific form. When learned in
+      this condition it remains a body of inert information. Moreover its form
+      of statement removes it further from fruitful contact with everyday
+      experiences than does the mode of statement proper to literature.
+      Nevertheless that the claims made for instruction in science were
+      unjustifiable does not follow. For material so taught is not science to
+      the pupil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Contact with things and laboratory exercises, while a great improvement
+      upon textbooks arranged upon the deductive plan, do not of themselves
+      suffice to meet the need. While they are an indispensable portion of
+      scientific method, they do not as a matter of course constitute scientific
+      method. Physical materials may be manipulated with scientific apparatus,
+      but the materials may be disassociated in themselves and in the ways in
+      which they are handled, from the materials and processes used out of
+      school. The problems dealt with may be only problems of science: problems,
+      that is, which would occur to one already initiated in the science of the
+      subject. Our attention may be devoted to getting skill in technical
+      manipulation without reference to the connection of laboratory exercises
+      with a problem belonging to subject matter. There is sometimes a ritual of
+      laboratory instruction as well as of heathen religion. 1 It has been
+      mentioned, incidentally, that scientific statements, or logical form,
+      implies the use of signs or symbols. The statement applies, of course, to
+      all use of language. But in the vernacular, the mind proceeds directly
+      from the symbol to the thing signified. Association with familiar material
+      is so close that the mind does not pause upon the sign. The signs are
+      intended only to stand for things and acts. But scientific terminology has
+      an additional use. It is designed, as we have seen, not to stand for the
+      things directly in their practical use in experience, but for the things
+      placed in a cognitive system. Ultimately, of course, they denote the
+      things of our common sense acquaintance. But immediately they do not
+      designate them in their common context, but translated into terms of
+      scientific inquiry. Atoms, molecules, chemical formulae, the mathematical
+      propositions in the study of physics&mdash;all these have primarily an
+      intellectual value and only indirectly an empirical value. They represent
+      instruments for the carrying on of science. As in the case of other tools,
+      their significance can be learned only by use. We cannot procure
+      understanding of their meaning by pointing to things, but only by pointing
+      to their work when they are employed as part of the technique of
+      knowledge. Even the circle, square, etc., of geometry exhibit a difference
+      from the squares and circles of familiar acquaintance, and the further one
+      proceeds in mathematical science the greater the remoteness from the
+      everyday empirical thing. Qualities which do not count for the pursuit of
+      knowledge about spatial relations are left out; those which are important
+      for this purpose are accentuated. If one carries his study far enough, he
+      will find even the properties which are significant for spatial knowledge
+      giving way to those which facilitate knowledge of other things&mdash;perhaps
+      a knowledge of the general relations of number. There will be nothing in
+      the conceptual definitions even to suggest spatial form, size, or
+      direction. This does not mean that they are unreal mental inventions, but
+      it indicates that direct physical qualities have been transmuted into
+      tools for a special end&mdash;the end of intellectual organization. In
+      every machine the primary state of material has been modified by
+      subordinating it to use for a purpose. Not the stuff in its original form
+      but in its adaptation to an end is important. No one would have a
+      knowledge of a machine who could enumerate all the materials entering into
+      its structure, but only he who knew their uses and could tell why they are
+      employed as they are. In like fashion one has a knowledge of mathematical
+      conceptions only when he sees the problems in which they function and
+      their specific utility in dealing with these problems. "Knowing" the
+      definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of
+      a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the
+      meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the
+      system of which it is a member.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the
+      direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a
+      perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience.
+      In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from
+      devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit
+      of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes
+      thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But
+      this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the
+      means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress
+      consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are
+      not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of
+      satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new
+      desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for
+      intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new
+      possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress
+      takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to
+      suggestion of new ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action
+      is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual
+      command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of
+      production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the
+      fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors,
+      telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are
+      conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of
+      them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational
+      inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary
+      to our daily life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus
+      procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for
+      satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human
+      purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal
+      of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been
+      absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly
+      and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely
+      remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places
+      upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the
+      habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an
+      extension of our physical arms and legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes
+      and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature
+      of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect
+      in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly
+      separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has
+      brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has
+      brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of
+      nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the
+      future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with
+      the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men
+      placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a
+      firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once
+      thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream;
+      the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized
+      men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent
+      gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an
+      intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of
+      human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education
+      in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine
+      generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary
+      use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and
+      unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence
+      of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling
+      philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical
+      knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances
+      without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say
+      that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode
+      of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of
+      remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of
+      necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to
+      deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids
+      constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an
+      imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science
+      means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the
+      master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not
+      beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is
+      experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change
+      men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the
+      same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of
+      being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime
+      region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is
+      found indigenous in experience:&mdash;the factor by which past experiences
+      are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to
+      signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also
+      that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable
+      trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally
+      repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical
+      with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel
+      element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element
+      requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless
+      abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects
+      from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought
+      helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a
+      meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very
+      artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience
+      available for guidance of another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large
+      scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and
+      strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the
+      subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved
+      for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress.
+      In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be
+      of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is
+      peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material
+      is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential.
+      Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the
+      peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is
+      not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and
+      fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience
+      may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record
+      what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the
+      permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it
+      may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions
+      is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor
+      when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range
+      of adaptation than other mechanical tools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of
+      an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,&mdash;its
+      extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these
+      possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be
+      fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization
+      is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests
+      exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations
+      were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and
+      free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a
+      short time,&mdash;limited to their own established customs as a measure of
+      all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are
+      equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location
+      in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and
+      episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the
+      "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range
+      of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record,
+      fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given
+      experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local
+      habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body.
+      Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to
+      the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they
+      cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and
+      personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon
+      it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in
+      this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were,
+      instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must
+      take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find
+      a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own.
+      Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language
+      which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme
+      successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant
+      to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to
+      express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will
+      know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances
+      the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation
+      supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed
+      meanings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection
+      and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and
+      on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole
+      instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And
+      if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon
+      it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very
+      different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in
+      permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached
+      for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action.
+      There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but
+      genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its
+      expansion and its direction to new possibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational
+      tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the
+      curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests
+      is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary
+      philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before
+      experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its
+      way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly
+      it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and
+      literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science
+      is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the
+      educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum,
+      nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante,
+      p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career,
+      for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it.
+      Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability
+      to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent
+      upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for
+      the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions
+      of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse
+      goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is
+      to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality.
+      One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles
+      by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious
+      subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual
+      self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and
+      technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information
+      about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction
+      to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural
+      knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational
+      attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's
+      occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion
+      that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was
+      natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and
+      serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom
+      rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then
+      identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of
+      life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching
+      to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of
+      science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the
+      appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and
+      after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that
+      which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which
+      concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge
+      laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the
+      mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put
+      themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of
+      science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a
+      democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that
+      natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases
+      its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class.
+      For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition
+      to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to
+      exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink
+      to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may
+      evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to
+      find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices
+      which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of
+      Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important
+      contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest
+      opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par
+      excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the
+      possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to
+      the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned
+      class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge
+      is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the
+      past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and
+      human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is
+      humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even
+      educational.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM17">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what
+      commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a
+      statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a
+      belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the
+      statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics
+      of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high
+      degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the
+      learner&mdash;the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more
+      refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored,
+      science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less
+      interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an
+      unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to
+      perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race:
+      emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the
+      opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal
+      habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization,
+      and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In
+      emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated
+      and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any
+      individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and
+      philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon
+      the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden,
+      the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be
+      treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for
+      the better pursuit of these problems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have
+      already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide
+      with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility,
+      culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline
+      or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are
+      valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and
+      there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern
+      and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of
+      values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends
+      subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of
+      the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant
+      contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of
+      educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior
+      discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the
+      other, by bringing them into connection with one another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is
+      indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things
+      and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one
+      thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and
+      hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all
+      symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language
+      the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands
+      in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we
+      take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention
+      of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally
+      direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of
+      agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would
+      remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery
+      to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the
+      range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider
+      meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or
+      symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the
+      disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person&mdash;so
+      dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect
+      experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is
+      always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that
+      instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it
+      enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will
+      become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to
+      this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere
+      bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with
+      it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to
+      express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in
+      contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a
+      representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and
+      "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the
+      realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas
+      except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc.,
+      for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a
+      thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a
+      technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing
+      it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about
+      light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a
+      misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of
+      technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the
+      sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume
+      that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations
+      sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by
+      formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or
+      bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it
+      must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic
+      material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying
+      facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine
+      situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the
+      material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the
+      pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account;
+      from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying
+      subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and
+      of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material
+      symbolically conveyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand
+      for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision
+      made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing
+      need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while
+      the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary
+      education, where the demand for the available background of direct
+      experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or
+      elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of
+      laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field,
+      is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts
+      and problems&mdash;to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of
+      technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at
+      first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school
+      activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not
+      to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to
+      acquire skill,&mdash;though these results may accrue as by-products,&mdash;but
+      to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and
+      effective the interest in intellectual progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out
+      three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct
+      from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in
+      appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of
+      study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the
+      course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the
+      worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon
+      qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods;
+      upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values,
+      and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these
+      values&mdash;the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc.,
+      proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system
+      in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as
+      standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and
+      instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They
+      overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that
+      is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from
+      professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself
+      specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations.
+      An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are
+      conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some
+      correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these
+      traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past
+      experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is
+      ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the
+      ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal
+      realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been
+      taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed
+      forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies
+      equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has
+      had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness
+      toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of
+      generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty
+      and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard
+      remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate
+      into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge
+      that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the
+      degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a
+      person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of
+      the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical
+      opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear
+      to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the
+      split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy,
+      an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked
+      through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to
+      clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of
+      clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He
+      may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and
+      division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of
+      these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes
+      home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance
+      of the logical norms&mdash;so-called&mdash;remains as much an external
+      piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able
+      to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were
+      confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is
+      as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits
+      is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes&mdash;habitual
+      modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There
+      are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in
+      schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon
+      promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given
+      to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and
+      problems is vitally brought home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or
+      representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work
+      of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving
+      imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The
+      imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement
+      of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than
+      mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative
+      with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the
+      full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy
+      tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art,"
+      as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by
+      neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which
+      reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill
+      and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and&mdash;to some extent&mdash;practice,
+      have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative
+      enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially
+      marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the
+      difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should
+      be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a
+      difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result
+      is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of
+      childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine
+      efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement
+      comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do
+      better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the
+      achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside. Meantime
+      mind-wandering and wayward fancy are nothing but the unsuppressible
+      imagination cut loose from concern with what is done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of
+      realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct
+      physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in
+      teaching. The emphasis put in this book, in accord with many tendencies in
+      contemporary education, upon activity, will be misleading if it is not
+      recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral part of
+      human activity as is muscular movement. The educative value of manual
+      activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play, depends upon
+      the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing of the meaning of
+      what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are dramatizations.
+      Their utilitarian value in forming habits of skill to be used for tangible
+      results is important, but not when isolated from the appreciative side.
+      Were it not for the accompanying play of imagination, there would be no
+      road from a direct activity to representative knowledge; for it is by
+      imagination that symbols are translated over into a direct meaning and
+      integrated with a narrower activity so as to expand and enrich it. When
+      the representative creative imagination is made merely literary and
+      mythological, symbols are rendered mere means of directing physical
+      reactions of the organs of speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. In the account previously given nothing was explicitly said about the
+      place of literature and the fine arts in the course of study. The omission
+      at that point was intentional. At the outset, there is no sharp
+      demarcation of useful, or industrial, arts and fine arts. The activities
+      mentioned in Chapter XV contain within themselves the factors later
+      discriminated into fine and useful arts. As engaging the emotions and the
+      imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts their
+      quality. As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of tools to
+      materials with constantly increasing perfection, they involve the element
+      of technique indispensable to artistic production. From the standpoint of
+      product, or the work of art, they are naturally defective, though even in
+      this respect when they comprise genuine appreciation they often have a
+      rudimentary charm. As experiences they have both an artistic and an
+      esthetic quality. When they emerge into activities which are tested by
+      their product and when the socially serviceable value of the product is
+      emphasized, they pass into useful or industrial arts. When they develop in
+      the direction of an enhanced appreciation of the immediate qualities which
+      appeal to taste, they grow into fine arts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of its meanings, appreciation is opposed to depreciation. It
+      denotes an enlarged, an intensified prizing, not merely a prizing, much
+      less&mdash;like depreciation&mdash;a lowered and degraded prizing. This
+      enhancement of the qualities which make any ordinary experience appealing,
+      appropriable&mdash;capable of full assimilation&mdash;and enjoyable,
+      constitutes the prime function of literature, music, drawing, painting,
+      etc., in education. They are not the exclusive agencies of appreciation in
+      the most general sense of that word; but they are the chief agencies of an
+      intensified, enhanced appreciation. As such, they are not only
+      intrinsically and directly enjoyable, but they serve a purpose beyond
+      themselves. They have the office, in increased degree, of all appreciation
+      in fixing taste, in forming standards for the worth of later experiences.
+      They arouse discontent with conditions which fall below their measure;
+      they create a demand for surroundings coming up to their own level. They
+      reveal a depth and range of meaning in experiences which otherwise might
+      be mediocre and trivial. They supply, that is, organs of vision. Moreover,
+      in their fullness they represent the concentration and consummation of
+      elements of good which are otherwise scattered and incomplete. They select
+      and focus the elements of enjoyable worth which make any experience
+      directly enjoyable. They are not luxuries of education, but emphatic
+      expressions of that which makes any education worth while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Valuation of Studies. The theory of educational values involves not
+      only an account of the nature of appreciation as fixing the measure of
+      subsequent valuations, but an account of the specific directions in which
+      these valuations occur. To value means primarily to prize, to esteem; but
+      secondarily it means to apprise, to estimate. It means, that is, the act
+      of cherishing something, holding it dear, and also the act of passing
+      judgment upon the nature and amount of its value as compared with
+      something else. To value in the latter sense is to valuate or evaluate.
+      The distinction coincides with that sometimes made between intrinsic and
+      instrumental values. Intrinsic values are not objects of judgment, they
+      cannot (as intrinsic) be compared, or regarded as greater and less, better
+      or worse. They are invaluable; and if a thing is invaluable, it is neither
+      more nor less so than any other invaluable. But occasions present
+      themselves when it is necessary to choose, when we must let one thing go
+      in order to take another. This establishes an order of preference, a
+      greater and less, better and worse. Things judged or passed upon have to
+      be estimated in relation to some third thing, some further end. With
+      respect to that, they are means, or instrumental values.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may imagine a man who at one time thoroughly enjoys converse with his
+      friends, at another the hearing of a symphony; at another the eating of
+      his meals; at another the reading of a book; at another the earning of
+      money, and so on. As an appreciative realization, each of these is an
+      intrinsic value. It occupies a particular place in life; it serves its own
+      end, which cannot be supplied by a substitute. There is no question of
+      comparative value, and hence none of valuation. Each is the specific good
+      which it is, and that is all that can be said. In its own place, none is a
+      means to anything beyond itself. But there may arise a situation in which
+      they compete or conflict, in which a choice has to be made. Now comparison
+      comes in. Since a choice has to be made, we want to know the respective
+      claims of each competitor. What is to be said for it? What does it offer
+      in comparison with, as balanced over against, some other possibility?
+      Raising these questions means that a particular good is no longer an end
+      in itself, an intrinsic good. For if it were, its claims would be
+      incomparable, imperative. The question is now as to its status as a means
+      of realizing something else, which is then the invaluable of that
+      situation. If a man has just eaten, or if he is well fed generally and the
+      opportunity to hear music is a rarity, he will probably prefer the music
+      to eating. In the given situation that will render the greater
+      contribution. If he is starving, or if he is satiated with music for the
+      time being, he will naturally judge food to have the greater worth. In the
+      abstract or at large, apart from the needs of a particular situation in
+      which choice has to be made, there is no such thing as degrees or order of
+      value. Certain conclusions follow with respect to educational values. We
+      cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies. It is futile to
+      attempt to arrange them in an order, beginning with one having least worth
+      and going on to that of maximum value. In so far as any study has a unique
+      or irreplaceable function in experience, in so far as it marks a
+      characteristic enrichment of life, its worth is intrinsic or incomparable.
+      Since education is not a means to living, but is identical with the
+      operation of living a life which is fruitful and inherently significant,
+      the only ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living
+      itself. And this is not an end to which studies and activities are
+      subordinate means; it is the whole of which they are ingredients. And what
+      has been said about appreciation means that every study in one of its
+      aspects ought to have just such ultimate significance. It is true of
+      arithmetic as it is of poetry that in some place and at some time it ought
+      to be a good to be appreciated on its own account&mdash;just as an
+      enjoyable experience, in short. If it is not, then when the time and place
+      come for it to be used as a means or instrumentality, it will be in just
+      that much handicapped. Never having been realized or appreciated for
+      itself, one will miss something of its capacity as a resource for other
+      ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It equally follows that when we compare studies as to their values, that
+      is, treat them as means to something beyond themselves, that which
+      controls their proper valuation is found in the specific situation in
+      which they are to be used. The way to enable a student to apprehend the
+      instrumental value of arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit it
+      will be to him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him
+      discover that success in something he is interested in doing depends upon
+      ability to use number.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It also follows that the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of value
+      among different studies is a misguided one, in spite of the amount of time
+      recently devoted to the undertaking. Science for example may have any kind
+      of value, depending upon the situation into which it enters as a means. To
+      some the value of science may be military; it may be an instrument in
+      strengthening means of offense or defense; it may be technological, a tool
+      for engineering; or it may be commercial&mdash;an aid in the successful
+      conduct of business; under other conditions, its worth may be
+      philanthropic&mdash;the service it renders in relieving human suffering;
+      or again it may be quite conventional&mdash;of value in establishing one's
+      social status as an "educated" person. As matter of fact, science serves
+      all these purposes, and it would be an arbitrary task to try to fix upon
+      one of them as its "real" end. All that we can be sure of educationally is
+      that science should be taught so as to be an end in itself in the lives of
+      students&mdash;something worth while on account of its own unique
+      intrinsic contribution to the experience of life. Primarily it must have
+      "appreciation value." If we take something which seems to be at the
+      opposite pole, like poetry, the same sort of statement applies. It may be
+      that, at the present time, its chief value is the contribution it makes to
+      the enjoyment of leisure. But that may represent a degenerate condition
+      rather than anything necessary. Poetry has historically been allied with
+      religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the
+      mysterious depths of things. It has had an enormous patriotic value. Homer
+      to the Greeks was a Bible, a textbook of morals, a history, and a national
+      inspiration. In any case, it may be said that an education which does not
+      succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in
+      its leisure, has something the matter with it&mdash;or else the poetry is
+      artificial poetry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same considerations apply to the value of a study or a topic of a
+      study with reference to its motivating force. Those responsible for
+      planning and teaching the course of study should have grounds for thinking
+      that the studies and topics included furnish both direct increments to the
+      enriching of lives of the pupils and also materials which they can put to
+      use in other concerns of direct interest. Since the curriculum is always
+      getting loaded down with purely inherited traditional matter and with
+      subjects which represent mainly the energy of some influential person or
+      group of persons in behalf of something dear to them, it requires constant
+      inspection, criticism, and revision to make sure it is accomplishing its
+      purpose. Then there is always the probability that it represents the
+      values of adults rather than those of children and youth, or those of
+      pupils a generation ago rather than those of the present day. Hence a
+      further need for a critical outlook and survey. But these considerations
+      do not mean that for a subject to have motivating value to a pupil
+      (whether intrinsic or instrumental) is the same thing as for him to be
+      aware of the value, or to be able to tell what the study is good for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, as long as any topic makes an immediate appeal, it is
+      not necessary to ask what it is good for. This is a question which can be
+      asked only about instrumental values. Some goods are not good for
+      anything; they are just goods. Any other notion leads to an absurdity. For
+      we cannot stop asking the question about an instrumental good, one whose
+      value lies in its being good for something, unless there is at some point
+      something intrinsically good, good for itself. To a hungry, healthy child,
+      food is a good of the situation; we do not have to bring him to
+      consciousness of the ends subserved by food in order to supply a motive to
+      eat. The food in connection with his appetite is a motive. The same thing
+      holds of mentally eager pupils with respect to many topics. Neither they
+      nor the teacher could possibly foretell with any exactness the purposes
+      learning is to accomplish in the future; nor as long as the eagerness
+      continues is it advisable to try to specify particular goods which are to
+      come of it. The proof of a good is found in the fact that the pupil
+      responds; his response is use. His response to the material shows that the
+      subject functions in his life. It is unsound to urge that, say, Latin has
+      a value per se in the abstract, just as a study, as a sufficient
+      justification for teaching it. But it is equally absurd to argue that
+      unless teacher or pupil can point out some definite assignable future use
+      to which it is to be put, it lacks justifying value. When pupils are
+      genuinely concerned in learning Latin, that is of itself proof that it
+      possesses value. The most which one is entitled to ask in such cases is
+      whether in view of the shortness of time, there are not other things of
+      intrinsic value which in addition have greater instrumental value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This brings us to the matter of instrumental values&mdash;topics studied
+      because of some end beyond themselves. If a child is ill and his appetite
+      does not lead him to eat when food is presented, or if his appetite is
+      perverted so that he prefers candy to meat and vegetables, conscious
+      reference to results is indicated. He needs to be made conscious of
+      consequences as a justification of the positive or negative value of
+      certain objects. Or the state of things may be normal enough, and yet an
+      individual not be moved by some matter because he does not grasp how his
+      attainment of some intrinsic good depends upon active concern with what is
+      presented. In such cases, it is obviously the part of wisdom to establish
+      consciousness of connection. In general what is desirable is that a topic
+      be presented in such a way that it either have an immediate value, and
+      require no justification, or else be perceived to be a means of achieving
+      something of intrinsic value. An instrumental value then has the intrinsic
+      value of being a means to an end. It may be questioned whether some of the
+      present pedagogical interest in the matter of values of studies is not
+      either excessive or else too narrow. Sometimes it appears to be a labored
+      effort to furnish an apologetic for topics which no longer operate to any
+      purpose, direct or indirect, in the lives of pupils. At other times, the
+      reaction against useless lumber seems to have gone to the extent of
+      supposing that no subject or topic should be taught unless some quite
+      definite future utility can be pointed out by those making the course of
+      study or by the pupil himself, unmindful of the fact that life is its own
+      excuse for being; and that definite utilities which can be pointed out are
+      themselves justified only because they increase the experienced content of
+      life itself. 3. The Segregation and Organization of Values. It is of
+      course possible to classify in a general way the various valuable phases
+      of life. In order to get a survey of aims sufficiently wide (See ante, p.
+      110) to give breadth and flexibility to the enterprise of education, there
+      is some advantage in such a classification. But it is a great mistake to
+      regard these values as ultimate ends to which the concrete satisfactions
+      of experience are subordinate. They are nothing but generalizations, more
+      or less adequate, of concrete goods. Health, wealth, efficiency,
+      sociability, utility, culture, happiness itself are only abstract terms
+      which sum up a multitude of particulars. To regard such things as
+      standards for the valuation of concrete topics and process of education is
+      to subordinate to an abstraction the concrete facts from which the
+      abstraction is derived. They are not in any true sense standards of
+      valuation; these are found, as we have previously seen, in the specific
+      realizations which form tastes and habits of preference. They are,
+      however, of significance as points of view elevated above the details of
+      life whence to survey the field and see how its constituent details are
+      distributed, and whether they are well proportioned. No classification can
+      have other than a provisional validity. The following may prove of some
+      help. We may say that the kind of experience to which the work of the
+      schools should contribute is one marked by executive competency in the
+      management of resources and obstacles encountered (efficiency); by
+      sociability, or interest in the direct companionship of others; by
+      aesthetic taste or capacity to appreciate artistic excellence in at least
+      some of its classic forms; by trained intellectual method, or interest in
+      some mode of scientific achievement; and by sensitiveness to the rights
+      and claims of others&mdash;conscientiousness. And while these
+      considerations are not standards of value, they are useful criteria for
+      survey, criticism, and better organization of existing methods and subject
+      matter of instruction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The need of such general points of view is the greater because of a
+      tendency to segregate educational values due to the isolation from one
+      another of the various pursuits of life. The idea is prevalent that
+      different studies represent separate kinds of values, and that the
+      curriculum should, therefore, be constituted by gathering together various
+      studies till a sufficient variety of independent values have been cared
+      for. The following quotation does not use the word value, but it contains
+      the notion of a curriculum constructed on the idea that there are a number
+      of separate ends to be reached, and that various studies may be evaluated
+      by referring each study to its respective end. "Memory is trained by most
+      studies, but best by languages and history; taste is trained by the more
+      advanced study of languages, and still better by English literature;
+      imagination by all higher language teaching, but chiefly by Greek and
+      Latin poetry; observation by science work in the laboratory, though some
+      training is to be got from the earlier stages of Latin and Greek; for
+      expression, Greek and Latin composition comes first and English
+      composition next; for abstract reasoning, mathematics stands almost alone;
+      for concrete reasoning, science comes first, then geometry; for social
+      reasoning, the Greek and Roman historians and orators come first, and
+      general history next. Hence the narrowest education which can claim to be
+      at all complete includes Latin, one modern language, some history, some
+      English literature, and one science." There is much in the wording of this
+      passage which is irrelevant to our point and which must be discounted to
+      make it clear. The phraseology betrays the particular provincial tradition
+      within which the author is writing. There is the unquestioned assumption
+      of "faculties" to be trained, and a dominant interest in the ancient
+      languages; there is comparative disregard of the earth on which men happen
+      to live and the bodies they happen to carry around with them. But with
+      allowances made for these matters (even with their complete abandonment)
+      we find much in contemporary educational philosophy which parallels the
+      fundamental notion of parceling out special values to segregated studies.
+      Even when some one end is set up as a standard of value, like social
+      efficiency or culture, it will often be found to be but a verbal heading
+      under which a variety of disconnected factors are comprised. And although
+      the general tendency is to allow a greater variety of values to a given
+      study than does the passage quoted, yet the attempt to inventory a number
+      of values attaching to each study and to state the amount of each value
+      which the given study possesses emphasizes an implied educational
+      disintegration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As matter of fact, such schemes of values of studies are largely but
+      unconscious justifications of the curriculum with which one is familiar.
+      One accepts, for the most part, the studies of the existing course and
+      then assigns values to them as a sufficient reason for their being taught.
+      Mathematics is said to have, for example, disciplinary value in
+      habituating the pupil to accuracy of statement and closeness of reasoning;
+      it has utilitarian value in giving command of the arts of calculation
+      involved in trade and the arts; culture value in its enlargement of the
+      imagination in dealing with the most general relations of things; even
+      religious value in its concept of the infinite and allied ideas. But
+      clearly mathematics does not accomplish such results, because it is
+      endowed with miraculous potencies called values; it has these values if
+      and when it accomplishes these results, and not otherwise. The statements
+      may help a teacher to a larger vision of the possible results to be
+      effected by instruction in mathematical topics. But unfortunately, the
+      tendency is to treat the statement as indicating powers inherently
+      residing in the subject, whether they operate or not, and thus to give it
+      a rigid justification. If they do not operate, the blame is put not on the
+      subject as taught, but on the indifference and recalcitrancy of pupils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This attitude toward subjects is the obverse side of the conception of
+      experience or life as a patchwork of independent interests which exist
+      side by side and limit one another. Students of politics are familiar with
+      a check and balance theory of the powers of government. There are supposed
+      to be independent separate functions, like the legislative, executive,
+      judicial, administrative, and all goes well if each of these checks all
+      the others and thus creates an ideal balance. There is a philosophy which
+      might well be called the check and balance theory of experience. Life
+      presents a diversity of interests. Left to themselves, they tend to
+      encroach on one another. The ideal is to prescribe a special territory for
+      each till the whole ground of experience is covered, and then see to it
+      each remains within its own boundaries. Politics, business, recreation,
+      art, science, the learned professions, polite intercourse, leisure,
+      represent such interests. Each of these ramifies into many branches:
+      business into manual occupations, executive positions, bookkeeping,
+      railroading, banking, agriculture, trade and commerce, etc., and so with
+      each of the others. An ideal education would then supply the means of
+      meeting these separate and pigeon-holed interests. And when we look at the
+      schools, it is easy to get the impression that they accept this view of
+      the nature of adult life, and set for themselves the task of meeting its
+      demands. Each interest is acknowledged as a kind of fixed institution to
+      which something in the course of study must correspond. The course of
+      study must then have some civics and history politically and patriotically
+      viewed: some utilitarian studies; some science; some art (mainly
+      literature of course); some provision for recreation; some moral
+      education; and so on. And it will be found that a large part of current
+      agitation about schools is concerned with clamor and controversy about the
+      due meed of recognition to be given to each of these interests, and with
+      struggles to secure for each its due share in the course of study; or, if
+      this does not seem feasible in the existing school system, then to secure
+      a new and separate kind of schooling to meet the need. In the multitude of
+      educations education is forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obvious outcome is congestion of the course of study, overpressure and
+      distraction of pupils, and a narrow specialization fatal to the very idea
+      of education. But these bad results usually lead to more of the same sort
+      of thing as a remedy. When it is perceived that after all the requirements
+      of a full life experience are not met, the deficiency is not laid to the
+      isolation and narrowness of the teaching of the existing subjects, and
+      this recognition made the basis of reorganization of the system. No, the
+      lack is something to be made up for by the introduction of still another
+      study, or, if necessary, another kind of school. And as a rule those who
+      object to the resulting overcrowding and consequent superficiality and
+      distraction usually also have recourse to a merely quantitative criterion:
+      the remedy is to cut off a great many studies as fads and frills, and
+      return to the good old curriculum of the three R's in elementary education
+      and the equally good and equally old-fashioned curriculum of the classics
+      and mathematics in higher education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation has, of course, its historic explanation. Various epochs of
+      the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. Each
+      of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit,
+      like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way into
+      educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of
+      study, distinct types of schools. With the rapid change of political,
+      scientific, and economic interests in the last century, provision had to
+      be made for new values. Though the older courses resisted, they have had
+      at least in this country to retire their pretensions to a monopoly. They
+      have not, however, been reorganized in content and aim; they have only
+      been reduced in amount. The new studies, representing the new interests,
+      have not been used to transform the method and aim of all instruction;
+      they have been injected and added on. The result is a conglomerate, the
+      cement of which consists in the mechanics of the school program or time
+      table. Thence arises the scheme of values and standards of value which we
+      have mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This situation in education represents the divisions and separations which
+      obtain in social life. The variety of interests which should mark any rich
+      and balanced experience have been torn asunder and deposited in separate
+      institutions with diverse and independent purposes and methods. Business
+      is business, science is science, art is art, politics is politics, social
+      intercourse is social intercourse, morals is morals, recreation is
+      recreation, and so on. Each possesses a separate and independent province
+      with its own peculiar aims and ways of proceeding. Each contributes to the
+      others only externally and accidentally. All of them together make up the
+      whole of life by just apposition and addition. What does one expect from
+      business save that it should furnish money, to be used in turn for making
+      more money and for support of self and family, for buying books and
+      pictures, tickets to concerts which may afford culture, and for paying
+      taxes, charitable gifts and other things of social and ethical value? How
+      unreasonable to expect that the pursuit of business should be itself a
+      culture of the imagination, in breadth and refinement; that it should
+      directly, and not through the money which it supplies, have social service
+      for its animating principle and be conducted as an enterprise in behalf of
+      social organization! The same thing is to be said, mutatis mutandis, of
+      the pursuit of art or science or politics or religion. Each has become
+      specialized not merely in its appliances and its demands upon time, but in
+      its aim and animating spirit. Unconsciously, our course of studies and our
+      theories of the educational values of studies reflect this division of
+      interests. The point at issue in a theory of educational value is then the
+      unity or integrity of experience. How shall it be full and varied without
+      losing unity of spirit? How shall it be one and yet not narrow and
+      monotonous in its unity? Ultimately, the question of values and a standard
+      of values is the moral question of the organization of the interests of
+      life. Educationally, the question concerns that organization of schools,
+      materials, and methods which will operate to achieve breadth and richness
+      of experience. How shall we secure breadth of outlook without sacrificing
+      efficiency of execution? How shall we secure the diversity of interests,
+      without paying the price of isolation? How shall the individual be
+      rendered executive in his intelligence instead of at the cost of his
+      intelligence? How shall art, science, and politics reinforce one another
+      in an enriched temper of mind instead of constituting ends pursued at one
+      another's expense? How can the interests of life and the studies which
+      enforce them enrich the common experience of men instead of dividing men
+      from one another? With the questions of reorganization thus suggested, we
+      shall be concerned in the concluding chapters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM18">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      have been covered in the prior discussion of aims and interests. But since
+      educational values are generally discussed in connection with the claims
+      of the various studies of the curriculum, the consideration of aim and
+      interest is here resumed from the point of view of special studies. The
+      term "value" has two quite different meanings. On the one hand, it denotes
+      the attitude of prizing a thing finding it worth while, for its own sake,
+      or intrinsically. This is a name for a full or complete experience. To
+      value in this sense is to appreciate. But to value also means a
+      distinctively intellectual act&mdash;an operation of comparing and judging&mdash;to
+      valuate. This occurs when direct full experience is lacking, and the
+      question arises which of the various possibilities of a situation is to be
+      preferred in order to reach a full realization, or vital experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We must not, however, divide the studies of the curriculum into the
+      appreciative, those concerned with intrinsic value, and the instrumental,
+      concerned with those which are of value or ends beyond themselves. The
+      formation of proper standards in any subject depends upon a realization of
+      the contribution which it makes to the immediate significance of
+      experience, upon a direct appreciation. Literature and the fine arts are
+      of peculiar value because they represent appreciation at its best&mdash;a
+      heightened realization of meaning through selection and concentration. But
+      every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for
+      the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Contribution to immediate intrinsic values in all their variety in
+      experience is the only criterion for determining the worth of instrumental
+      and derived values in studies. The tendency to assign separate values to
+      each study and to regard the curriculum in its entirety as a kind of
+      composite made by the aggregation of segregated values is a result of the
+      isolation of social groups and classes. Hence it is the business of
+      education in a democratic social group to struggle against this isolation
+      in order that the various interests may reinforce and play into one
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Origin of the Opposition.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The isolation of aims and values which we have been considering leads to
+      opposition between them. Probably the most deep-seated antithesis which
+      has shown itself in educational history is that between education in
+      preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure. The bare
+      terms "useful labor" and "leisure" confirm the statement already made that
+      the segregation and conflict of values are not self-inclosed, but reflect
+      a division within social life. Were the two functions of gaining a
+      livelihood by work and enjoying in a cultivated way the opportunities of
+      leisure, distributed equally among the different members of a community,
+      it would not occur to any one that there was any conflict of educational
+      agencies and aims involved. It would be self-evident that the question was
+      how education could contribute most effectively to both. And while it
+      might be found that some materials of instruction chiefly accomplished one
+      result and other subject matter the other, it would be evident that care
+      must be taken to secure as much overlapping as conditions permit; that is,
+      the education which had leisure more directly in view should indirectly
+      reinforce as much as possible the efficiency and the enjoyment of work,
+      while that aiming at the latter should produce habits of emotion and
+      intellect which would procure a worthy cultivation of leisure. These
+      general considerations are amply borne out by the historical development
+      of educational philosophy. The separation of liberal education from
+      professional and industrial education goes back to the time of the Greeks,
+      and was formulated expressly on the basis of a division of classes into
+      those who had to labor for a living and those who were relieved from this
+      necessity. The conception that liberal education, adapted to men in the
+      latter class, is intrinsically higher than the servile training given to
+      the latter class reflected the fact that one class was free and the other
+      servile in its social status. The latter class labored not only for its
+      own subsistence, but also for the means which enabled the superior class
+      to live without personally engaging in occupations taking almost all the
+      time and not of a nature to engage or reward intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That a certain amount of labor must be engaged in goes without saying.
+      Human beings have to live and it requires work to supply the resources of
+      life. Even if we insist that the interests connected with getting a living
+      are only material and hence intrinsically lower than those connected with
+      enjoyment of time released from labor, and even if it were admitted that
+      there is something engrossing and insubordinate in material interests
+      which leads them to strive to usurp the place belonging to the higher
+      ideal interests, this would not&mdash;barring the fact of socially divided
+      classes&mdash;lead to neglect of the kind of education which trains men
+      for the useful pursuits. It would rather lead to scrupulous care for them,
+      so that men were trained to be efficient in them and yet to keep them in
+      their place; education would see to it that we avoided the evil results
+      which flow from their being allowed to flourish in obscure purlieus of
+      neglect. Only when a division of these interests coincides with a division
+      of an inferior and a superior social class will preparation for useful
+      work be looked down upon with contempt as an unworthy thing: a fact which
+      prepares one for the conclusion that the rigid identification of work with
+      material interests, and leisure with ideal interests is itself a social
+      product. The educational formulations of the social situation made over
+      two thousand years ago have been so influential and give such a clear and
+      logical recognition of the implications of the division into laboring and
+      leisure classes, that they deserve especial note. According to them, man
+      occupies the highest place in the scheme of animate existence. In part, he
+      shares the constitution and functions of plants and animals&mdash;nutritive,
+      reproductive, motor or practical. The distinctively human function is
+      reason existing for the sake of beholding the spectacle of the universe.
+      Hence the truly human end is the fullest possible of this distinctive
+      human prerogative. The life of observation, meditation, cogitation, and
+      speculation pursued as an end in itself is the proper life of man. From
+      reason moreover proceeds the proper control of the lower elements of human
+      nature&mdash;the appetites and the active, motor, impulses. In themselves
+      greedy, insubordinate, lovers of excess, aiming only at their own satiety,
+      they observe moderation&mdash;the law of the mean&mdash;and serve
+      desirable ends as they are subjected to the rule of reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the situation as an affair of theoretical psychology and as most
+      adequately stated by Aristotle. But this state of things is reflected in
+      the constitution of classes of men and hence in the organization of
+      society. Only in a comparatively small number is the function of reason
+      capable of operating as a law of life. In the mass of people, vegetative
+      and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble
+      and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and
+      passion. Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason
+      constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they are
+      means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves, although
+      unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain discretion
+      in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by nature, and not
+      merely by social convention, there are those who are slaves&mdash;that is,
+      means for the ends of others. 1 The great body of artisans are in one
+      important respect worse off than even slaves. Like the latter they are
+      given up to the service of ends external to themselves; but since they do
+      not enjoy the intimate association with the free superior class
+      experienced by domestic slaves they remain on a lower plane of excellence.
+      Moreover, women are classed with slaves and craftsmen as factors among the
+      animate instrumentalities of production and reproduction of the means for
+      a free or rational life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Individually and collectively there is a gulf between merely living and
+      living worthily. In order that one may live worthily he must first live,
+      and so with collective society. The time and energy spent upon mere life,
+      upon the gaining of subsistence, detracts from that available for
+      activities that have an inherent rational meaning; they also unfit for the
+      latter. Means are menial, the serviceable is servile. The true life is
+      possible only in the degree in which the physical necessities are had
+      without effort and without attention. Hence slaves, artisans, and women
+      are employed in furnishing the means of subsistence in order that others,
+      those adequately equipped with intelligence, may live the life of
+      leisurely concern with things intrinsically worth while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To these two modes of occupation, with their distinction of servile and
+      free activities (or "arts") correspond two types of education: the base or
+      mechanical and the liberal or intellectual. Some persons are trained by
+      suitable practical exercises for capacity in doing things, for ability to
+      use the mechanical tools involved in turning out physical commodities and
+      rendering personal service. This training is a mere matter of habituation
+      and technical skill; it operates through repetition and assiduity in
+      application, not through awakening and nurturing thought. Liberal
+      education aims to train intelligence for its proper office: to know. The
+      less this knowledge has to do with practical affairs, with making or
+      producing, the more adequately it engages intelligence. So consistently
+      does Aristotle draw the line between menial and liberal education that he
+      puts what are now called the "fine" arts, music, painting, sculpture, in
+      the same class with menial arts so far as their practice is concerned.
+      They involve physical agencies, assiduity of practice, and external
+      results. In discussing, for example, education in music he raises the
+      question how far the young should be practiced in the playing of
+      instruments. His answer is that such practice and proficiency may be
+      tolerated as conduce to appreciation; that is, to understanding and
+      enjoyment of music when played by slaves or professionals. When
+      professional power is aimed at, music sinks from the liberal to the
+      professional level. One might then as well teach cooking, says Aristotle.
+      Even a liberal concern with the works of fine art depends upon the
+      existence of a hireling class of practitioners who have subordinated the
+      development of their own personality to attaining skill in mechanical
+      execution. The higher the activity the more purely mental is it; the less
+      does it have to do with physical things or with the body. The more purely
+      mental it is, the more independent or self-sufficing is it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These last words remind us that Aristotle again makes a distinction of
+      superior and inferior even within those living the life of reason. For
+      there is a distinction in ends and in free action, according as one's life
+      is merely accompanied by reason or as it makes reason its own medium. That
+      is to say, the free citizen who devotes himself to the public life of his
+      community, sharing in the management of its affairs and winning personal
+      honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied by reason. But the
+      thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific inquiry and philosophic
+      speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not simply by *. Even the
+      activity of the citizen in his civic relations, in other words, retains
+      some of the taint of practice, of external or merely instrumental doing.
+      This infection is shown by the fact that civic activity and civic
+      excellence need the help of others; one cannot engage in public life all
+      by himself. But all needs, all desires imply, in the philosophy of
+      Aristotle, a material factor; they involve lack, privation; they are
+      dependent upon something beyond themselves for completion. A purely
+      intellectual life, however, one carries on by himself, in himself; such
+      assistance as he may derive from others is accidental, rather than
+      intrinsic. In knowing, in the life of theory, reason finds its own full
+      manifestation; knowing for the sake of knowing irrespective of any
+      application is alone independent, or self-sufficing. Hence only the
+      education that makes for power to know as an end in itself, without
+      reference to the practice of even civic duties, is truly liberal or free.
+      2. The Present Situation. If the Aristotelian conception represented just
+      Aristotle's personal view, it would be a more or less interesting
+      historical curiosity. It could be dismissed as an illustration of the lack
+      of sympathy or the amount of academic pedantry which may coexist with
+      extraordinary intellectual gifts. But Aristotle simply described without
+      confusion and without that insincerity always attendant upon mental
+      confusion, the life that was before him. That the actual social situation
+      has greatly changed since his day there is no need to say. But in spite of
+      these changes, in spite of the abolition of legal serfdom, and the spread
+      of democracy, with the extension of science and of general education (in
+      books, newspapers, travel, and general intercourse as well as in schools),
+      there remains enough of a cleavage of society into a learned and an
+      unlearned class, a leisure and a laboring class, to make his point of view
+      a most enlightening one from which to criticize the separation between
+      culture and utility in present education. Behind the intellectual and
+      abstract distinction as it figures in pedagogical discussion, there looms
+      a social distinction between those whose pursuits involve a minimum of
+      self-directive thought and aesthetic appreciation, and those who are
+      concerned more directly with things of the intelligence and with the
+      control of the activities of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aristotle was certainly permanently right when he said that "any
+      occupation or art or study deserves to be called mechanical if it renders
+      the body or soul or intellect of free persons unfit for the exercise and
+      practice of excellence." The force of the statement is almost infinitely
+      increased when we hold, as we nominally do at present, that all persons,
+      instead of a comparatively few, are free. For when the mass of men and all
+      women were regarded as unfree by the very nature of their bodies and
+      minds, there was neither intellectual confusion nor moral hypocrisy in
+      giving them only the training which fitted them for mechanical skill,
+      irrespective of its ulterior effect upon their capacity to share in a
+      worthy life. He was permanently right also when he went on to say that
+      "all mercenary employments as well as those which degrade the condition of
+      the body are mechanical, since they deprive the intellect of leisure and
+      dignity,"&mdash;permanently right, that is, if gainful pursuits as matter
+      of fact deprive the intellect of the conditions of its exercise and so of
+      its dignity. If his statements are false, it is because they identify a
+      phase of social custom with a natural necessity. But a different view of
+      the relations of mind and matter, mind and body, intelligence and social
+      service, is better than Aristotle's conception only if it helps render the
+      old idea obsolete in fact&mdash;in the actual conduct of life and
+      education. Aristotle was permanently right in assuming the inferiority and
+      subordination of mere skill in performance and mere accumulation of
+      external products to understanding, sympathy of appreciation, and the free
+      play of ideas. If there was an error, it lay in assuming the necessary
+      separation of the two: in supposing that there is a natural divorce
+      between efficiency in producing commodities and rendering service, and
+      self-directive thought; between significant knowledge and practical
+      achievement. We hardly better matters if we just correct his theoretical
+      misapprehension, and tolerate the social state of affairs which generated
+      and sanctioned his conception. We lose rather than gain in change from
+      serfdom to free citizenship if the most prized result of the change is
+      simply an increase in the mechanical efficiency of the human tools of
+      production. So we lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence
+      as an organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that an
+      unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage directly in
+      turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence which controls to be the
+      exclusive possession of remote scientists and captains of industry. We are
+      in a position honestly to criticize the division of life into separate
+      functions and of society into separate classes only so far as we are free
+      from responsibility for perpetuating the educational practices which train
+      the many for pursuits involving mere skill in production, and the few for
+      a knowledge that is an ornament and a cultural embellishment. In short,
+      ability to transcend the Greek philosophy of life and education is not
+      secured by a mere shifting about of the theoretical symbols meaning free,
+      rational, and worthy. It is not secured by a change of sentiment regarding
+      the dignity of labor, and the superiority of a life of service to that of
+      an aloof self-sufficing independence. Important as these theoretical and
+      emotional changes are, their importance consists in their being turned to
+      account in the development of a truly democratic society, a society in
+      which all share in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure. It is
+      not a mere change in the concepts of culture&mdash;or a liberal mind&mdash;and
+      social service which requires an educational reorganization; but the
+      educational transformation is needed to give full and explicit effect to
+      the changes implied in social life. The increased political and economic
+      emancipation of the "masses" has shown itself in education; it has
+      effected the development of a common school system of education, public
+      and free. It has destroyed the idea that learning is properly a monopoly
+      of the few who are predestined by nature to govern social affairs. But the
+      revolution is still incomplete. The idea still prevails that a truly
+      cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly at
+      least, with industrial affairs, and that the education which is fit for
+      the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense which
+      opposes useful and practical to nurture of appreciation and liberation of
+      thought. As a consequence, our actual system is an inconsistent mixture.
+      Certain studies and methods are retained on the supposition that they have
+      the sanction of peculiar liberality, the chief content of the term liberal
+      being uselessness for practical ends. This aspect is chiefly visible in
+      what is termed the higher education&mdash;that of the college and of
+      preparation for it. But it has filtered through into elementary education
+      and largely controls its processes and aims. But, on the other hand,
+      certain concessions have been made to the masses who must engage in
+      getting a livelihood and to the increased role of economic activities in
+      modern life. These concessions are exhibited in special schools and
+      courses for the professions, for engineering, for manual training and
+      commerce, in vocational and prevocational courses; and in the spirit in
+      which certain elementary subjects, like the three R's, are taught. The
+      result is a system in which both "cultural" and "utilitarian" subjects
+      exist in an inorganic composite where the former are not by dominant
+      purpose socially serviceable and the latter not liberative of imagination
+      or thinking power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the inherited situation, there is a curious intermingling, in even the
+      same study, of concession to usefulness and a survival of traits once
+      exclusively attributed to preparation for leisure. The "utility" element
+      is found in the motives assigned for the study, the "liberal" element in
+      methods of teaching. The outcome of the mixture is perhaps less
+      satisfactory than if either principle were adhered to in its purity. The
+      motive popularly assigned for making the studies of the first four or five
+      years consist almost entirely of reading, spelling, writing, and
+      arithmetic, is, for example, that ability to read, write, and figure
+      accurately is indispensable to getting ahead. These studies are treated as
+      mere instruments for entering upon a gainful employment or of later
+      progress in the pursuit of learning, according as pupils do not or do
+      remain in school. This attitude is reflected in the emphasis put upon
+      drill and practice for the sake of gaining automatic skill. If we turn to
+      Greek schooling, we find that from the earliest years the acquisition of
+      skill was subordinated as much as possible to acquisition of literary
+      content possessed of aesthetic and moral significance. Not getting a tool
+      for subsequent use but present subject matter was the emphasized thing.
+      Nevertheless the isolation of these studies from practical application,
+      their reduction to purely symbolic devices, represents a survival of the
+      idea of a liberal training divorced from utility. A thorough adoption of
+      the idea of utility would have led to instruction which tied up the
+      studies to situations in which they were directly needed and where they
+      were rendered immediately and not remotely helpful. It would be hard to
+      find a subject in the curriculum within which there are not found evil
+      results of a compromise between the two opposed ideals. Natural science is
+      recommended on the ground of its practical utility, but is taught as a
+      special accomplishment in removal from application. On the other hand,
+      music and literature are theoretically justified on the ground of their
+      culture value and are then taught with chief emphasis upon forming
+      technical modes of skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we had less compromise and resulting confusion, if we analyzed more
+      carefully the respective meanings of culture and utility, we might find it
+      easier to construct a course of study which should be useful and liberal
+      at the same time. Only superstition makes us believe that the two are
+      necessarily hostile so that a subject is illiberal because it is useful
+      and cultural because it is useless. It will generally be found that
+      instruction which, in aiming at utilitarian results, sacrifices the
+      development of imagination, the refining of taste and the deepening of
+      intellectual insight&mdash;surely cultural values&mdash;also in the same
+      degree renders what is learned limited in its use. Not that it makes it
+      wholly unavailable but that its applicability is restricted to routine
+      activities carried on under the supervision of others. Narrow modes of
+      skill cannot be made useful beyond themselves; any mode of skill which is
+      achieved with deepening of knowledge and perfecting of judgment is readily
+      put to use in new situations and is under personal control. It was not the
+      bare fact of social and economic utility which made certain activities
+      seem servile to the Greeks but the fact that the activities directly
+      connected with getting a livelihood were not, in their days, the
+      expression of a trained intelligence nor carried on because of a personal
+      appreciation of their meaning. So far as farming and the trades were
+      rule-of-thumb occupations and so far as they were engaged in for results
+      external to the minds of agricultural laborers and mechanics, they were
+      illiberal&mdash;but only so far. The intellectual and social context has
+      now changed. The elements in industry due to mere custom and routine have
+      become subordinate in most economic callings to elements derived from
+      scientific inquiry. The most important occupations of today represent and
+      depend upon applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The area of the
+      human world influenced by economic production and influencing consumption
+      has been so indefinitely widened that geographical and political
+      considerations of an almost infinitely wide scope enter in. It was natural
+      for Plato to deprecate the learning of geometry and arithmetic for
+      practical ends, because as matter of fact the practical uses to which they
+      were put were few, lacking in content and mostly mercenary in quality. But
+      as their social uses have increased and enlarged, their liberalizing or
+      "intellectual" value and their practical value approach the same limit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubtless the factor which chiefly prevents our full recognition and
+      employment of this identification is the conditions under which so much
+      work is still carried on. The invention of machines has extended the
+      amount of leisure which is possible even while one is at work. It is a
+      commonplace that the mastery of skill in the form of established habits
+      frees the mind for a higher order of thinking. Something of the same kind
+      is true of the introduction of mechanically automatic operations in
+      industry. They may release the mind for thought upon other topics. But
+      when we confine the education of those who work with their hands to a few
+      years of schooling devoted for the most part to acquiring the use of
+      rudimentary symbols at the expense of training in science, literature, and
+      history, we fail to prepare the minds of workers to take advantage of this
+      opportunity. More fundamental is the fact that the great majority of
+      workers have no insight into the social aims of their pursuits and no
+      direct personal interest in them. The results actually achieved are not
+      the ends of their actions, but only of their employers. They do what they
+      do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of the wage earned. It
+      is this fact which makes the action illiberal, and which will make any
+      education designed simply to give skill in such undertakings illiberal and
+      immoral. The activity is not free because not freely participated in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, there is already an opportunity for an education which,
+      keeping in mind the larger features of work, will reconcile liberal
+      nurture with training in social serviceableness, with ability to share
+      efficiently and happily in occupations which are productive. And such an
+      education will of itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing
+      economic situation. In the degree in which men have an active concern in
+      the ends that control their activity, their activity becomes free or
+      voluntary and loses its externally enforced and servile quality, even
+      though the physical aspect of behavior remain the same. In what is termed
+      politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this direct
+      participation in control: in the economic region, control remains external
+      and autocratic. Hence the split between inner mental action and outer
+      physical action of which the traditional distinction between the liberal
+      and the utilitarian is the reflex. An education which should unify the
+      disposition of the members of society would do much to unify society
+      itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM19">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Of the segregations of educational values discussed in the
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      last chapter, that between culture and utility is probably the most
+      fundamental. While the distinction is often thought to be intrinsic and
+      absolute, it is really historical and social. It originated, so far as
+      conscious formulation is concerned, in Greece, and was based upon the fact
+      that the truly human life was lived only by a few who subsisted upon the
+      results of the labor of others. This fact affected the psychological
+      doctrine of the relation of intelligence and desire, theory and practice.
+      It was embodied in a political theory of a permanent division of human
+      beings into those capable of a life of reason and hence having their own
+      ends, and those capable only of desire and work, and needing to have their
+      ends provided by others. The two distinctions, psychological and
+      political, translated into educational terms, effected a division between
+      a liberal education, having to do with the self-sufficing life of leisure
+      devoted to knowing for its own sake, and a useful, practical training for
+      mechanical occupations, devoid of intellectual and aesthetic content.
+      While the present situation is radically diverse in theory and much
+      changed in fact, the factors of the older historic situation still persist
+      sufficiently to maintain the educational distinction, along with
+      compromises which often reduce the efficacy of the educational measures.
+      The problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with the
+      dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide
+      of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting
+      responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 Aristotle does not hold that the class of actual slaves and of natural
+      slaves necessarily coincide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge. As livelihood and
+      leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice, intelligence and
+      execution, knowledge and activity. The latter set of oppositions doubtless
+      springs from the same social conditions which produce the former conflict;
+      but certain definite problems of education connected with them make it
+      desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the relationship and alleged
+      separation of knowing and doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
+      practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has a
+      long history. The history so far as conscious statement is concerned takes
+      us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated by Plato
+      and Aristotle. Much as these thinkers differed in many respects, they
+      agreed in identifying experience with purely practical concerns; and hence
+      with material interests as to its purpose and with the body as to its
+      organ. Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its own sake free from
+      practical reference, and found its source and organ in a purely immaterial
+      mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal interests. Again, experience
+      always involved lack, need, desire; it was never self-sufficing. Rational
+      knowing on the other hand, was complete and comprehensive within itself.
+      Hence the practical life was in a condition of perpetual flux, while
+      intellectual knowledge concerned eternal truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that Athenian philosophy
+      began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of knowledge and
+      conduct. In a search for something to replace them, it hit upon reason as
+      the only adequate guide of belief and activity. Since custom and tradition
+      were identified with experience, it followed at once that reason was
+      superior to experience. Moreover, experience, not content with its proper
+      position of subordination, was the great foe to the acknowledgment of the
+      authority of reason. Since custom and traditionary beliefs held men in
+      bondage, the struggle of reason for its legitimate supremacy could be won
+      only by showing the inherently unstable and inadequate nature of
+      experience. The statement of Plato that philosophers should be kings may
+      best be understood as a statement that rational intelligence and not
+      habit, appetite, impulse, and emotion should regulate human affairs. The
+      former secures unity, order, and law; the latter signify multiplicity and
+      discord, irrational fluctuations from one estate to another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grounds for the identification of experience with the unsatisfactory
+      condition of things, the state of affairs represented by rule of mere
+      custom, are not far to seek. Increasing trade and travel, colonizations,
+      migrations and wars, had broadened the intellectual horizon. The customs
+      and beliefs of different communities were found to diverge sharply from
+      one another. Civil disturbance had become a custom in Athens; the fortunes
+      of the city seemed given over to strife of factions. The increase of
+      leisure coinciding with the broadening of the horizon had brought into ken
+      many new facts of nature and had stimulated curiosity and speculation. The
+      situation tended to raise the question as to the existence of anything
+      constant and universal in the realm of nature and society. Reason was the
+      faculty by which the universal principle and essence is apprehended; while
+      the senses were the organs of perceiving change,&mdash;the unstable and
+      the diverse as against the permanent and uniform. The results of the work
+      of the senses, preserved in memory and imagination, and applied in the
+      skill given by habit, constituted experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Experience at its best is thus represented in the various handicrafts&mdash;the
+      arts of peace and war. The cobbler, the flute player, the soldier, have
+      undergone the discipline of experience to acquire the skill they have.
+      This means that the bodily organs, particularly the senses, have had
+      repeated contact with things and that the result of these contacts has
+      been preserved and consolidated till ability in foresight and in practice
+      had been secured. Such was the essential meaning of the term "empirical."
+      It suggested a knowledge and an ability not based upon insight into
+      principles, but expressing the result of a large number of separate
+      trials. It expressed the idea now conveyed by "method of trial and error,"
+      with especial emphasis upon the more or less accidental character of the
+      trials. So far as ability of control, of management, was concerned, it
+      amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure, to routine. If new circumstances
+      resembled the past, it might work well enough; in the degree in which they
+      deviated, failure was likely. Even to-day to speak of a physician as an
+      empiricist is to imply that he lacks scientific training, and that he is
+      proceeding simply on the basis of what he happens to have got out of the
+      chance medley of his past practice. Just because of the lack of science or
+      reason in "experience" it is hard to keep it at its poor best. The empiric
+      easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge
+      begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he
+      begins to pretend&mdash;to make claims for which there is no
+      justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others&mdash;to
+      "bluff." Moreover, he assumes that because he has learned one thing, he
+      knows others&mdash;as the history of Athens showed that the common
+      craftsmen thought they could manage household affairs, education, and
+      politics, because they had learned to do the specific things of their
+      trades. Experience is always hovering, then, on the edge of pretense, of
+      sham, of seeming, and appearance, in distinction from the reality upon
+      which reason lays hold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this state of
+      affairs. The senses are connected with the appetites, with wants and
+      desires. They lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation
+      which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of wants
+      and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the life of the
+      body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life. Experience thus
+      has a definitely material character; it has to do with physical things in
+      relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or science, lays hold of the
+      immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is something morally dangerous
+      about experience, as such words as sensual, carnal, material, worldly,
+      interests suggest; while pure reason and spirit connote something morally
+      praiseworthy. Moreover, ineradicable connection with the changing, the
+      inexplicably shifting, and with the manifold, the diverse, clings to
+      experience. Its material is inherently variable and untrustworthy. It is
+      anarchic, because unstable. The man who trusts to experience does not know
+      what he depends upon, since it changes from person to person, from day to
+      day, to say nothing of from country to country. Its connection with the
+      "many," with various particulars, has the same effect, and also carries
+      conflict in its train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. Out of
+      experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts within the
+      individual and between individuals. From experience no standard of belief
+      can issue, because it is the very nature of experience to instigate all
+      kinds of contrary beliefs, as varieties of local custom proved. Its
+      logical outcome is that anything is good and true to the particular
+      individual which his experience leads him to believe true and good at a
+      particular time and place. Finally practice falls of necessity within
+      experience. Doing proceeds from needs and aims at change. To produce or to
+      make is to alter something; to consume is to alter. All the obnoxious
+      characters of change and diversity thus attach themselves to doing while
+      knowing is as permanent as its object. To know, to grasp a thing
+      intellectually or theoretically, is to be out of the region of
+      vicissitude, chance, and diversity. Truth has no lack; it is untouched by
+      the perturbations of the world of sense. It deals with the eternal and the
+      universal. And the world of experience can be brought under control, can
+      be steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law of reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions persisted
+      in full technical definiteness. But they all of them profoundly influenced
+      men's subsequent thinking and their ideas about education. The contempt
+      for physical as compared with mathematical and logical science, for the
+      senses and sense observation; the feeling that knowledge is high and
+      worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal symbols instead of with
+      the concrete; the scorn of particulars except as they are deductively
+      brought under a universal; the disregard for the body; the depreciation of
+      arts and crafts as intellectual instrumentalities, all sought shelter and
+      found sanction under this estimate of the respective values of experience
+      and reason&mdash;or, what came to the same thing, of the practical and the
+      intellectual. Medieval philosophy continued and reinforced the tradition.
+      To know reality meant to be in relation to the supreme reality, or God,
+      and to enjoy the eternal bliss of that relation. Contemplation of supreme
+      reality was the ultimate end of man to which action is subordinate.
+      Experience had to do with mundane, profane, and secular affairs,
+      practically necessary indeed, but of little import in comparison with
+      supernatural objects of knowledge. When we add to this motive the force
+      derived from the literary character of the Roman education and the Greek
+      philosophic tradition, and conjoin to them the preference for studies
+      which obviously demarcated the aristocratic class from the lower classes,
+      we can readily understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent
+      preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply in
+      educational philosophies but in the higher schools. 2. The Modern Theory
+      of Experience and Knowledge. As we shall see later, the development of
+      experimentation as a method of knowledge makes possible and necessitates a
+      radical transformation of the view just set forth. But before coming to
+      that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge developed in
+      the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, it presents us with
+      an almost complete reversal of the classic doctrine of the relations of
+      experience and reason. To Plato experience meant habituation, or the
+      conservation of the net product of a lot of past chance trials. Reason
+      meant the principle of reform, of progress, of increase of control.
+      Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking through the limitations of
+      custom and getting at things as they really were. To the modern reformers,
+      the situation was the other way around. Reason, universal principles, a
+      priori notions, meant either blank forms which had to be filled in by
+      experience, by sense observations, in order to get significance and
+      validity; or else were mere indurated prejudices, dogmas imposed by
+      authority, which masqueraded and found protection under august names. The
+      great need was to break way from captivity to conceptions which, as Bacon
+      put it, "anticipated nature" and imposed merely human opinions upon her,
+      and to resort to experience to find out what nature was like. Appeal to
+      experience marked the breach with authority. It meant openness to new
+      impressions; eagerness in discovery and invention instead of absorption in
+      tabulating and systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of
+      the relations they sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the
+      mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over them
+      by preconceived ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it had
+      borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing and being
+      done to, and became a name for something intellectual and cognitive. It
+      meant the apprehension of material which should ballast and check the
+      exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic empiricist and by his
+      opponent, experience has been looked upon just as a way of knowing. The
+      only question was how good a way it is. The result was an even greater
+      "intellectualism" than is found in ancient philosophy, if that word be
+      used to designate an emphatic and almost exclusive interest in knowledge
+      in its isolation. Practice was not so much subordinated to knowledge as
+      treated as a kind of tag-end or aftermath of knowledge. The educational
+      result was only to confirm the exclusion of active pursuits from the
+      school, save as they might be brought in for purely utilitarian ends&mdash;the
+      acquisition by drill of certain habits. In the second place, the interest
+      in experience as a means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to
+      looking at the mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the
+      more truly objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a
+      hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to
+      vitiate true knowledge&mdash;to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a
+      maximum of receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by
+      objects were generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a
+      doctrine of sensationalism&mdash;that is to say, a doctrine which
+      identified knowledge with the reception and association of sensory
+      impressions. In John Locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we
+      find this sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental
+      faculties, like discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction,
+      and generalization which work up the material of sense into definite and
+      organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own account, such
+      as the fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics. (See ante, p.
+      61.) But some of his successors, especially in France in the latter part
+      of the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the limit; they
+      regarded discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations made in us by the
+      conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held that the mind is a
+      blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing engraved on it at birth
+      (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of ideas were concerned, but had
+      endowed it with activities to be exercised upon the material received. His
+      French successors razed away the powers and derived them also from
+      impressions received.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new interest in
+      education as method of social reform. (See ante, p. 93.) The emptier the
+      mind to begin with, the more it may be made anything we wish by bringing
+      the right influences to bear upon it. Thus Helvetius, perhaps the most
+      extreme and consistent sensationalist, proclaimed that education could do
+      anything&mdash;that it was omnipotent. Within the sphere of school
+      instruction, empiricism found its directly beneficial office in protesting
+      against mere book learning. If knowledge comes from the impressions made
+      upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure knowledge without
+      the use of objects which impress the mind. Words, all kinds of linguistic
+      symbols, in the lack of prior presentations of objects with which they may
+      be associated, convey nothing but sensations of their own shape and color&mdash;certainly
+      not a very instructive kind of knowledge. Sensationalism was an extremely
+      handy weapon with which to combat doctrines and opinions resting wholly
+      upon tradition and authority. With respect to all of them, it set up a
+      test: Where are the real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are
+      received? If such objects could not be produced, ideas were explained as
+      the result of false associations and combinations. Empiricism also
+      insisted upon a first-hand element. The impression must be made upon me,
+      upon my mind. The further we get away from this direct, first-hand source
+      of knowledge, the more numerous the sources of error, and the vaguer the
+      resulting idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the positive
+      side. Of course, the value of natural objects and firsthand acquaintance
+      was not dependent upon the truth of the theory. Introduced into the
+      schools they would do their work, even if the sensational theory about the
+      way in which they did it was quite wrong. So far, there is nothing to
+      complain of. But the emphasis upon sensationalism also operated to
+      influence the way in which natural objects were employed, and to prevent
+      full good being got from them. "Object lessons" tended to isolate the mere
+      sense-activity and make it an end in itself. The more isolated the object,
+      the more isolated the sensory quality, the more distinct the
+      sense-impression as a unit of knowledge. The theory worked not only in the
+      direction of this mechanical isolation, which tended to reduce instruction
+      to a kind of physical gymnastic of the sense-organs (good like any
+      gymnastic of bodily organs, but not more so), but also to the neglect of
+      thinking. According to the theory there was no need of thinking in
+      connection with sense-observation; in fact, in strict theory such thinking
+      would be impossible till afterwards, for thinking consisted simply in
+      combining and separating sensory units which had been received without any
+      participation of judgment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education upon
+      a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least after
+      the early years of infancy. Its obvious deficiencies have caused it to be
+      resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge (that is to
+      say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and modes of
+      application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for lending greater
+      "interest" to barren symbols. There are at least three serious defects of
+      sensationalistic empiricism as an educational philosophy of knowledge. (a)
+      the historical value of the theory was critical; it was a dissolvent of
+      current beliefs about the world and political institutions. It was a
+      destructive organ of criticism of hard and fast dogmas. But the work of
+      education is constructive, not critical. It assumes not old beliefs to be
+      eliminated and revised, but the need of building up new experience into
+      intellectual habitudes as correct as possible from the start.
+      Sensationalism is highly unfitted for this constructive task. Mind,
+      understanding, denotes responsiveness to meanings (ante, p. 29), not
+      response to direct physical stimuli. And meaning exists only with
+      reference to a context, which is excluded by any scheme which identifies
+      knowledge with a combination of sense-impressions. The theory, so far as
+      educationally applied, led either to a magnification of mere physical
+      excitations or else to a mere heaping up of isolated objects and
+      qualities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it also
+      has the disadvantage of being limited in range. Direct acquaintance with
+      the natural surroundings of the home environment so as to give reality to
+      ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of the senses, and as a
+      means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one thing. As an end-all and
+      be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally restricted. In precisely
+      analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and counters may be helpful aids to a
+      realization of numerical relations, but when employed except as aids to
+      thought&mdash;the apprehension of meaning&mdash;they become an obstacle to
+      the growth of arithmetical understanding. They arrest growth on a low
+      plane, the plane of specific physical symbols. Just as the race developed
+      especial symbols as tools of calculation and mathematical reasonings,
+      because the use of the fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the
+      individual must progress from concrete to abstract symbols&mdash;that is,
+      symbols whose meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. And
+      undue absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers
+      this growth. (c) A thoroughly false psychology of mental development
+      underlay sensationalistic empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter of
+      activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with things.
+      What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received quality
+      impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of handling,
+      throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the consequent
+      effect of the object upon the direction of activities. (See ante, p. 140.)
+      Fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the ancient notion of
+      experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that the modern notion
+      of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The neglect of the
+      deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a fatal defect of
+      the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more uninteresting and
+      mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which ignores and as far as may
+      be excludes the natural tendency to learn about the qualities of objects
+      by the uses to which they are put through trying to do something with
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience
+      represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical
+      assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished a
+      satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. Its educational influence
+      was confined to injecting a new factor into the older curriculum, with
+      incidental modifications of the older studies and methods. It introduced
+      greater regard for observation of things directly and through pictures and
+      graphic descriptions, and it reduced the importance attached to verbal
+      symbolization. But its own scope was so meager that it required
+      supplementation by information concerning matters outside of
+      sense-perception and by matters which appealed more directly to thought.
+      Consequently it left unimpaired the scope of informational and abstract,
+      or "rationalistic" studies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Experience as Experimentation. It has already been intimated that
+      sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience justified
+      by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by modern
+      scientific procedure. With respect to the former, it omits the primary
+      position of active response which puts things to use and which learns
+      about them through discovering the consequences that result from use. It
+      would seem as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of the way an
+      infant gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the notion that he
+      is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated ready-made
+      qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it would be seen that the
+      infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling, reaching, etc., in
+      order to see what results follow upon motor response to a sensory
+      stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not isolated
+      qualities, but the behavior which may be expected from a thing, and the
+      changes in things and persons which an activity may be expected to
+      produce. In other words, what he learns are connections. Even such
+      qualities as red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated
+      and identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
+      consequences these activities effect. We learn what things are hard and
+      what are soft by finding out through active experimentation what they
+      respectively will do and what can be done and what cannot be done with
+      them. In like fashion, children learn about persons by finding out what
+      responsive activities these persons exact and what these persons will do
+      in reply to the children's activities. And the combination of what things
+      do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind) in modifying our
+      actions, furthering some of them and resisting and checking others, and
+      what we can do to them in producing new changes constitutes experience.
+      The methods of science by which the revolution in our knowledge of the
+      world dating from the seventeenth century, was brought about, teach the
+      same lesson. For these methods are nothing but experimentation carried out
+      under conditions of deliberate control. To the Greek, it seemed absurd
+      that such an activity as, say, the cobbler punching holes in leather, or
+      using wax and needle and thread, could give an adequate knowledge of the
+      world. It seemed almost axiomatic that for true knowledge we must have
+      recourse to concepts coming from a reason above experience. But the
+      introduction of the experimental method signified precisely that such
+      operations, carried on under conditions of control, are just the ways in
+      which fruitful ideas about nature are obtained and tested. In other words,
+      it is only needed to conduct such an operation as the pouring of an acid
+      on a metal for the purpose of getting knowledge instead of for the purpose
+      of getting a trade result, in order to lay hold of the principle upon
+      which the science of nature was henceforth to depend. Sense perceptions
+      were indeed indispensable, but there was less reliance upon sense
+      perceptions in their natural or customary form than in the older science.
+      They were no longer regarded as containing within themselves some "form"
+      or "species" of universal kind in a disguised mask of sense which could be
+      stripped off by rational thought. On the contrary, the first thing was to
+      alter and extend the data of sense perception: to act upon the given
+      objects of sense by the lens of the telescope and microscope, and by all
+      sorts of experimental devices. To accomplish this in a way which would
+      arouse new ideas (hypotheses, theories) required even more general ideas
+      (like those of mathematics) than were at the command of ancient science.
+      But these general conceptions were no longer taken to give knowledge in
+      themselves. They were implements for instituting, conducting, interpreting
+      experimental inquiries and formulating their results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and knowledge, a
+      philosophy which no longer puts experience in opposition to rational
+      knowledge and explanation. Experience is no longer a mere summarizing of
+      what has been done in a more or less chance way in the past; it is a
+      deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens
+      to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions (of
+      suggested meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the
+      suggestions. When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by
+      impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure
+      and method, it becomes reasonable&mdash;rational. When what we suffer from
+      things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance
+      circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior
+      purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant&mdash;enlightening
+      and instructive. The antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses the
+      support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and relative
+      justification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely practical and
+      purely intellectual studies is self-evident. The distinction is not
+      intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions, and upon conditions which can
+      be regulated. Practical activities may be intellectually narrow and
+      trivial; they will be so in so far as they are routine, carried on under
+      the dictates of authority, and having in view merely some external result.
+      But childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just the time when it
+      is possible to carry them on in a different spirit. It is inexpedient to
+      repeat the discussions of our previous chapters on thinking and on the
+      evolution of educative subject matter from childlike work and play to
+      logically organized subject matter. The discussions of this chapter and
+      the prior one should, however, give an added meaning to those results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (i) Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations
+      subsisting between a human being and his natural and social surroundings.
+      In some cases, the initiative in activity is on the side of the
+      environment; the human being undergoes or suffers certain checkings and
+      deflections of endeavors. In other cases, the behavior of surrounding
+      things and persons carries to a successful issue the active tendencies of
+      the individual, so that in the end what the individual undergoes are
+      consequences which he has himself tried to produce. In just the degree in
+      which connections are established between what happens to a person and
+      what he does in response, and between what he does to his environment and
+      what it does in response to him, his acts and the things about him acquire
+      meaning. He learns to understand both himself and the world of men and
+      things. Purposive education or schooling should present such an
+      environment that this interaction will effect acquisition of those
+      meanings which are so important that they become, in turn, instruments of
+      further learnings. (ante, Ch. XI.) As has been repeatedly pointed out,
+      activity out of school is carried on under conditions which have not been
+      deliberately adapted to promoting the function of understanding and
+      formation of effective intellectual dispositions. The results are vital
+      and genuine as far as they go, but they are limited by all kinds of
+      circumstances. Some powers are left quite undeveloped and undirected;
+      others get only occasional and whimsical stimulations; others are formed
+      into habits of a routine skill at the expense of aims and resourceful
+      initiative and inventiveness. It is not the business of the school to
+      transport youth from an environment of activity into one of cramped study
+      of the records of other men's learning; but to transport them from an
+      environment of relatively chance activities (accidental in the relation
+      they bear to insight and thought) into one of activities selected with
+      reference to guidance of learning. A slight inspection of the improved
+      methods which have already shown themselves effective in education will
+      reveal that they have laid hold, more or less consciously, upon the fact
+      that "intellectual" studies instead of being opposed to active pursuits
+      represent an intellectualizing of practical pursuits. It remains to grasp
+      the principle with greater firmness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) The changes which are taking place in the content of social life
+      tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which will
+      intellectualize the play and work of the school. When one bears in mind
+      the social environment of the Greeks and the people of the Middle Ages,
+      where such practical activities as could be successfully carried on were
+      mostly of a routine and external sort and even servile in nature, one is
+      not surprised that educators turned their backs upon them as unfitted to
+      cultivate intelligence. But now that even the occupations of the
+      household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as transportation and
+      intercourse are instinct with applied science, the case stands otherwise.
+      It is true that many of those who now engage in them are not aware of the
+      intellectual content upon which their personal actions depend. But this
+      fact only gives an added reason why schooling should use these pursuits so
+      as to enable the coming generation to acquire a comprehension now too
+      generally lacking, and thus enable persons to carry on their pursuits
+      intelligently instead of blindly. (iii) The most direct blow at the
+      traditional separation of doing and knowing and at the traditional
+      prestige of purely "intellectual" studies, however, has been given by the
+      progress of experimental science. If this progress has demonstrated
+      anything, it is that there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and
+      fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing. The analysis and
+      rearrangement of facts which is indispensable to the growth of knowledge
+      and power of explanation and right classification cannot be attained
+      purely mentally&mdash;just inside the head. Men have to do something to
+      the things when they wish to find out something; they have to alter
+      conditions. This is the lesson of the laboratory method, and the lesson
+      which all education has to learn. The laboratory is a discovery of the
+      condition under which labor may become intellectually fruitful and not
+      merely externally productive. If, in too many cases at present, it results
+      only in the acquisition of an additional mode of technical skill, that is
+      because it still remains too largely but an isolated resource, not
+      resorted to until pupils are mostly too old to get the full advantage of
+      it, and even then is surrounded by other studies where traditional methods
+      isolate intellect from activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM20">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The Greeks were induced to philosophize by the increasing
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      failure of their traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. Thus
+      they were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other
+      source of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational
+      standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs
+      which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat
+      opposition of reason and experience. The more the former was exalted, the
+      more the latter was depreciated. Since experience was identified with what
+      men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of life, doing
+      shared in the philosophic depreciation. This influence fell in with many
+      others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods and topics which
+      involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily activity. The
+      modern age began with a revolt against this point of view, with an appeal
+      to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely rational concepts on
+      the ground that they either needed to be ballasted by the results of
+      concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions of prejudice and
+      institutionalized class interest, calling themselves rational for
+      protection. But various circumstances led to considering experience as
+      pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic active and emotional
+      phases, and to identifying it with a passive reception of isolated
+      "sensations." Hence the education reform effected by the new theory was
+      confined mainly to doing away with some of the bookishness of prior
+      methods; it did not accomplish a consistent reorganization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the
+      experimental method in science makes another conception of experience
+      explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of the
+      ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive&mdash;a
+      matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. But the ancient
+      theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so as to
+      take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as to
+      result in securely tested knowledge. "Experience" then ceases to be
+      empirical and becomes experimental. Reason ceases to be a remote and ideal
+      faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made
+      fruitful in meaning. Educationally, this change denotes such a plan for
+      the studies and method of instruction as has been developed in the
+      previous chapters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and Humanism
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ALLUSION has already been made to the conflict of natural science with
+      literary studies for a place in the curriculum. The solution thus far
+      reached consists essentially in a somewhat mechanical compromise whereby
+      the field is divided between studies having nature and studies having man
+      as their theme. The situation thus presents us with another instance of
+      the external adjustment of educational values, and focuses attention upon
+      the philosophy of the connection of nature with human affairs. In general,
+      it may be said that the educational division finds a reflection in the
+      dualistic philosophies. Mind and the world are regarded as two independent
+      realms of existence having certain points of contact with each other. From
+      this point of view it is natural that each sphere of existence should have
+      its own separate group of studies connected with it; it is even natural
+      that the growth of scientific studies should be viewed with suspicion as
+      marking a tendency of materialistic philosophy to encroach upon the domain
+      of spirit. Any theory of education which contemplates a more unified
+      scheme of education than now exists is under the necessity of facing the
+      question of the relation of man to nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The Historic Background of Humanistic Study. It is noteworthy that
+      classic Greek philosophy does not present the problem in its modern form.
+      Socrates indeed appears to have thought that science of nature was not
+      attainable and not very important. The chief thing to know is the nature
+      and end of man. Upon that knowledge hangs all that is of deep significance&mdash;all
+      moral and social achievement. Plato, however, makes right knowledge of man
+      and society depend upon knowledge of the essential features of nature. His
+      chief treatise, entitled the Republic, is at once a treatise on morals, on
+      social organization, and on the metaphysics and science of nature. Since
+      he accepts the Socratic doctrine that right achievement in the former
+      depends upon rational knowledge, he is compelled to discuss the nature of
+      knowledge. Since he accepts the idea that the ultimate object of knowledge
+      is the discovery of the good or end of man, and is discontented with the
+      Socratic conviction that all we know is our own ignorance, he connects the
+      discussion of the good of man with consideration of the essential good or
+      end of nature itself. To attempt to determine the end of man apart from a
+      knowledge of the ruling end which gives law and unity to nature is
+      impossible. It is thus quite consistent with his philosophy that he
+      subordinates literary studies (under the name of music) to mathematics and
+      to physics as well as to logic and metaphysics. But on the other hand,
+      knowledge of nature is not an end in itself; it is a necessary stage in
+      bringing the mind to a realization of the supreme purpose of existence as
+      the law of human action, corporate and individual. To use the modern
+      phraseology, naturalistic studies are indispensable, but they are in the
+      interests of humanistic and ideal ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aristotle goes even farther, if anything, in the direction of naturalistic
+      studies. He subordinates (ante, p. 254) civic relations to the purely
+      cognitive life. The highest end of man is not human but divine&mdash;participation
+      in pure knowing which constitutes the divine life. Such knowing deals with
+      what is universal and necessary, and finds, therefore, a more adequate
+      subject matter in nature at its best than in the transient things of man.
+      If we take what the philosophers stood for in Greek life, rather than the
+      details of what they say, we might summarize by saying that the Greeks
+      were too much interested in free inquiry into natural fact and in the
+      aesthetic enjoyment of nature, and were too deeply conscious of the extent
+      in which society is rooted in nature and subject to its laws, to think of
+      bringing man and nature into conflict. Two factors conspire in the later
+      period of ancient life, however, to exalt literary and humanistic studies.
+      One is the increasingly reminiscent and borrowed character of culture; the
+      other is the political and rhetorical bent of Roman life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greek achievement in civilization was native; the civilization of the
+      Alexandrians and Romans was inherited from alien sources. Consequently it
+      looked back to the records upon which it drew, instead of looking out
+      directly upon nature and society, for material and inspiration. We cannot
+      do better than quote the words of Hatch to indicate the consequences for
+      educational theory and practice. "Greece on one hand had lost political
+      power, and on the other possessed in her splendid literature an
+      inalienable heritage. It was natural that she should turn to letters. It
+      was natural also that the study of letters should be reflected upon
+      speech. The mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay stress on that
+      acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of
+      cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as
+      education. Our own comes by direct tradition from it. It set a fashion
+      which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the entire civilized
+      world. We study literature rather than nature because the Greeks did so,
+      and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials resolved to educate
+      their sons, they employed Greek teachers and followed in Greek paths." 1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The so-called practical bent of the Romans worked in the same direction.
+      In falling back upon the recorded ideas of the Greeks, they not only took
+      the short path to attaining a cultural development, but they procured just
+      the kind of material and method suited to their administrative talents.
+      For their practical genius was not directed to the conquest and control of
+      nature but to the conquest and control of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Hatch, in the passage quoted, takes a good deal of history for granted
+      in saying that we have studied literature rather than nature because the
+      Greeks, and the Romans whom they taught, did so. What is the link that
+      spans the intervening centuries? The question suggests that barbarian
+      Europe but repeated on a larger scale and with increased intensity the
+      Roman situation. It had to go to school to Greco-Roman civilization; it
+      also borrowed rather than evolved its culture. Not merely for its general
+      ideas and their artistic presentation but for its models of law it went to
+      the records of alien peoples. And its dependence upon tradition was
+      increased by the dominant theological interests of the period. For the
+      authorities to which the Church appealed were literatures composed in
+      foreign tongues. Everything converged to identify learning with linguistic
+      training and to make the language of the learned a literary language
+      instead of the mother speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The full scope of this fact escapes us, moreover, until we recognize that
+      this subject matter compelled recourse to a dialectical method.
+      Scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of
+      learning as a term of reproach. But all that it means is the method of The
+      Schools, or of the School Men. In its essence, it is nothing but a highly
+      effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning which
+      are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths. Where
+      literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes material
+      of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and
+      interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery, and
+      invention. And at bottom what is called Scholasticism is the whole-hearted
+      and consistent formulation and application of the methods which are suited
+      to instruction when the material of instruction is taken ready-made,
+      rather than as something which students are to find out for themselves. So
+      far as schools still teach from textbooks and rely upon the principle of
+      authority and acquisition rather than upon that of discovery and inquiry,
+      their methods are Scholastic&mdash;minus the logical accuracy and system
+      of Scholasticism at its best. Aside from laxity of method and statement,
+      the only difference is that geographies and histories and botanies and
+      astronomies are now part of the authoritative literature which is to be
+      mastered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a consequence, the Greek tradition was lost in which a humanistic
+      interest was used as a basis of interest in nature, and a knowledge of
+      nature used to support the distinctively human aims of man. Life found its
+      support in authority, not in nature. The latter was moreover an object of
+      considerable suspicion. Contemplation of it was dangerous, for it tended
+      to draw man away from reliance upon the documents in which the rules of
+      living were already contained. Moreover nature could be known only through
+      observation; it appealed to the senses&mdash;which were merely material as
+      opposed to a purely immaterial mind. Furthermore, the utilities of a
+      knowledge of nature were purely physical and secular; they connected with
+      the bodily and temporal welfare of man, while the literary tradition
+      concerned his spiritual and eternal well-being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Modern Scientific Interest in Nature. The movement of the fifteenth
+      century which is variously termed the revival of learning and the
+      renascence was characterized by a new interest in man's present life, and
+      accordingly by a new interest in his relationships with nature. It was
+      naturalistic, in the sense that it turned against the dominant
+      supernaturalistic interest. It is possible that the influence of a return
+      to classic Greek pagan literature in bringing about this changed mind has
+      been overestimated. Undoubtedly the change was mainly a product of
+      contemporary conditions. But there can be no doubt that educated men,
+      filled with the new point of view, turned eagerly to Greek literature for
+      congenial sustenance and reinforcement. And to a considerable extent, this
+      interest in Greek thought was not in literature for its own sake, but in
+      the spirit it expressed. The mental freedom, the sense of the order and
+      beauty of nature, which animated Greek expression, aroused men to think
+      and observe in a similar untrammeled fashion. The history of science in
+      the sixteenth century shows that the dawning sciences of physical nature
+      largely borrowed their points of departure from the new interest in Greek
+      literature. As Windelband has said, the new science of nature was the
+      daughter of humanism. The favorite notion of the time was that man was in
+      microcosm that which the universe was in macrocosm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This fact raises anew the question of how it was that nature and man were
+      later separated and a sharp division made between language and literature
+      and the physical sciences. Four reasons may be suggested. (a) The old
+      tradition was firmly entrenched in institutions. Politics, law, and
+      diplomacy remained of necessity branches of authoritative literature, for
+      the social sciences did not develop until the methods of the sciences of
+      physics and chemistry, to say nothing of biology, were much further
+      advanced. The same is largely true of history. Moreover, the methods used
+      for effective teaching of the languages were well developed; the inertia
+      of academic custom was on their side. Just as the new interest in
+      literature, especially Greek, had not been allowed at first to find
+      lodgment in the scholastically organized universities, so when it found
+      its way into them it joined hands with the older learning to minimize the
+      influence of experimental science. The men who taught were rarely trained
+      in science; the men who were scientifically competent worked in private
+      laboratories and through the medium of academies which promoted research,
+      but which were not organized as teaching bodies. Finally, the aristocratic
+      tradition which looked down upon material things and upon the senses and
+      the hands was still mighty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (b) The Protestant revolt brought with it an immense increase of interest
+      in theological discussion and controversies. The appeal on both sides was
+      to literary documents. Each side had to train men in ability to study and
+      expound the records which were relied upon. The demand for training men
+      who could defend the chosen faith against the other side, who were able to
+      propagandize and to prevent the encroachments of the other side, was such
+      that it is not too much to say that by the middle of the seventeenth
+      century the linguistic training of gymnasia and universities had been
+      captured by the revived theological interest, and used as a tool of
+      religious education and ecclesiastical controversy. Thus the educational
+      descent of the languages as they are found in education to-day is not
+      direct from the revival of learning, but from its adaptation to
+      theological ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (c) The natural sciences were themselves conceived in a way which
+      sharpened the opposition of man and nature. Francis Bacon presents an
+      almost perfect example of the union of naturalistic and humanistic
+      interest. Science, adopting the methods of observation and
+      experimentation, was to give up the attempt to "anticipate" nature&mdash;to
+      impose preconceived notions upon her&mdash;and was to become her humble
+      interpreter. In obeying nature intellectually, man would learn to command
+      her practically. "Knowledge is power." This aphorism meant that through
+      science man is to control nature and turn her energies to the execution of
+      his own ends. Bacon attacked the old learning and logic as purely
+      controversial, having to do with victory in argument, not with discovery
+      of the unknown. Through the new method of thought which was set forth in
+      his new logic an era of expansive discoveries was to emerge, and these
+      discoveries were to bear fruit in inventions for the service of man. Men
+      were to give up their futile, never-finished effort to dominate one
+      another to engage in the cooperative task of dominating nature in the
+      interests of humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the main, Bacon prophesied the direction of subsequent progress. But he
+      "anticipated" the advance. He did not see that the new science was for a
+      long time to be worked in the interest of old ends of human exploitation.
+      He thought that it would rapidly give man new ends. Instead, it put at the
+      disposal of a class the means to secure their old ends of aggrandizement
+      at the expense of another class. The industrial revolution followed, as he
+      foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific method. But it is taking the
+      revolution many centuries to produce a new mind. Feudalism was doomed by
+      the applications of the new science, for they transferred power from the
+      landed nobility to the manufacturing centers. But capitalism rather than a
+      social humanism took its place. Production and commerce were carried on as
+      if the new science had no moral lesson, but only technical lessons as to
+      economies in production and utilization of saving in self-interest.
+      Naturally, this application of physical science (which was the most
+      conspicuously perceptible one) strengthened the claims of professed
+      humanists that science was materialistic in its tendencies. It left a void
+      as to man's distinctively human interests which go beyond making, saving,
+      and expending money; and languages and literature put in their claim to
+      represent the moral and ideal interests of humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (d) Moreover, the philosophy which professed itself based upon science,
+      which gave itself out as the accredited representative of the net
+      significance of science, was either dualistic in character, marked by a
+      sharp division between mind (characterizing man) and matter, constituting
+      nature; or else it was openly mechanical, reducing the signal features of
+      human life to illusion. In the former case, it allowed the claims of
+      certain studies to be peculiar consignees of mental values, and indirectly
+      strengthened their claim to superiority, since human beings would incline
+      to regard human affairs as of chief importance at least to themselves. In
+      the latter case, it called out a reaction which threw doubt and suspicion
+      upon the value of physical science, giving occasion for treating it as an
+      enemy to man's higher interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greek and medieval knowledge accepted the world in its qualitative
+      variety, and regarded nature's processes as having ends, or in technical
+      phrase as teleological. New science was expounded so as to deny the
+      reality of all qualities in real, or objective, existence. Sounds, colors,
+      ends, as well as goods and bads, were regarded as purely subjective&mdash;as
+      mere impressions in the mind. Objective existence was then treated as
+      having only quantitative aspects&mdash;as so much mass in motion, its only
+      differences being that at one point in space there was a larger aggregate
+      mass than at another, and that in some spots there were greater rates of
+      motion than at others. Lacking qualitative distinctions, nature lacked
+      significant variety. Uniformities were emphasized, not diversities; the
+      ideal was supposed to be the discovery of a single mathematical formula
+      applying to the whole universe at once from which all the seeming variety
+      of phenomena could be derived. This is what a mechanical philosophy means.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a philosophy does not represent the genuine purport of science. It
+      takes the technique for the thing itself; the apparatus and the
+      terminology for reality, the method for its subject matter. Science does
+      confine its statements to conditions which enable us to predict and
+      control the happening of events, ignoring the qualities of the events.
+      Hence its mechanical and quantitative character. But in leaving them out
+      of account, it does not exclude them from reality, nor relegate them to a
+      purely mental region; it only furnishes means utilizable for ends. Thus
+      while in fact the progress of science was increasing man's power over
+      nature, enabling him to place his cherished ends on a firmer basis than
+      ever before, and also to diversify his activities almost at will, the
+      philosophy which professed to formulate its accomplishments reduced the
+      world to a barren and monotonous redistribution of matter in space. Thus
+      the immediate effect of modern science was to accentuate the dualism of
+      matter and mind, and thereby to establish the physical and the humanistic
+      studies as two disconnected groups. Since the difference between better
+      and worse is bound up with the qualities of experience, any philosophy of
+      science which excludes them from the genuine content of reality is bound
+      to leave out what is most interesting and most important to mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Present Educational Problem. In truth, experience knows no division
+      between human concerns and a purely mechanical physical world. Man's home
+      is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural
+      conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and
+      idle indulgences of fancy. From the standpoint of human experience, and
+      hence of educational endeavor, any distinction which can be justly made
+      between nature and man is a distinction between the conditions which have
+      to be reckoned with in the formation and execution of our practical aims,
+      and the aims themselves. This philosophy is vouched for by the doctrine of
+      biological development which shows that man is continuous with nature, not
+      an alien entering her processes from without. It is reinforced by the
+      experimental method of science which shows that knowledge accrues in
+      virtue of an attempt to direct physical energies in accord with ideas
+      suggested in dealing with natural objects in behalf of social uses. Every
+      step forward in the social sciences&mdash;the studies termed history,
+      economics, politics, sociology&mdash;shows that social questions are
+      capable of being intelligently coped with only in the degree in which we
+      employ the method of collected data, forming hypotheses, and testing them
+      in action which is characteristic of natural science, and in the degree in
+      which we utilize in behalf of the promotion of social welfare the
+      technical knowledge ascertained by physics and chemistry. Advanced methods
+      of dealing with such perplexing problems as insanity, intemperance,
+      poverty, public sanitation, city planning, the conservation of natural
+      resources, the constructive use of governmental agencies for furthering
+      the public good without weakening personal initiative, all illustrate the
+      direct dependence of our important social concerns upon the methods and
+      results of natural science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With respect then to both humanistic and naturalistic studies, education
+      should take its departure from this close interdependence. It should aim
+      not at keeping science as a study of nature apart from literature as a
+      record of human interests, but at cross-fertilizing both the natural
+      sciences and the various human disciplines such as history, literature,
+      economics, and politics. Pedagogically, the problem is simpler than the
+      attempt to teach the sciences as mere technical bodies of information and
+      technical forms of physical manipulation, on one side; and to teach
+      humanistic studies as isolated subjects, on the other. For the latter
+      procedure institutes an artificial separation in the pupils' experience.
+      Outside of school pupils meet with natural facts and principles in
+      connection with various modes of human action. (See ante, p. 30.) In all
+      the social activities in which they have shared they have had to
+      understand the material and processes involved. To start them in school
+      with a rupture of this intimate association breaks the continuity of
+      mental development, makes the student feel an indescribable unreality in
+      his studies, and deprives him of the normal motive for interest in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no doubt, of course, that the opportunities of education should
+      be such that all should have a chance who have the disposition to advance
+      to specialized ability in science, and thus devote themselves to its
+      pursuit as their particular occupation in life. But at present, the pupil
+      too often has a choice only between beginning with a study of the results
+      of prior specialization where the material is isolated from his daily
+      experiences, or with miscellaneous nature study, where material is
+      presented at haphazard and does not lead anywhere in particular. The habit
+      of introducing college pupils into segregated scientific subject matter,
+      such as is appropriate to the man who wishes to become an expert in a
+      given field, is carried back into the high schools. Pupils in the latter
+      simply get a more elementary treatment of the same thing, with
+      difficulties smoothed over and topics reduced to the level of their
+      supposed ability. The cause of this procedure lies in following tradition,
+      rather than in conscious adherence to a dualistic philosophy. But the
+      effect is the same as if the purpose were to inculcate an idea that the
+      sciences which deal with nature have nothing to do with man, and vice
+      versa. A large part of the comparative ineffectiveness of the teaching of
+      the sciences, for those who never become scientific specialists, is the
+      result of a separation which is unavoidable when one begins with
+      technically organized subject matter. Even if all students were embryonic
+      scientific specialists, it is questionable whether this is the most
+      effective procedure. Considering that the great majority are concerned
+      with the study of sciences only for its effect upon their mental habits&mdash;in
+      making them more alert, more open-minded, more inclined to tentative
+      acceptance and to testing of ideas propounded or suggested,&mdash;and for
+      achieving a better understanding of their daily environment, it is
+      certainly ill-advised. Too often the pupil comes out with a smattering
+      which is too superficial to be scientific and too technical to be
+      applicable to ordinary affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The utilization of ordinary experience to secure an advance into
+      scientific material and method, while keeping the latter connected with
+      familiar human interests, is easier to-day than it ever was before. The
+      usual experience of all persons in civilized communities to-day is
+      intimately associated with industrial processes and results. These in turn
+      are so many cases of science in action. The stationary and traction steam
+      engine, gasoline engine, automobile, telegraph and telephone, the electric
+      motor enter directly into the lives of most individuals. Pupils at an
+      early age are practically acquainted with these things. Not only does the
+      business occupation of their parents depend upon scientific applications,
+      but household pursuits, the maintenance of health, the sights seen upon
+      the streets, embody scientific achievements and stimulate interest in the
+      connected scientific principles. The obvious pedagogical starting point of
+      scientific instruction is not to teach things labeled science, but to
+      utilize the familiar occupations and appliances to direct observation and
+      experiment, until pupils have arrived at a knowledge of some fundamental
+      principles by understanding them in their familiar practical workings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opinion sometimes advanced that it is a derogation from the "purity"
+      of science to study it in its active incarnation, instead of in
+      theoretical abstraction, rests upon a misunderstanding. AS matter of fact,
+      any subject is cultural in the degree in which it is apprehended in its
+      widest possible range of meanings. Perception of meanings depends upon
+      perception of connections, of context. To see a scientific fact or law in
+      its human as well as in its physical and technical context is to enlarge
+      its significance and give it increased cultural value. Its direct economic
+      application, if by economic is meant something having money worth, is
+      incidental and secondary, but a part of its actual connections. The
+      important thing is that the fact be grasped in its social connections&mdash;its
+      function in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with an
+      intelligent sense of human interests. The social interest, identical in
+      its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is necessarily supreme with
+      man. Knowledge about man, information as to his past, familiarity with his
+      documented records of literature, may be as technical a possession as the
+      accumulation of physical details. Men may keep busy in a variety of ways,
+      making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or in
+      amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the chronology of
+      literary productions. Unless such activity reacts to enlarge the
+      imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with the busy work of
+      children. It has the letter without the spirit of activity. It readily
+      degenerates itself into a miser's accumulation, and a man prides himself
+      on what he has, and not on the meaning he finds in the affairs of life.
+      Any study so pursued that it increases concern for the values of life, any
+      study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and greater
+      ability to promote that well-being is humane study. The humanistic spirit
+      of the Greeks was native and intense but it was narrow in scope. Everybody
+      outside the Hellenic circle was a barbarian, and negligible save as a
+      possible enemy. Acute as were the social observations and speculations of
+      Greek thinkers, there is not a word in their writings to indicate that
+      Greek civilization was not self-inclosed and self-sufficient. There was,
+      apparently, no suspicion that its future was at the mercy of the despised
+      outsider. Within the Greek community, the intense social spirit was
+      limited by the fact that higher culture was based on a substratum of
+      slavery and economic serfdom&mdash;classes necessary to the existence of
+      the state, as Aristotle declared, and yet not genuine parts of it. The
+      development of science has produced an industrial revolution which has
+      brought different peoples in such close contact with one another through
+      colonization and commerce that no matter how some nations may still look
+      down upon others, no country can harbor the illusion that its career is
+      decided wholly within itself. The same revolution has abolished
+      agricultural serfdom, and created a class of more or less organized
+      factory laborers with recognized political rights, and who make claims for
+      a responsible role in the control of industry&mdash;claims which receive
+      sympathetic attention from many among the well-to-do, since they have been
+      brought into closer connections with the less fortunate classes through
+      the breaking down of class barriers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This state of affairs may be formulated by saying that the older humanism
+      omitted economic and industrial conditions from its purview. Consequently,
+      it was one sided. Culture, under such circumstances, inevitably
+      represented the intellectual and moral outlook of the class which was in
+      direct social control. Such a tradition as to culture is, as we have seen
+      (ante, p. 260), aristocratic; it emphasizes what marks off one class from
+      another, rather than fundamental common interests. Its standards are in
+      the past; for the aim is to preserve what has been gained rather than
+      widely to extend the range of culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The modifications which spring from taking greater account of industry and
+      of whatever has to do with making a living are frequently condemned as
+      attacks upon the culture derived from the past. But a wider educational
+      outlook would conceive industrial activities as agencies for making
+      intellectual resources more accessible to the masses, and giving greater
+      solidity to the culture of those having superior resources. In short, when
+      we consider the close connection between science and industrial
+      development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic
+      cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other, we get
+      light on the opposition between technical scientific studies and refining
+      literary studies. We have before us the need of overcoming this separation
+      in education if society is to be truly democratic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM21">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected in
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      the division of studies between the naturalistic and the humanistic with a
+      tendency to reduce the latter to the literary records of the past. This
+      dualism is not characteristic (as were the others which we have noted) of
+      Greek thought. It arose partly because of the fact that the culture of
+      Rome and of barbarian Europe was not a native product, being borrowed
+      directly or indirectly from Greece, and partly because political and
+      ecclesiastic conditions emphasized dependence upon the authority of past
+      knowledge as that was transmitted in literary documents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a restoration of the
+      intimate connection of nature and humanity, for it viewed knowledge of
+      nature as the means of securing human progress and well-being. But the
+      more immediate applications of science were in the interests of a class
+      rather than of men in common; and the received philosophic formulations of
+      scientific doctrine tended either to mark it off as merely material from
+      man as spiritual and immaterial, or else to reduce mind to a subjective
+      illusion. In education, accordingly, the tendency was to treat the
+      sciences as a separate body of studies, consisting of technical
+      information regarding the physical world, and to reserve the older
+      literary studies as distinctively humanistic. The account previously given
+      of the evolution of knowledge, and of the educational scheme of studies
+      based upon it, are designed to overcome the separation, and to secure
+      recognition of the place occupied by the subject matter of the natural
+      sciences in human affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church. pp.
+      43-44.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Mind as Purely Individual. We have been concerned with the influences
+      which have effected a division between work and leisure, knowing and
+      doing, man and nature. These influences have resulted in splitting up the
+      subject matter of education into separate studies. They have also found
+      formulation in various philosophies which have opposed to each other body
+      and mind, theoretical knowledge and practice, physical mechanism and ideal
+      purpose. Upon the philosophical side, these various dualisms culminate in
+      a sharp demarcation of individual minds from the world, and hence from one
+      another. While the connection of this philosophical position with
+      educational procedure is not so obvious as is that of the points
+      considered in the last three chapters, there are certain educational
+      considerations which correspond to it; such as the antithesis supposed to
+      exist between subject matter (the counterpart of the world) and method
+      (the counterpart of mind); such as the tendency to treat interest as
+      something purely private, without intrinsic connection with the material
+      studied. Aside from incidental educational bearings, it will be shown in
+      this chapter that the dualistic philosophy of mind and the world implies
+      an erroneous conception of the relationship between knowledge and social
+      interests, and between individuality or freedom, and social control and
+      authority. The identification of the mind with the individual self and of
+      the latter with a private psychic consciousness is comparatively modern.
+      In both the Greek and medieval periods, the rule was to regard the
+      individual as a channel through which a universal and divine intelligence
+      operated. The individual was in no true sense the knower; the knower was
+      the "Reason" which operated through him. The individual interfered at his
+      peril, and only to the detriment of the truth. In the degree in which the
+      individual rather than reason "knew," conceit, error, and opinion were
+      substituted for true knowledge. In Greek life, observation was acute and
+      alert; and thinking was free almost to the point of irresponsible
+      speculations. Accordingly the consequences of the theory were only such as
+      were consequent upon the lack of an experimental method. Without such a
+      method individuals could not engage in knowing, and be checked up by the
+      results of the inquiries of others. Without such liability to test by
+      others, the minds of men could not be intellectually responsible; results
+      were to be accepted because of their aesthetic consistency, agreeable
+      quality, or the prestige of their authors. In the barbarian period,
+      individuals were in a still more humble attitude to truth; important
+      knowledge was supposed to be divinely revealed, and nothing remained for
+      the minds of individuals except to work it over after it had been received
+      on authority. Aside from the more consciously philosophic aspects of these
+      movements, it never occurs to any one to identify mind and the personal
+      self wherever beliefs are transmitted by custom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the medieval period there was a religious individualism. The deepest
+      concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul. In the later
+      Middle Ages, this latent individualism found conscious formulation in the
+      nominalistic philosophies, which treated the structure of knowledge as
+      something built up within the individual through his own acts, and mental
+      states. With the rise of economic and political individualism after the
+      sixteenth century, and with the development of Protestantism, the times
+      were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the individual in
+      achieving knowledge for himself. This led to the view that knowledge is
+      won wholly through personal and private experiences. As a consequence,
+      mind, the source and possessor of knowledge, was thought of as wholly
+      individual. Thus upon the educational side, we find educational reformers,
+      like Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, henceforth vehemently denouncing all
+      learning which is acquired on hearsay, and asserting that even if beliefs
+      happen to be true, they do not constitute knowledge unless they have grown
+      up in and been tested by personal experience. The reaction against
+      authority in all spheres of life, and the intensity of the struggle,
+      against great odds, for freedom of action and inquiry, led to such an
+      emphasis upon personal observations and ideas as in effect to isolate
+      mind, and set it apart from the world to be known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This isolation is reflected in the great development of that branch of
+      philosophy known as epistemology&mdash;the theory of knowledge. The
+      identification of mind with the self, and the setting up of the self as
+      something independent and self-sufficient, created such a gulf between the
+      knowing mind and the world that it became a question how knowledge was
+      possible at all. Given a subject&mdash;the knower&mdash;and an object&mdash;the
+      thing to be known&mdash;wholly separate from one another, it is necessary
+      to frame a theory to explain how they get into connection with each other
+      so that valid knowledge may result. This problem, with the allied one of
+      the possibility of the world acting upon the mind and the mind acting upon
+      the world, became almost the exclusive preoccupation of philosophic
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The theories that we cannot know the world as it really is but only the
+      impressions made upon the mind, or that there is no world beyond the
+      individual mind, or that knowledge is only a certain association of the
+      mind's own states, were products of this preoccupation. We are not
+      directly concerned with their truth; but the fact that such desperate
+      solutions were widely accepted is evidence of the extent to which mind had
+      been set over the world of realities. The increasing use of the term
+      "consciousness" as an equivalent for mind, in the supposition that there
+      is an inner world of conscious states and processes, independent of any
+      relationship to nature and society, an inner world more truly and
+      immediately known than anything else, is evidence of the same fact. In
+      short, practical individualism, or struggle for greater freedom of thought
+      in action, was translated into philosophic subjectivism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Individual Mind as the Agent of Reorganization. It should be obvious
+      that this philosophic movement misconceived the significance of the
+      practical movement. Instead of being its transcript, it was a perversion.
+      Men were not actually engaged in the absurdity of striving to be free from
+      connection with nature and one another. They were striving for greater
+      freedom in nature and society. They wanted greater power to initiate
+      changes in the world of things and fellow beings; greater scope of
+      movement and consequently greater freedom in observations and ideas
+      implied in movement. They wanted not isolation from the world, but a more
+      intimate connection with it. They wanted to form their beliefs about it at
+      first hand, instead of through tradition. They wanted closer union with
+      their fellows so that they might influence one another more effectively
+      and might combine their respective actions for mutual aims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as their beliefs were concerned, they felt that a great deal which
+      passed for knowledge was merely the accumulated opinions of the past, much
+      of it absurd and its correct portions not understood when accepted on
+      authority. Men must observe for themselves, and form their own theories
+      and personally test them. Such a method was the only alternative to the
+      imposition of dogma as truth, a procedure which reduced mind to the formal
+      act of acquiescing in truth. Such is the meaning of what is sometimes
+      called the substitution of inductive experimental methods of knowing for
+      deductive. In some sense, men had always used an inductive method in
+      dealing with their immediate practical concerns. Architecture,
+      agriculture, manufacture, etc., had to be based upon observation of the
+      activities of natural objects, and ideas about such affairs had to be
+      checked, to some extent, by results. But even in such things there was an
+      undue reliance upon mere custom, followed blindly rather than
+      understandingly. And this observational-experimental method was restricted
+      to these "practical" matters, and a sharp distinction maintained between
+      practice and theoretical knowledge or truth. (See Ch. XX.) The rise of
+      free cities, the development of travel, exploration, and commerce, the
+      evolution of new methods of producing commodities and doing business,
+      threw men definitely upon their own resources. The reformers of science
+      like Galileo, Descartes, and their successors, carried analogous methods
+      into ascertaining the facts about nature. An interest in discovery took
+      the place of an interest in systematizing and "proving" received beliefs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A just philosophic interpretation of these movements would, indeed, have
+      emphasized the rights and responsibilities of the individual in gaining
+      knowledge and personally testing beliefs, no matter by what authorities
+      they were vouched for. But it would not have isolated the individual from
+      the world, and consequently isolated individuals&mdash;in theory&mdash;from
+      one another. It would have perceived that such disconnection, such rupture
+      of continuity, denied in advance the possibility of success in their
+      endeavors. As matter of fact every individual has grown up, and always
+      must grow up, in a social medium. His responses grow intelligent, or gain
+      meaning, simply because he lives and acts in a medium of accepted meanings
+      and values. (See ante, p. 30.) Through social intercourse, through sharing
+      in the activities embodying beliefs, he gradually acquires a mind of his
+      own. The conception of mind as a purely isolated possession of the self is
+      at the very antipodes of the truth. The self achieves mind in the degree
+      in which knowledge of things is incarnate in the life about him; the self
+      is not a separate mind building up knowledge anew on its own account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there is a valid distinction between knowledge which is objective and
+      impersonal, and thinking which is subjective and personal. In one sense,
+      knowledge is that which we take for granted. It is that which is settled,
+      disposed of, established, under control. What we fully know, we do not
+      need to think about. In common phrase, it is certain, assured. And this
+      does not mean a mere feeling of certainty. It denotes not a sentiment, but
+      a practical attitude, a readiness to act without reserve or quibble. Of
+      course we may be mistaken. What is taken for knowledge&mdash;for fact and
+      truth&mdash;at a given time may not be such. But everything which is
+      assumed without question, which is taken for granted in our intercourse
+      with one another and nature is what, at the given time, is called
+      knowledge. Thinking on the contrary, starts, as we have seen, from doubt
+      or uncertainty. It marks an inquiring, hunting, searching attitude,
+      instead of one of mastery and possession. Through its critical process
+      true knowledge is revised and extended, and our convictions as to the
+      state of things reorganized. Clearly the last few centuries have been
+      typically a period of revision and reorganization of beliefs. Men did not
+      really throw away all transmitted beliefs concerning the realities of
+      existence, and start afresh upon the basis of their private, exclusive
+      sensations and ideas. They could not have done so if they had wished to,
+      and if it had been possible general imbecility would have been the only
+      outcome. Men set out from what had passed as knowledge, and critically
+      investigated the grounds upon which it rested; they noted exceptions; they
+      used new mechanical appliances to bring to light data inconsistent with
+      what had been believed; they used their imaginations to conceive a world
+      different from that in which their forefathers had put their trust. The
+      work was a piecemeal, a retail, business. One problem was tackled at a
+      time. The net results of all the revisions amounted, however, to a
+      revolution of prior conceptions of the world. What occurred was a
+      reorganization of prior intellectual habitudes, infinitely more efficient
+      than a cutting loose from all connections would have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This state of affairs suggests a definition of the role of the individual,
+      or the self, in knowledge; namely, the redirection, or reconstruction of
+      accepted beliefs. Every new idea, every conception of things differing
+      from that authorized by current belief, must have its origin in an
+      individual. New ideas are doubtless always sprouting, but a society
+      governed by custom does not encourage their development. On the contrary,
+      it tends to suppress them, just because they are deviations from what is
+      current. The man who looks at things differently from others is in such a
+      community a suspect character; for him to persist is generally fatal. Even
+      when social censorship of beliefs is not so strict, social conditions may
+      fail to provide the appliances which are requisite if new ideas are to be
+      adequately elaborated; or they may fail to provide any material support
+      and reward to those who entertain them. Hence they remain mere fancies,
+      romantic castles in the air, or aimless speculations. The freedom of
+      observation and imagination involved in the modern scientific revolution
+      were not easily secured; they had to be fought for; many suffered for
+      their intellectual independence. But, upon the whole, modern European
+      society first permitted, and then, in some fields at least, deliberately
+      encouraged the individual reactions which deviate from what custom
+      prescribes. Discovery, research, inquiry in new lines, inventions, finally
+      came to be either the social fashion, or in some degree tolerable.
+      However, as we have already noted, philosophic theories of knowledge were
+      not content to conceive mind in the individual as the pivot upon which
+      reconstruction of beliefs turned, thus maintaining the continuity of the
+      individual with the world of nature and fellow men. They regarded the
+      individual mind as a separate entity, complete in each person, and
+      isolated from nature and hence from other minds. Thus a legitimate
+      intellectual individualism, the attitude of critical revision of former
+      beliefs which is indispensable to progress, was explicitly formulated as a
+      moral and social individualism. When the activities of mind set out from
+      customary beliefs and strive to effect transformations of them which will
+      in turn win general conviction, there is no opposition between the
+      individual and the social. The intellectual variations of the individual
+      in observation, imagination, judgment, and invention are simply the
+      agencies of social progress, just as conformity to habit is the agency of
+      social conservation. But when knowledge is regarded as originating and
+      developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of
+      one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied, it
+      becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with
+      his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of
+      different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion that the
+      consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed continent,
+      intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody
+      else. But when men act, they act in a common and public world. This is the
+      problem to which the theory of isolated and independent conscious minds
+      gave rise: Given feelings, ideas, desires, which have nothing to do with
+      one another, how can actions proceeding from them be controlled in a
+      social or public interest? Given an egoistic consciousness, how can action
+      which has regard for others take place?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moral philosophies which have started from such premises have developed
+      four typical ways of dealing with the question. (i) One method represents
+      the survival of the older authoritative position, with such concessions
+      and compromises as the progress of events has made absolutely inevitable.
+      The deviations and departures characterizing an individual are still
+      looked upon with suspicion; in principle they are evidences of the
+      disturbances, revolts, and corruptions inhering in an individual apart
+      from external authoritative guidance. In fact, as distinct from principle,
+      intellectual individualism is tolerated in certain technical regions&mdash;in
+      subjects like mathematics and physics and astronomy, and in the technical
+      inventions resulting therefrom. But the applicability of a similar method
+      to morals, social, legal, and political matters, is denied. In such
+      matters, dogma is still to be supreme; certain eternal truths made known
+      by revelation, intuition, or the wisdom of our forefathers set unpassable
+      limits to individual observation and speculation. The evils from which
+      society suffers are set down to the efforts of misguided individuals to
+      transgress these boundaries. Between the physical and the moral sciences,
+      lie intermediate sciences of life, where the territory is only grudgingly
+      yielded to freedom of inquiry under the pressure of accomplished fact.
+      Although past history has demonstrated that the possibilities of human
+      good are widened and made more secure by trusting to a responsibility
+      built up within the very process of inquiry, the "authority" theory sets
+      apart a sacred domain of truth which must be protected from the inroads of
+      variation of beliefs. Educationally, emphasis may not be put on eternal
+      truth, but it is put on the authority of book and teacher, and individual
+      variation is discouraged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) Another method is sometimes termed rationalism or abstract
+      intellectualism. A formal logical faculty is set up in distinction from
+      tradition and history and all concrete subject matter. This faculty of
+      reason is endowed with power to influence conduct directly. Since it deals
+      wholly with general and impersonal forms, when different persons act in
+      accord with logical findings, their activities will be externally
+      consistent. There is no doubt of the services rendered by this philosophy.
+      It was a powerful factor in the negative and dissolving criticism of
+      doctrines having nothing but tradition and class interest behind them; it
+      accustomed men to freedom of discussion and to the notion that beliefs had
+      to be submitted to criteria of reasonableness. It undermined the power of
+      prejudice, superstition, and brute force, by habituating men to reliance
+      upon argument, discussion, and persuasion. It made for clarity and order
+      of exposition. But its influence was greater in destruction of old
+      falsities than in the construction of new ties and associations among men.
+      Its formal and empty nature, due to conceiving reason as something
+      complete in itself apart from subject matter, its hostile attitude toward
+      historical institutions, its disregard of the influence of habit,
+      instinct, and emotion, as operative factors in life, left it impotent in
+      the suggestion of specific aims and methods. Bare logic, however important
+      in arranging and criticizing existing subject matter, cannot spin new
+      subject matter out of itself. In education, the correlative is trust in
+      general ready-made rules and principles to secure agreement, irrespective
+      of seeing to it that the pupil's ideas really agree with one another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iii) While this rationalistic philosophy was developing in France,
+      English thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest of individuals
+      in order to secure outer unity in the acts which issued from isolated
+      streams of consciousness. Legal arrangements, especially penal
+      administration, and governmental regulations, were to be such as to
+      prevent the acts which proceeded from regard for one's own private
+      sensations from interfering with the feelings of others. Education was to
+      instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others and some
+      degree of positive regard for their welfare were necessary for security in
+      the pursuit of one's own happiness. Chief emphasis was put, however, upon
+      trade as a means of bringing the conduct of one into harmony with that of
+      others. In commerce, each aims at the satisfaction of his own wants, but
+      can gain his own profit only by furnishing some commodity or service to
+      another. Thus in aiming at the increase of his own private pleasurable
+      states of consciousness, he contributes to the consciousness of others.
+      Again there is no doubt that this view expressed and furthered a
+      heightened perception of the values of conscious life, and a recognition
+      that institutional arrangements are ultimately to be judged by the
+      contributions which they make to intensifying and enlarging the scope of
+      conscious experience. It also did much to rescue work, industry, and
+      mechanical devices from the contempt in which they had been held in
+      communities founded upon the control of a leisure class. In both ways,
+      this philosophy promoted a wider and more democratic social concern. But
+      it was tainted by the narrowness of its fundamental premise: the doctrine
+      that every individual acts only from regard for his own pleasures and
+      pains, and that so-called generous and sympathetic acts are only indirect
+      ways of procuring and assuring one's own comfort. In other words, it made
+      explicit the consequences inhering in any doctrine which makes mental life
+      a self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt to redirect and readapt
+      common concerns. It made union among men a matter of calculation of
+      externals. It lent itself to the contemptuous assertions of Carlyle that
+      it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a constable, and recognized only a "cash
+      nexus" among men. The educational equivalents of this doctrine in the uses
+      made of pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only too obvious.
+      (iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path. It started from what
+      was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of Descartes and his French
+      successors. But while French thought upon the whole developed the idea of
+      reason in opposition to the religious conception of a divine mind residing
+      in individuals, German thought (as in Hegel) made a synthesis of the two.
+      Reason is absolute. Nature is incarnate reason. History is reason in its
+      progressive unfolding in man. An individual becomes rational only as he
+      absorbs into himself the content of rationality in nature and in social
+      institutions. For an absolute reason is not, like the reason of
+      rationalism, purely formal and empty; as absolute it must include all
+      content within itself. Thus the real problem is not that of controlling
+      individual freedom so that some measure of social order and concord may
+      result, but of achieving individual freedom through developing individual
+      convictions in accord with the universal law found in the organization of
+      the state as objective Reason. While this philosophy is usually termed
+      absolute or objective idealism, it might better be termed, for educational
+      purposes at least, institutional idealism. (See ante, p. 59.) It idealized
+      historical institutions by conceiving them as incarnations of an immanent
+      absolute mind. There can be no doubt that this philosophy was a powerful
+      influence in rescuing philosophy in the beginning of the nineteenth
+      century from the isolated individualism into which it had fallen in France
+      and England. It served also to make the organization of the state more
+      constructively interested in matters of public concern. It left less to
+      chance, less to mere individual logical conviction, less to the workings
+      of private self-interest. It brought intelligence to bear upon the conduct
+      of affairs; it accentuated the need of nationally organized education in
+      the interests of the corporate state. It sanctioned and promoted freedom
+      of inquiry in all technical details of natural and historical phenomena.
+      But in all ultimate moral matters, it tended to reinstate the principle of
+      authority. It made for efficiency of organization more than did any of the
+      types of philosophy previously mentioned, but it made no provision for
+      free experimental modification of this organization. Political democracy,
+      with its belief in the right of individual desire and purpose to take part
+      in readapting even the fundamental constitution of society, was foreign to
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Educational Equivalents. It is not necessary to consider in detail the
+      educational counterparts of the various defects found in these various
+      types of philosophy. It suffices to say that in general the school has
+      been the institution which exhibited with greatest clearness the assumed
+      antithesis between purely individualistic methods of learning and social
+      action, and between freedom and social control. The antithesis is
+      reflected in the absence of a social atmosphere and motive for learning,
+      and the consequent separation, in the conduct of the school, between
+      method of instruction and methods of government; and in the slight
+      opportunity afforded individual variations. When learning is a phase of
+      active undertakings which involve mutual exchange, social control enters
+      into the very process of learning. When the social factor is absent,
+      learning becomes a carrying over of some presented material into a purely
+      individual consciousness, and there is no inherent reason why it should
+      give a more socialized direction to mental and emotional disposition.
+      There is tendency on the part of both the upholders and the opponents of
+      freedom in school to identify it with absence of social direction, or,
+      sometimes, with merely physical unconstraint of movement. But the essence
+      of the demand for freedom is the need of conditions which will enable an
+      individual to make his own special contribution to a group interest, and
+      to partake of its activities in such ways that social guidance shall be a
+      matter of his own mental attitude, and not a mere authoritative dictation
+      of his acts. Because what is often called discipline and "government" has
+      to do with the external side of conduct alone, a similar meaning is
+      attached, by reaction, to freedom. But when it is perceived that each idea
+      signifies the quality of mind expressed in action, the supposed opposition
+      between them falls away. Freedom means essentially the part played by
+      thinking&mdash;which is personal&mdash;in learning:&mdash;it means
+      intellectual initiative, independence in observation, judicious invention,
+      foresight of consequences, and ingenuity of adaptation to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But because these are the mental phase of behavior, the needed play of
+      individuality&mdash;or freedom&mdash;cannot be separated from opportunity
+      for free play of physical movements. Enforced physical quietude may be
+      unfavorable to realization of a problem, to undertaking the observations
+      needed to define it, and to performance of the experiments which test the
+      ideas suggested. Much has been said about the importance of
+      "self-activity" in education, but the conception has too frequently been
+      restricted to something merely internal&mdash;something excluding the free
+      use of sensory and motor organs. Those who are at the stage of learning
+      from symbols, or who are engaged in elaborating the implications of a
+      problem or idea preliminary to more carefully thought-out activity, may
+      need little perceptible overt activity. But the whole cycle of
+      self-activity demands an opportunity for investigation and
+      experimentation, for trying out one's ideas upon things, discovering what
+      can be done with materials and appliances. And this is incompatible with
+      closely restricted physical activity. Individual activity has sometimes
+      been taken as meaning leaving a pupil to work by himself or alone. Relief
+      from need of attending to what any one else is doing is truly required to
+      secure calm and concentration. Children, like grown persons, require a
+      judicious amount of being let alone. But the time, place, and amount of
+      such separate work is a matter of detail, not of principle. There is no
+      inherent opposition between working with others and working as an
+      individual. On the contrary, certain capacities of an individual are not
+      brought out except under the stimulus of associating with others. That a
+      child must work alone and not engage in group activities in order to be
+      free and let his individuality develop, is a notion which measures
+      individuality by spatial distance and makes a physical thing of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Individuality as a factor to be respected in education has a double
+      meaning. In the first place, one is mentally an individual only as he has
+      his own purpose and problem, and does his own thinking. The phrase "think
+      for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't
+      thinking. Only by a pupil's own observations, reflections, framing and
+      testing of suggestions can what he already knows be amplified and
+      rectified. Thinking is as much an individual matter as is the digestion of
+      food. In the second place, there are variations of point of view, of
+      appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from person to person. When
+      these variations are suppressed in the alleged interests of uniformity,
+      and an attempt is made to have a single mold of method of study and
+      recitation, mental confusion and artificiality inevitably result.
+      Originality is gradually destroyed, confidence in one's own quality of
+      mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to the opinion of
+      others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild. The harm is greater now than
+      when the whole community was governed by customary beliefs, because the
+      contrast between methods of learning in school and those relied upon
+      outside the school is greater. That systematic advance in scientific
+      discovery began when individuals were allowed, and then encouraged, to
+      utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject matter, no one will
+      deny. If it is said in objection, that pupils in school are not capable of
+      any such originality, and hence must be confined to appropriating and
+      reproducing things already known by the better informed, the reply is
+      twofold. (i) We are concerned with originality of attitude which is
+      equivalent to the unforced response of one's own individuality, not with
+      originality as measured by product. No one expects the young to make
+      original discoveries of just the same facts and principles as are embodied
+      in the sciences of nature and man. But it is not unreasonable to expect
+      that learning may take place under such conditions that from the
+      standpoint of the learner there is genuine discovery. While immature
+      students will not make discoveries from the standpoint of advanced
+      students, they make them from their own standpoint, whenever there is
+      genuine learning. (ii) In the normal process of becoming acquainted with
+      subject matter already known to others, even young pupils react in
+      unexpected ways. There is something fresh, something not capable of being
+      fully anticipated by even the most experienced teacher, in the ways they
+      go at the topic, and in the particular ways in which things strike them.
+      Too often all this is brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are deliberately
+      held to rehearsing material in the exact form in which the older person
+      conceives it. The result is that what is instinctively original in
+      individuality, that which marks off one from another, goes unused and
+      undirected. Teaching then ceases to be an educative process for the
+      teacher. At most he learns simply to improve his existing technique; he
+      does not get new points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual
+      companionship. Hence both teaching and learning tend to become
+      conventional and mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides
+      therein implied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background of
+      familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or less
+      random physical experimentation is reduced. Activity is defined or
+      specialized in certain channels. To the eyes of others, the student may be
+      in a position of complete physical quietude, because his energies are
+      confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes and
+      vocal organs. But because this attitude is evidence of intense mental
+      concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not follow that
+      it should be set up as a model for students who still have to find their
+      intellectual way about. And even with the adult, it does not cover the
+      whole circuit of mental energy. It marks an intermediate period, capable
+      of being lengthened with increased mastery of a subject, but always coming
+      between an earlier period of more general and conspicuous organic action
+      and a later time of putting to use what has been apprehended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and body in
+      acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the need of
+      obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to identify the freedom which
+      is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking by which what a
+      person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. If attention is
+      centered upon the conditions which have to be met in order to secure a
+      situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take care of
+      itself. The individual who has a question which being really a question to
+      him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his eagerness for information
+      that will help him cope with it, and who has at command an equipment which
+      will permit these interests to take effect, is intellectually free.
+      Whatever initiative and imaginative vision he possesses will be called
+      into play and control his impulses and habits. His own purposes will
+      direct his actions. Otherwise, his seeming attention, his docility, his
+      memorizings and reproductions, will partake of intellectual servility.
+      Such a condition of intellectual subjection is needed for fitting the
+      masses into a society where the many are not expected to have aims or
+      ideas of their own, but to take orders from the few set in authority. It
+      is not adapted to a society which intends to be democratic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM22">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. True individualism is a product of the relaxation of the grip
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      of the authority of custom and traditions as standards of belief. Aside
+      from sporadic instances, like the height of Greek thought, it is a
+      comparatively modern manifestation. Not but that there have always been
+      individual diversities, but that a society dominated by conservative
+      custom represses them or at least does not utilize them and promote them.
+      For various reasons, however, the new individualism was interpreted
+      philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for revising and
+      transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an assertion that each
+      individual's mind was complete in isolation from everything else. In the
+      theoretical phase of philosophy, this produced the epistemological
+      problem: the question as to the possibility of any cognitive relationship
+      of the individual to the world. In its practical phase, it generated the
+      problem of the possibility of a purely individual consciousness acting on
+      behalf of general or social interests,&mdash;the problem of social
+      direction. While the philosophies which have been elaborated to deal with
+      these questions have not affected education directly, the assumptions
+      underlying them have found expression in the separation frequently made
+      between study and government and between freedom of individuality and
+      control by others. Regarding freedom, the important thing to bear in mind
+      is that it designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint
+      of movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair
+      leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc. A
+      society based on custom will utilize individual variations only up to a
+      limit of conformity with usage; uniformity is the chief ideal within each
+      class. A progressive society counts individual variations as precious
+      since it finds in them the means of its own growth. Hence a democratic
+      society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for intellectual
+      freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in its educational
+      measures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Meaning of Vocation. At the present time the conflict of
+      philosophic theories focuses in discussion of the proper place and
+      function of vocational factors in education. The bald statement that
+      significant differences in fundamental philosophical conceptions find
+      their chief issue in connection with this point may arouse incredulity:
+      there seems to be too great a gap between the remote and general terms in
+      which philosophic ideas are formulated and the practical and concrete
+      details of vocational education. But a mental review of the intellectual
+      presuppositions underlying the oppositions in education of labor and
+      leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the world,
+      will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and cultural
+      education. Traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to the notions
+      of leisure, purely contemplative knowledge and a spiritual activity not
+      involving the active use of bodily organs. Culture has also tended,
+      latterly, to be associated with a purely private refinement, a cultivation
+      of certain states and attitudes of consciousness, separate from either
+      social direction or service. It has been an escape from the former, and a
+      solace for the necessity of the latter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole subject
+      of vocational education, that it is necessary to define the meaning of
+      vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the impression that an
+      education which centers about it is narrowly practical, if not merely
+      pecuniary. A vocation means nothing but such a direction of life
+      activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because of
+      the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates. The
+      opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture, but aimlessness,
+      capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in experience, on
+      the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence upon the others,
+      on the social side. Occupation is a concrete term for continuity. It
+      includes the development of artistic capacity of any kind, of special
+      scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well as professional and
+      business occupations, to say nothing of mechanical labor or engagement in
+      gainful pursuits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to the
+      occupations where immediately tangible commodities are produced, but also
+      the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one and
+      only one to each person. Such restricted specialism is impossible; nothing
+      could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an eye to
+      only one line of activity. In the first place, each individual has of
+      necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be
+      intelligently effective; and in the second place any one occupation loses
+      its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy at something in the degree
+      in which it is isolated from other interests. (i) No one is just an artist
+      and nothing else, and in so far as one approximates that condition, he is
+      so much the less developed human being; he is a kind of monstrosity. He
+      must, at some period of his life, be a member of a family; he must have
+      friends and companions; he must either support himself or be supported by
+      others, and thus he has a business career. He is a member of some
+      organized political unit, and so on. We naturally name his vocation from
+      that one of the callings which distinguishes him, rather than from those
+      which he has in common with all others. But we should not allow ourselves
+      to be so subject to words as to ignore and virtually deny his other
+      callings when it comes to a consideration of the vocational phases of
+      education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) As a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized
+      phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his
+      efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by its
+      association with other callings. A person must have experience, he must
+      live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical accomplishment. He
+      cannot find the subject matter of his artistic activity within his art;
+      this must be an expression of what he suffers and enjoys in other
+      relationships&mdash;a thing which depends in turn upon the alertness and
+      sympathy of his interests. What is true of an artist is true of any other
+      special calling. There is doubtless&mdash;in general accord with the
+      principle of habit&mdash;a tendency for every distinctive vocation to
+      become too dominant, too exclusive and absorbing in its specialized
+      aspect. This means emphasis upon skill or technical method at the expense
+      of meaning. Hence it is not the business of education to foster this
+      tendency, but rather to safeguard against it, so that the scientific
+      inquirer shall not be merely the scientist, the teacher merely the
+      pedagogue, the clergyman merely one who wears the cloth, and so on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Place of Vocational Aims in Education. Bearing in mind the varied
+      and connected content of the vocation, and the broad background upon which
+      a particular calling is projected, we shall now consider education for the
+      more distinctive activity of an individual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. An occupation is the only thing which balances the distinctive capacity
+      of an individual with his social service. To find out what one is fitted
+      to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness.
+      Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business in
+      life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into
+      an uncongenial calling. A right occupation means simply that the aptitudes
+      of a person are in adequate play, working with the minimum of friction and
+      the maximum of satisfaction. With reference to other members of a
+      community, this adequacy of action signifies, of course, that they are
+      getting the best service the person can render. It is generally believed,
+      for example, that slave labor was ultimately wasteful even from the purely
+      economic point of view&mdash;that there was not sufficient stimulus to
+      direct the energies of slaves, and that there was consequent wastage.
+      Moreover, since slaves were confined to certain prescribed callings, much
+      talent must have remained unavailable to the community, and hence there
+      was a dead loss. Slavery only illustrates on an obvious scale what happens
+      in some degree whenever an individual does not find himself in his work.
+      And he cannot completely find himself when vocations are looked upon with
+      contempt, and a conventional ideal of a culture which is essentially the
+      same for all is maintained. Plato (ante, p. 88) laid down the fundamental
+      principle of a philosophy of education when he asserted that it was the
+      business of education to discover what each person is good for, and to
+      train him to mastery of that mode of excellence, because such development
+      would also secure the fulfillment of social needs in the most harmonious
+      way. His error was not in qualitative principle, but in his limited
+      conception of the scope of vocations socially needed; a limitation of
+      vision which reacted to obscure his perception of the infinite variety of
+      capacities found in different individuals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. An occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose. Education
+      through occupations consequently combines within itself more of the
+      factors conducive to learning than any other method. It calls instincts
+      and habits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. It has an end in
+      view; results are to be accomplished. Hence it appeals to thought; it
+      demands that an idea of an end be steadily maintained, so that activity
+      cannot be either routine or capricious. Since the movement of activity
+      must be progressive, leading from one stage to another, observation and
+      ingenuity are required at each stage to overcome obstacles and to discover
+      and readapt means of execution. In short, an occupation, pursued under
+      conditions where the realization of the activity rather than merely the
+      external product is the aim, fulfills the requirements which were laid
+      down earlier in connection with the discussion of aims, interest, and
+      thinking. (See Chapters VIII, X, XII.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for information and
+      ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth. It provides an axis which
+      runs through an immense diversity of detail; it causes different
+      experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with one
+      another. The lawyer, the physician, the laboratory investigator in some
+      branch of chemistry, the parent, the citizen interested in his own
+      locality, has a constant working stimulus to note and relate whatever has
+      to do with his concern. He unconsciously, from the motivation of his
+      occupation, reaches out for all relevant information, and holds to it. The
+      vocation acts as both magnet to attract and as glue to hold. Such
+      organization of knowledge is vital, because it has reference to needs; it
+      is so expressed and readjusted in action that it never becomes stagnant.
+      No classification, no selection and arrangement of facts, which is
+      consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever compare in
+      solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of an
+      occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal, superficial, and
+      cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The only adequate training for occupations is training through
+      occupations. The principle stated early in this book (see Chapter VI) that
+      the educative process is its own end, and that the only sufficient
+      preparation for later responsibilities comes by making the most of
+      immediately present life, applies in full force to the vocational phases
+      of education. The dominant vocation of all human beings at all times is
+      living&mdash;intellectual and moral growth. In childhood and youth, with
+      their relative freedom from economic stress, this fact is naked and
+      unconcealed. To predetermine some future occupation for which education is
+      to be a strict preparation is to injure the possibilities of present
+      development and thereby to reduce the adequacy of preparation for a future
+      right employment. To repeat the principle we have had occasion to appeal
+      to so often, such training may develop a machine-like skill in routine
+      lines (it is far from being sure to do so, since it may develop distaste,
+      aversion, and carelessness), but it will be at the expense of those
+      qualities of alert observation and coherent and ingenious planning which
+      make an occupation intellectually rewarding. In an autocratically managed
+      society, it is often a conscious object to prevent the development of
+      freedom and responsibility, a few do the planning and ordering, the others
+      follow directions and are deliberately confined to narrow and prescribed
+      channels of endeavor. However much such a scheme may inure to the prestige
+      and profit of a class, it is evident that it limits the development of the
+      subject class; hardens and confines the opportunities for learning through
+      experience of the master class, and in both ways hampers the life of the
+      society as a whole. (See ante, p. 260.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only alternative is that all the earlier preparation for vocations be
+      indirect rather than direct; namely, through engaging in those active
+      occupations which are indicated by the needs and interests of the pupil at
+      the time. Only in this way can there be on the part of the educator and of
+      the one educated a genuine discovery of personal aptitudes so that the
+      proper choice of a specialized pursuit in later life may be indicated.
+      Moreover, the discovery of capacity and aptitude will be a constant
+      process as long as growth continues. It is a conventional and arbitrary
+      view which assumes that discovery of the work to be chosen for adult life
+      is made once for all at some particular date. One has discovered in
+      himself, say, an interest, intellectual and social, in the things which
+      have to do with engineering and has decided to make that his calling. At
+      most, this only blocks out in outline the field in which further growth is
+      to be directed. It is a sort of rough sketch for use in direction of
+      further activities. It is the discovery of a profession in the sense in
+      which Columbus discovered America when he touched its shores. Future
+      explorations of an indefinitely more detailed and extensive sort remain to
+      be made. When educators conceive vocational guidance as something which
+      leads up to a definitive, irretrievable, and complete choice, both
+      education and the chosen vocation are likely to be rigid, hampering
+      further growth. In so far, the calling chosen will be such as to leave the
+      person concerned in a permanently subordinate position, executing the
+      intelligence of others who have a calling which permits more flexible play
+      and readjustment. And while ordinary usages of language may not justify
+      terming a flexible attitude of readjustment a choice of a new and further
+      calling, it is such in effect. If even adults have to be on the lookout to
+      see that their calling does not shut down on them and fossilize them,
+      educators must certainly be careful that the vocational preparation of
+      youth is such as to engage them in a continuous reorganization of aims and
+      methods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Present Opportunities and Dangers. In the past, education has been much
+      more vocational in fact than in name. (i) The education of the masses was
+      distinctly utilitarian. It was called apprenticeship rather than
+      education, or else just learning from experience. The schools devoted
+      themselves to the three R's in the degree in which ability to go through
+      the forms of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements in all
+      kinds of labor. Taking part in some special line of work, under the
+      direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education. The
+      two supplemented each other; the school work in its narrow and formal
+      character was as much a part of apprenticeship to a calling as that
+      explicitly so termed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) To a considerable extent, the education of the dominant classes was
+      essentially vocational&mdash;it only happened that their pursuits of
+      ruling and of enjoying were not called professions. For only those things
+      were named vocations or employments which involved manual labor, laboring
+      for a reward in keep, or its commuted money equivalent, or the rendering
+      of personal services to specific persons. For a long time, for example,
+      the profession of the surgeon and physician ranked almost with that of the
+      valet or barber&mdash;partly because it had so much to do with the body,
+      and partly because it involved rendering direct service for pay to some
+      definite person. But if we go behind words, the business of directing
+      social concerns, whether politically or economically, whether in war or
+      peace, is as much a calling as anything else; and where education has not
+      been completely under the thumb of tradition, higher schools in the past
+      have been upon the whole calculated to give preparation for this business.
+      Moreover, display, the adornment of person, the kind of social
+      companionship and entertainment which give prestige, and the spending of
+      money, have been made into definite callings. Unconsciously to themselves
+      the higher institutions of learning have been made to contribute to
+      preparation for these employments. Even at present, what is called higher
+      education is for a certain class (much smaller than it once was) mainly
+      preparation for engaging effectively in these pursuits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other respects, it is largely, especially in the most advanced work,
+      training for the calling of teaching and special research. By a peculiar
+      superstition, education which has to do chiefly with preparation for the
+      pursuit of conspicuous idleness, for teaching, and for literary callings,
+      and for leadership, has been regarded as non-vocational and even as
+      peculiarly cultural. The literary training which indirectly fits for
+      authorship, whether of books, newspaper editorials, or magazine articles,
+      is especially subject to this superstition: many a teacher and author
+      writes and argues in behalf of a cultural and humane education against the
+      encroachments of a specialized practical education, without recognizing
+      that his own education, which he calls liberal, has been mainly training
+      for his own particular calling. He has simply got into the habit of
+      regarding his own business as essentially cultural and of overlooking the
+      cultural possibilities of other employments. At the bottom of these
+      distinctions is undoubtedly the tradition which recognizes as employment
+      only those pursuits where one is responsible for his work to a specific
+      employer, rather than to the ultimate employer, the community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are, however, obvious causes for the present conscious emphasis upon
+      vocational education&mdash;for the disposition to make explicit and
+      deliberate vocational implications previously tacit. (i) In the first
+      place, there is an increased esteem, in democratic communities, of
+      whatever has to do with manual labor, commercial occupations, and the
+      rendering of tangible services to society. In theory, men and women are
+      now expected to do something in return for their support&mdash;intellectual
+      and economic&mdash;by society. Labor is extolled; service is a much-lauded
+      moral ideal. While there is still much admiration and envy of those who
+      can pursue lives of idle conspicuous display, better moral sentiment
+      condemns such lives. Social responsibility for the use of time and
+      personal capacity is more generally recognized than it used to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) In the second place, those vocations which are specifically
+      industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last century and
+      a half. Manufacturing and commerce are no longer domestic and local, and
+      consequently more or less incidental, but are world-wide. They engage the
+      best energies of an increasingly large number of persons. The
+      manufacturer, banker, and captain of industry have practically displaced a
+      hereditary landed gentry as the immediate directors of social affairs. The
+      problem of social readjustment is openly industrial, having to do with the
+      relations of capital and labor. The great increase in the social
+      importance of conspicuous industrial processes has inevitably brought to
+      the front questions having to do with the relationship of schooling to
+      industrial life. No such vast social readjustment could occur without
+      offering a challenge to an education inherited from different social
+      conditions, and without putting up to education new problems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iii) In the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly mentioned:
+      Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical, rule-of-thumb
+      procedure, handed down by custom. Its technique is now technological: that
+      is to say, based upon machinery resulting from discoveries in mathematics,
+      physics, chemistry, bacteriology, etc. The economic revolution has
+      stimulated science by setting problems for solution, by producing greater
+      intellectual respect for mechanical appliances. And industry received back
+      payment from science with compound interest. As a consequence, industrial
+      occupations have infinitely greater intellectual content and infinitely
+      larger cultural possibilities than they used to possess. The demand for
+      such education as will acquaint workers with the scientific and social
+      bases and bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative, since those who
+      are without it inevitably sink to the role of appendages to the machines
+      they operate. Under the old regime all workers in a craft were
+      approximately equals in their knowledge and outlook. Personal knowledge
+      and ingenuity were developed within at least a narrow range, because work
+      was done with tools under the direct command of the worker. Now the
+      operator has to adjust himself to his machine, instead of his tool to his
+      own purposes. While the intellectual possibilities of industry have
+      multiplied, industrial conditions tend to make industry, for great masses,
+      less of an educative resource than it was in the days of hand production
+      for local markets. The burden of realizing the intellectual possibilities
+      inhering in work is thus thrown back on the school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iv) In the fourth place, the pursuit of knowledge has become, in science,
+      more experimental, less dependent upon literary tradition, and less
+      associated with dialectical methods of reasoning, and with symbols. As a
+      result, the subject matter of industrial occupation presents not only more
+      of the content of science than it used to, but greater opportunity for
+      familiarity with the method by which knowledge is made. The ordinary
+      worker in the factory is of course under too immediate economic pressure
+      to have a chance to produce a knowledge like that of the worker in the
+      laboratory. But in schools, association with machines and industrial
+      processes may be had under conditions where the chief conscious concern of
+      the students is insight. The separation of shop and laboratory, where
+      these conditions are fulfilled, is largely conventional, the laboratory
+      having the advantage of permitting the following up of any intellectual
+      interest a problem may suggest; the shop the advantage of emphasizing the
+      social bearings of the scientific principle, as well as, with many pupils,
+      of stimulating a livelier interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (v) Finally, the advances which have been made in the psychology of
+      learning in general and of childhood in particular fall into line with the
+      increased importance of industry in life. For modern psychology emphasizes
+      the radical importance of primitive unlearned instincts of exploring,
+      experimentation, and "trying on." It reveals that learning is not the work
+      of something ready-made called mind, but that mind itself is an
+      organization of original capacities into activities having significance.
+      As we have already seen (ante, p. 204), in older pupils work is to
+      educative development of raw native activities what play is for younger
+      pupils. Moreover, the passage from play to work should be gradual, not
+      involving a radical change of attitude but carrying into work the elements
+      of play, plus continuous reorganization in behalf of greater control. The
+      reader will remark that these five points practically resume the main
+      contentions of the previous part of the work. Both practically and
+      philosophically, the key to the present educational situation lies in a
+      gradual reconstruction of school materials and methods so as to utilize
+      various forms of occupation typifying social callings, and to bring out
+      their intellectual and moral content. This reconstruction must relegate
+      purely literary methods&mdash;including textbooks&mdash;and dialectical
+      methods to the position of necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent
+      development of consecutive and cumulative activities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational
+      reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a technical
+      preparation for industries and professions as they now operate, much less
+      by merely reproducing existing industrial conditions in the school. The
+      problem is not that of making the schools an adjunct to manufacture and
+      commerce, but of utilizing the factors of industry to make school life
+      more active, more full of immediate meaning, more connected with
+      out-of-school experience. The problem is not easy of solution. There is a
+      standing danger that education will perpetuate the older traditions for a
+      select few, and effect its adjustment to the newer economic conditions
+      more or less on the basis of acquiescence in the untransformed,
+      unrationalized, and unsocialized phases of our defective industrial
+      regime. Put in concrete terms, there is danger that vocational education
+      will be interpreted in theory and practice as trade education: as a means
+      of securing technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits. Education
+      would then become an instrument of perpetuating unchanged the existing
+      industrial order of society, instead of operating as a means of its
+      transformation. The desired transformation is not difficult to define in a
+      formal way. It signifies a society in which every person shall be occupied
+      in something which makes the lives of others better worth living, and
+      which accordingly makes the ties which bind persons together more
+      perceptible&mdash;which breaks down the barriers of distance between them.
+      It denotes a state of affairs in which the interest of each in his work is
+      uncoerced and intelligent: based upon its congeniality to his own
+      aptitudes. It goes without saying that we are far from such a social
+      state; in a literal and quantitative sense, we may never arrive at it. But
+      in principle, the quality of social changes already accomplished lies in
+      this direction. There are more ample resources for its achievement now
+      than ever there have been before. No insuperable obstacles, given the
+      intelligent will for its realization, stand in the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Success or failure in its realization depends more upon the adoption of
+      educational methods calculated to effect the change than upon anything
+      else. For the change is essentially a change in the quality of mental
+      disposition&mdash;an educative change. This does not mean that we can
+      change character and mind by direct instruction and exhortation, apart
+      from a change in industrial and political conditions. Such a conception
+      contradicts our basic idea that character and mind are attitudes of
+      participative response in social affairs. But it does mean that we may
+      produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like to
+      realize, and by forming minds in accord with it gradually modify the
+      larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society. Sentimentally, it
+      may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present regime is not
+      found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact
+      that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are
+      pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings
+      constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and
+      evade. Neither men's hearts nor their minds are in their work. On the
+      other hand, those who are not only much better off in worldly goods, but
+      who are in excessive, if not monopolistic, control of the activities of
+      the many are shut off from equality and generality of social intercourse.
+      They are stimulated to pursuits of indulgence and display; they try to
+      make up for the distance which separates them from others by the
+      impression of force and superior possession and enjoyment which they can
+      make upon others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational
+      education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form. Taking its stand
+      upon a dogma of social predestination, it would assume that some are to
+      continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like the present,
+      and would aim simply to give them what is termed a trade education&mdash;that
+      is, greater technical efficiency. Technical proficiency is often sadly
+      lacking, and is surely desirable on all accounts&mdash;not merely for the
+      sake of the production of better goods at less cost, but for the greater
+      happiness found in work. For no one cares for what one cannot half do. But
+      there is a great difference between a proficiency limited to immediate
+      work, and a competency extended to insight into its social bearings;
+      between efficiency in carrying out the plans of others and in one forming
+      one's own. At present, intellectual and emotional limitation characterizes
+      both the employing and the employed class. While the latter often have no
+      concern with their occupation beyond the money return it brings, the
+      former's outlook may be confined to profit and power. The latter interest
+      generally involves much greater intellectual initiation and larger survey
+      of conditions. For it involves the direction and combination of a large
+      number of diverse factors, while the interest in wages is restricted to
+      certain direct muscular movements. But none the less there is a limitation
+      of intelligence to technical and non-humane, non-liberal channels, so far
+      as the work does not take in its social bearings. And when the animating
+      motive is desire for private profit or personal power, this limitation is
+      inevitable. In fact, the advantage in immediate social sympathy and humane
+      disposition often lies with the economically unfortunate, who have not
+      experienced the hardening effects of a one-sided control of the affairs of
+      others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of departure
+      from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely to assume and to
+      perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and thus to become an instrument
+      in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination. Those who are
+      in a position to make their wishes good, will demand a liberal, a cultural
+      occupation, and one which fits for directive power the youth in whom they
+      are directly interested. To split the system, and give to others, less
+      fortunately situated, an education conceived mainly as specific trade
+      preparation, is to treat the schools as an agency for transferring the
+      older division of labor and leisure, culture and service, mind and body,
+      directed and directive class, into a society nominally democratic. Such a
+      vocational education inevitably discounts the scientific and historic
+      human connections of the materials and processes dealt with. To include
+      such things in narrow trade education would be to waste time; concern for
+      them would not be "practical." They are reserved for those who have
+      leisure at command&mdash;the leisure due to superior economic resources.
+      Such things might even be dangerous to the interests of the controlling
+      class, arousing discontent or ambitions "beyond the station" of those
+      working under the direction of others. But an education which acknowledges
+      the full intellectual and social meaning of a vocation would include
+      instruction in the historic background of present conditions; training in
+      science to give intelligence and initiative in dealing with material and
+      agencies of production; and study of economics, civics, and politics, to
+      bring the future worker into touch with the problems of the day and the
+      various methods proposed for its improvement. Above all, it would train
+      power of readaptation to changing conditions so that future workers would
+      not become blindly subject to a fate imposed upon them. This ideal has to
+      contend not only with the inertia of existing educational traditions, but
+      also with the opposition of those who are entrenched in command of the
+      industrial machinery, and who realize that such an educational system if
+      made general would threaten their ability to use others for their own
+      ends. But this very fact is the presage of a more equitable and
+      enlightened social order, for it gives evidence of the dependence of
+      social reorganization upon educational reconstruction. It is accordingly
+      an encouragement to those believing in a better order to undertake the
+      promotion of a vocational education which does not subject youth to the
+      demands and standards of the present system, but which utilizes its
+      scientific and social factors to develop a courageous intelligence, and to
+      make intelligence practical and executive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM23">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. A vocation signifies any form of continuous activity which
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      renders service to others and engages personal powers in behalf of the
+      accomplishment of results. The question of the relation of vocation to
+      education brings to a focus the various problems previously discussed
+      regarding the connection of thought with bodily activity; of individual
+      conscious development with associated life; of theoretical culture with
+      practical behavior having definite results; of making a livelihood with
+      the worthy enjoyment of leisure. In general, the opposition to recognition
+      of the vocational phases of life in education (except for the utilitarian
+      three R's in elementary schooling) accompanies the conservation of
+      aristocratic ideals of the past. But, at the present juncture, there is a
+      movement in behalf of something called vocational training which, if
+      carried into effect, would harden these ideas into a form adapted to the
+      existing industrial regime. This movement would continue the traditional
+      liberal or cultural education for the few economically able to enjoy it,
+      and would give to the masses a narrow technical trade education for
+      specialized callings, carried on under the control of others. This scheme
+      denotes, of course, simply a perpetuation of the older social division,
+      with its counterpart intellectual and moral dualisms. But it means its
+      continuation under conditions where it has much less justification for
+      existence. For industrial life is now so dependent upon science and so
+      intimately affects all forms of social intercourse, that there is an
+      opportunity to utilize it for development of mind and character. Moreover,
+      a right educational use of it would react upon intelligence and interest
+      so as to modify, in connection with legislation and administration, the
+      socially obnoxious features of the present industrial and commercial
+      order. It would turn the increasing fund of social sympathy to
+      constructive account, instead of leaving it a somewhat blind philanthropic
+      sentiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would give those who engage in industrial callings desire and ability
+      to share in social control, and ability to become masters of their
+      industrial fate. It would enable them to saturate with meaning the
+      technical and mechanical features which are so marked a feature of our
+      machine system of production and distribution. So much for those who now
+      have the poorer economic opportunities. With the representatives of the
+      more privileged portion of the community, it would increase sympathy for
+      labor, create a disposition of mind which can discover the culturing
+      elements in useful activity, and increase a sense of social
+      responsibility. The crucial position of the question of vocational
+      education at present is due, in other words, to the fact that it
+      concentrates in a specific issue two fundamental questions:&mdash;Whether
+      intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity which puts
+      nature to human use, and whether individual culture is best secured under
+      egoistic or social conditions. No discussion of details is undertaken in
+      this chapter, because this conclusion but summarizes the discussion of the
+      previous chapters, XV to XXII, inclusive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. A Critical Review. Although we are dealing with the philosophy of
+      education, DO definition of philosophy has yet been given; nor has there
+      been an explicit consideration of the nature of a philosophy of education.
+      This topic is now introduced by a summary account of the logical order
+      implied in the previous discussions, for the purpose of bringing out the
+      philosophic issues involved. Afterwards we shall undertake a brief
+      discussion, in more specifically philosophical terms, of the theories of
+      knowledge and of morals implied in different educational ideals as they
+      operate in practice. The prior chapters fall logically into three parts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. The first chapters deal with education as a social need and function.
+      Their purpose is to outline the general features of education as the
+      process by which social groups maintain their continuous existence.
+      Education was shown to be a process of renewal of the meanings of
+      experience through a process of transmission, partly incidental to the
+      ordinary companionship or intercourse of adults and youth, partly
+      deliberately instituted to effect social continuity. This process was seen
+      to involve control and growth of both the immature individual and the
+      group in which he lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This consideration was formal in that it took no specific account of the
+      quality of the social group concerned&mdash;the kind of society aiming at
+      its own perpetuation through education. The general discussion was then
+      specified by application to social groups which are intentionally
+      progressive, and which aim at a greater variety of mutually shared
+      interests in distinction from those which aim simply at the preservation
+      of established customs. Such societies were found to be democratic in
+      quality, because of the greater freedom allowed the constituent members,
+      and the conscious need of securing in individuals a consciously socialized
+      interest, instead of trusting mainly to the force of customs operating
+      under the control of a superior class. The sort of education appropriate
+      to the development of a democratic community was then explicitly taken as
+      the criterion of the further, more detailed analysis of education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II. This analysis, based upon the democratic criterion, was seen to imply
+      the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing of experience, of
+      such a nature as to increase its recognized meaning or social content, and
+      as to increase the capacity of individuals to act as directive guardians
+      of this reorganization. (See Chapters VI-VII.) This distinction was then
+      used to outline the respective characters of subject matter and method. It
+      also defined their unity, since method in study and learning upon this
+      basis is just the consciously directed movement of reorganization of the
+      subject matter of experience. From this point of view the main principles
+      of method and subject matter of learning were developed (Chapters
+      XIII-XIV.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III. Save for incidental criticisms designed to illustrate principles by
+      force of contrast, this phase of the discussion took for granted the
+      democratic criterion and its application in present social life. In the
+      subsequent chapters (XVIII-XXII) we considered the present limitation of
+      its actual realization. They were found to spring from the notion that
+      experience consists of a variety of segregated domains, or interests, each
+      having its own independent value, material, and method, each checking
+      every other, and, when each is kept properly bounded by the others,
+      forming a kind of "balance of powers" in education. We then proceeded to
+      an analysis of the various assumptions underlying this segregation. On the
+      practical side, they were found to have their cause in the divisions of
+      society into more or less rigidly marked-off classes and groups&mdash;in
+      other words, in obstruction to full and flexible social interaction and
+      intercourse. These social ruptures of continuity were seen to have their
+      intellectual formulation in various dualisms or antitheses&mdash;such as
+      that of labor and leisure, practical and intellectual activity, man and
+      nature, individuality and association, culture and vocation. In this
+      discussion, we found that these different issues have their counterparts
+      in formulations which have been made in classic philosophic systems; and
+      that they involve the chief problems of philosophy&mdash;such as mind (or
+      spirit) and matter, body and mind, the mind and the world, the individual
+      and his relationships to others, etc. Underlying these various separations
+      we found the fundamental assumption to be an isolation of mind from
+      activity involving physical conditions, bodily organs, material
+      appliances, and natural objects. Consequently, there was indicated a
+      philosophy which recognizes the origin, place, and function of mind in an
+      activity which controls the environment. Thus we have completed the
+      circuit and returned to the conceptions of the first portion of this book:
+      such as the biological continuity of human impulses and instincts with
+      natural energies; the dependence of the growth of mind upon participation
+      in conjoint activities having a common purpose; the influence of the
+      physical environment through the uses made of it in the social medium; the
+      necessity of utilization of individual variations in desire and thinking
+      for a progressively developing society; the essential unity of method and
+      subject matter; the intrinsic continuity of ends and means; the
+      recognition of mind as thinking which perceives and tests the meanings of
+      behavior. These conceptions are consistent with the philosophy which sees
+      intelligence to be the purposive reorganization, through action, of the
+      material of experience; and they are inconsistent with each of the
+      dualistic philosophies mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Nature of Philosophy. Our further task is to extract and make
+      explicit the idea of philosophy implicit in these considerations. We have
+      already virtually described, though not defined, philosophy in terms of
+      the problems with which it deals; and we have pointed out that these problems originate in the conflicts
+and difficulties of social life. The problems are such things as the
+relations of mind and matter; body and soul; humanity and physical
+nature; the individual and the social; theory&mdash;or knowing, and
+practice&mdash;or doing. The philosophical systems which formulate these
+problems record the main lineaments and difficulties of contemporary
+social practice. They bring to explicit consciousness what men have come
+to think, in virtue of the quality of their current experience, about
+nature, themselves, and the reality they conceive to include or to
+govern both.
+</p>
+<p>
+As we might expect, then, philosophy has generally been defined in ways
+which imply a certain totality, generality, and ultimateness of both
+subject matter and method. With respect to subject matter, philosophy
+is an attempt to <i>comprehend</i>&mdash;that is, to gather together the varied
+details of the world and of life into a single inclusive whole, which
+shall either be a unity, or, as in the dualistic systems, shall reduce
+the plural details to a small number of ultimate principles. On the
+side of the attitude of the philosopher and of those who accept his
+conclusions, there is the endeavor to attain as unified, consistent,
+and complete an outlook upon experience as is possible. This aspect is
+expressed in the word 'philosophy'&mdash;love of wisdom. Whenever philosophy
+has been taken seriously, it has always been assumed that it signified
+achieving a wisdom which would influence the conduct of life. Witness
+the fact that almost all ancient schools of philosophy were also
+organized ways of living, those who accepted their tenets being
+committed to certain distinctive modes of conduct; witness the intimate
+connection of philosophy with the theology of the Roman church in the
+middle ages, its frequent association with religious interests, and, at
+national crises, its association with political struggles.
+</p>
+<p>
+This direct and intimate connection of philosophy with an outlook upon
+life obviously differentiates philosophy from science. Particular facts
+and laws of science evidently influence conduct. They suggest things to
+do and not do, and provide means of execution. When science denotes not
+simply a report of the particular facts discovered about the world but
+a <i>general attitude</i> toward it&mdash;as distinct from special things to do
+&mdash;it merges into philosophy. For an underlying disposition represents an
+attitude not to this and that thing nor even to the aggregate
+      of known things, but to the considerations which govern conduct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of subject matter.
+      For this reason, the definition of such conceptions as generality,
+      totality, and ultimateness is most readily reached from the side of the
+      disposition toward the world which they connote. In any literal and
+      quantitative sense, these terms do not apply to the subject matter of
+      knowledge, for completeness and finality are out of the question. The very
+      nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process forbids. In a less
+      rigid sense, they apply to science rather than to philosophy. For
+      obviously it is to mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology,
+      history, etc. that we must go, not to philosophy, to find out the facts of
+      the world. It is for the sciences to say what generalizations are tenable
+      about the world and what they specifically are. But when we ask what sort
+      of permanent disposition of action toward the world the scientific
+      disclosures exact of us we are raising a philosophic question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this point of view, "totality" does not mean the hopeless task of a
+      quantitative summation. It means rather consistency of mode of response in
+      reference to the plurality of events which occur. Consistency does not
+      mean literal identity; for since the same thing does not happen twice, an
+      exact repetition of a reaction involves some maladjustment. Totality means
+      continuity&mdash;the carrying on of a former habit of action with the
+      readaptation necessary to keep it alive and growing. Instead of signifying
+      a ready-made complete scheme of action, it means keeping the balance in a
+      multitude of diverse actions, so that each borrows and gives significance
+      to every other. Any person who is open-minded and sensitive to new
+      perceptions, and who has concentration and responsibility in connecting
+      them has, in so far, a philosophic disposition. One of the popular senses
+      of philosophy is calm and endurance in the face of difficulty and loss; it
+      is even supposed to be a power to bear pain without complaint. This
+      meaning is a tribute to the influence of the Stoic philosophy rather than
+      an attribute of philosophy in general. But in so far as it suggests that
+      the wholeness characteristic of philosophy is a power to learn, or to
+      extract meaning, from even the unpleasant vicissitudes of experience and
+      to embody what is learned in an ability to go on learning, it is justified
+      in any scheme. An analogous interpretation applies to the generality and
+      ultimateness of philosophy. Taken literally, they are absurd pretensions;
+      they indicate insanity. Finality does not mean, however, that experience
+      is ended and exhausted, but means the disposition to penetrate to deeper
+      levels of meaning&mdash;to go below the surface and find out the
+      connections of any event or object, and to keep at it. In like manner the
+      philosophic attitude is general in the sense that it is averse to taking
+      anything as isolated; it tries to place an act in its context&mdash;which
+      constitutes its significance. It is of assistance to connect philosophy
+      with thinking in its distinction from knowledge. Knowledge, grounded
+      knowledge, is science; it represents objects which have been settled,
+      ordered, disposed of rationally. Thinking, on the other hand, is
+      prospective in reference. It is occasioned by an unsettlement and it aims
+      at overcoming a disturbance. Philosophy is thinking what the known demands
+      of us&mdash;what responsive attitude it exacts. It is an idea of what is
+      possible, not a record of accomplished fact. Hence it is hypothetical,
+      like all thinking. It presents an assignment of something to be done&mdash;something
+      to be tried. Its value lies not in furnishing solutions (which can be
+      achieved only in action) but in defining difficulties and suggesting
+      methods for dealing with them. Philosophy might almost be described as
+      thinking which has become conscious of itself&mdash;which has generalized
+      its place, function, and value in experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More specifically, the demand for a "total" attitude arises because there
+      is the need of integration in action of the conflicting various interests
+      in life. Where interests are so superficial that they glide readily into
+      one another, or where they are not sufficiently organized to come into
+      conflict with one another, the need for philosophy is not perceptible. But
+      when the scientific interest conflicts with, say, the religious, or the
+      economic with the scientific or aesthetic, or when the conservative
+      concern for order is at odds with the progressive interest in freedom, or
+      when institutionalism clashes with individuality, there is a stimulus to
+      discover some more comprehensive point of view from which the divergencies
+      may be brought together, and consistency or continuity of experience
+      recovered. Often these clashes may be settled by an individual for
+      himself; the area of the struggle of aims is limited and a person works
+      out his own rough accommodations. Such homespun philosophies are genuine
+      and often adequate. But they do not result in systems of philosophy. These
+      arise when the discrepant claims of different ideals of conduct affect the
+      community as a whole, and the need for readjustment is general. These
+      traits explain some things which are often brought as objections against
+      philosophies, such as the part played in them by individual speculation,
+      and their controversial diversity, as well as the fact that philosophy
+      seems to be repeatedly occupied with much the same questions differently
+      stated. Without doubt, all these things characterize historic philosophies
+      more or less. But they are not objections to philosophy so much as they
+      are to human nature, and even to the world in which human nature is set.
+      If there are genuine uncertainties in life, philosophies must reflect that
+      uncertainty. If there are different diagnoses of the cause of a
+      difficulty, and different proposals for dealing with it; if, that is, the
+      conflict of interests is more or less embodied in different sets of
+      persons, there must be divergent competing philosophies. With respect to
+      what has happened, sufficient evidence is all that is needed to bring
+      agreement and certainty. The thing itself is sure. But with reference to
+      what it is wise to do in a complicated situation, discussion is inevitable
+      precisely because the thing itself is still indeterminate. One would not
+      expect a ruling class living at ease to have the same philosophy of life
+      as those who were having a hard struggle for existence. If the possessing
+      and the dispossessed had the same fundamental disposition toward the
+      world, it would argue either insincerity or lack of seriousness. A
+      community devoted to industrial pursuits, active in business and commerce,
+      is not likely to see the needs and possibilities of life in the same way
+      as a country with high aesthetic culture and little enterprise in turning
+      the energies of nature to mechanical account. A social group with a fairly
+      continuous history will respond mentally to a crisis in a very different
+      way from one which has felt the shock of abrupt breaks. Even if the same
+      data were present, they would be evaluated differently. But the different
+      sorts of experience attending different types of life prevent just the
+      same data from presenting themselves, as well as lead to a different
+      scheme of values. As for the similarity of problems, this is often more a
+      matter of appearance than of fact, due to old discussions being translated
+      into the terms of contemporary perplexities. But in certain fundamental
+      respects the same predicaments of life recur from time to time with only
+      such changes as are due to change of social context, including the growth
+      of the sciences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact that philosophic problems arise because of widespread and widely
+      felt difficulties in social practice is disguised because philosophers
+      become a specialized class which uses a technical language, unlike the
+      vocabulary in which the direct difficulties are stated. But where a system
+      becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of interests calling
+      for some program of social adjustment may always be discovered. At this
+      point, the intimate connection between philosophy and education appears.
+      In fact, education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the
+      human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic
+      discussions. The student of philosophy "in itself" is always in danger of
+      taking it as so much nimble or severe intellectual exercise&mdash;as
+      something said by philosophers and concerning them alone. But when
+      philosophic issues are approached from the side of the kind of mental
+      disposition to which they correspond, or the differences in educational
+      practice they make when acted upon, the life-situations which they
+      formulate can never be far from view. If a theory makes no difference in
+      educational endeavor, it must be artificial. The educational point of view
+      enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and
+      thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a
+      difference in practice. If we are willing to conceive education as the
+      process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional,
+      toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the
+      general theory of education. Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic&mdash;or
+      verbal&mdash;or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary
+      dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take
+      effect in conduct. Public agitation, propaganda, legislative and
+      administrative action are effective in producing the change of disposition
+      which a philosophy indicates as desirable, but only in the degree in which
+      they are educative&mdash;that is to say, in the degree in which they
+      modify mental and moral attitudes. And at the best, such methods are
+      compromised by the fact they are used with those whose habits are already
+      largely set, while education of youth has a fairer and freer field of
+      operation. On the other side, the business of schooling tends to become a
+      routine empirical affair unless its aims and methods are animated by such
+      a broad and sympathetic survey of its place in contemporary life as it is
+      the business of philosophy to provide. Positive science always implies
+      practically the ends which the community is concerned to achieve. Isolated
+      from such ends, it is matter of indifference whether its disclosures are
+      used to cure disease or to spread it; to increase the means of sustenance
+      of life or to manufacture war material to wipe life out. If society is
+      interested in one of these things rather than another, science shows the
+      way of attainment. Philosophy thus has a double task: that of criticizing
+      existing aims with respect to the existing state of science, pointing out
+      values which have become obsolete with the command of new resources,
+      showing what values are merely sentimental because there are no means for
+      their realization; and also that of interpreting the results of
+      specialized science in their bearing on future social endeavor. It is
+      impossible that it should have any success in these tasks without
+      educational equivalents as to what to do and what not to do. For
+      philosophic theory has no Aladdin's lamp to summon into immediate
+      existence the values which it intellectually constructs. In the mechanical
+      arts, the sciences become methods of managing things so as to utilize
+      their energies for recognized aims. By the educative arts philosophy may
+      generate methods of utilizing the energies of human beings in accord with
+      serious and thoughtful conceptions of life. Education is the laboratory in
+      which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are tested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is suggestive that European philosophy originated (among the Athenians)
+      under the direct pressure of educational questions. The earlier history of
+      philosophy, developed by the Greeks in Asia Minor and Italy, so far as its
+      range of topics is concerned, is mainly a chapter in the history of
+      science rather than of philosophy as that word is understood to-day. It
+      had nature for its subject, and speculated as to how things are made and
+      changed. Later the traveling teachers, known as the Sophists, began to
+      apply the results and the methods of the natural philosophers to human
+      conduct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Sophists, the first body of professional educators in Europe,
+      instructed the youth in virtue, the political arts, and the management of
+      city and household, philosophy began to deal with the relation of the
+      individual to the universal, to some comprehensive class, or to some
+      group; the relation of man and nature, of tradition and reflection, of
+      knowledge and action. Can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be
+      learned, they asked? What is learning? It has to do with knowledge. What,
+      then, is knowledge? How is it achieved? Through the senses, or by
+      apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has undergone a
+      preliminary logical discipline? Since learning is coming to know, it
+      involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom, from privation to fullness
+      from defect to perfection, from non-being to being, in the Greek way of
+      putting it. How is such a transition possible? Is change, becoming,
+      development really possible and if so, how? And supposing such questions
+      answered, what is the relation of instruction, of knowledge, to virtue?
+      This last question led to opening the problem of the relation of reason to
+      action, of theory to practice, since virtue clearly dwelt in action. Was
+      not knowing, the activity of reason, the noblest attribute of man? And
+      consequently was not purely intellectual activity itself the highest of
+      all excellences, compared with which the virtues of neighborliness and the
+      citizen's life were secondary? Or, on the other hand, was the vaunted
+      intellectual knowledge more than empty and vain pretense, demoralizing to
+      character and destructive of the social ties that bound men together in
+      their community life? Was not the only true, because the only moral, life
+      gained through obedient habituation to the customary practices of the
+      community? And was not the new education an enemy to good citizenship,
+      because it set up a rival standard to the established traditions of the
+      community?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of two or three generations such questions were cut loose
+      from their original practical bearing upon education and were discussed on
+      their own account; that is, as matters of philosophy as an independent
+      branch of inquiry. But the fact that the stream of European philosophical
+      thought arose as a theory of educational procedure remains an eloquent
+      witness to the intimate connection of philosophy and education.
+      "Philosophy of education" is not an external application of ready-made
+      ideas to a system of practice having a radically different origin and
+      purpose: it is only an explicit formulation of the problems of the
+      formation of right mental and moral habitudes in respect to the
+      difficulties of contemporary social life. The most penetrating definition
+      of philosophy which can be given is, then, that it is the theory of
+      education in its most general phases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social ideals and
+      methods thus go hand in hand. If there is especial need of educational
+      reconstruction at the present time, if this need makes urgent a
+      reconsideration of the basic ideas of traditional philosophic systems, it
+      is because of the thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying the
+      advance of science, the industrial revolution, and the development of
+      democracy. Such practical changes cannot take place without demanding an
+      educational reformation to meet them, and without leading men to ask what
+      ideas and ideals are implicit in these social changes, and what revisions
+      they require of the ideas and ideals which are inherited from older and
+      unlike cultures. Incidentally throughout the whole book, explicitly in the
+      last few chapters, we have been dealing with just these questions as they
+      affect the relationship of mind and body, theory and practice, man and
+      nature, the individual and social, etc. In our concluding chapters we
+      shall sum up the prior discussions with respect first to the philosophy of
+      knowledge, and then to the philosophy of morals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM24">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. After a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      implicit in the previous discussions, philosophy was defined as the
+      generalized theory of education. Philosophy was stated to be a form of
+      thinking, which, like all thinking, finds its origin in what is uncertain
+      in the subject matter of experience, which aims to locate the nature of
+      the perplexity and to frame hypotheses for its clearing up to be tested in
+      action. Philosophic thinking has for its differentia the fact that the
+      uncertainties with which it deals are found in widespread social
+      conditions and aims, consisting in a conflict of organized interests and
+      institutional claims. Since the only way of bringing about a harmonious
+      readjustment of the opposed tendencies is through a modification of
+      emotional and intellectual disposition, philosophy is at once an explicit
+      formulation of the various interests of life and a propounding of points
+      of view and methods through which a better balance of interests may be
+      effected. Since education is the process through which the needed
+      transformation may be accomplished and not remain a mere hypothesis as to
+      what is desirable, we reach a justification of the statement that
+      philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately conducted
+      practice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Continuity versus Dualism. A number of theories of knowing have been
+      criticized in the previous pages. In spite of their differences from one
+      another, they all agree in one fundamental respect which contrasts with
+      the theory which has been positively advanced. The latter assumes
+      continuity; the former state or imply certain basic divisions,
+      separations, or antitheses, technically called dualisms. The origin of
+      these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walls which mark off
+      social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and
+      poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers
+      mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent to
+      the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with isolated
+      subject matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social condition
+      must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is to be a
+      sincere account of experience. When it gets beyond dualism&mdash;as many
+      philosophies do in form&mdash;it can only be by appeal to something higher
+      than anything found in experience, by a flight to some transcendental
+      realm. And in denying duality in name such theories restore it in fact,
+      for they end in a division between things of this world as mere
+      appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as these divisions persist and others are added to them, each
+      leaves its mark upon the educational system, until the scheme of
+      education, taken as a whole, is a deposit of various purposes and
+      procedures. The outcome is that kind of check and balance of segregated
+      factors and values which has been described. (See Chapter XVIII.) The
+      present discussion is simply a formulation, in the terminology of
+      philosophy, of various antithetical conceptions involved in the theory of
+      knowing. In the first place, there is the opposition of empirical and
+      higher rational knowing. The first is connected with everyday affairs,
+      serves the purposes of the ordinary individual who has no specialized
+      intellectual
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      pursuit, and brings his wants into some kind of working connection with
+      the immediate environment. Such knowing is depreciated, if not despised,
+      as purely utilitarian, lacking in cultural significance. Rational
+      knowledge is supposed to be something which touches reality in ultimate,
+      intellectual fashion; to be pursued for its own sake and properly to
+      terminate in purely theoretical insight, not debased by application in
+      behavior. Socially, the distinction corresponds to that of the
+      intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a learned class
+      remote from concern with the means of living. Philosophically, the
+      difference turns about the distinction of the particular and universal.
+      Experience is an aggregate of more or less isolated particulars,
+      acquaintance with each of which must be separately made. Reason deals with
+      universals, with general principles, with laws, which lie above the welter
+      of concrete details. In the educational precipitate, the pupil is supposed
+      to have to learn, on one hand, a lot of items of specific information,
+      each standing by itself, and upon the other hand, to become familiar with
+      a certain number of laws and general relationships. Geography, as often
+      taught, illustrates the former; mathematics, beyond the rudiments of
+      figuring, the latter. For all practical purposes, they represent two
+      independent worlds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another antithesis is suggested by the two senses of the word "learning."
+      On the one hand, learning is the sum total of what is known, as that is
+      handed down by books and learned men. It is something external, an
+      accumulation of cognitions as one might store material commodities in a
+      warehouse. Truth exists ready-made somewhere. Study is then the process by
+      which an individual draws on what is in storage. On the other hand,
+      learning means something which the individual does when he studies. It is
+      an active, personally conducted affair. The dualism here is between
+      knowledge as something external, or, as it is often called, objective, and
+      knowing as something purely internal, subjective, psychical. There is, on
+      one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on the other, a ready-made
+      mind equipped with a faculty of knowing&mdash;if it only wills to exercise
+      it, which it is often strangely loath to do. The separation, often touched
+      upon, between subject matter and method is the educational equivalent of
+      this dualism. Socially the distinction has to do with the part of life
+      which is dependent upon authority and that where individuals are free to
+      advance. Another dualism is that of activity and passivity in knowing.
+      Purely empirical and physical things are often supposed to be known by
+      receiving impressions. Physical things somehow stamp themselves upon the
+      mind or convey themselves into consciousness by means of the sense organs.
+      Rational knowledge and knowledge of spiritual things is supposed, on the
+      contrary, to spring from activity initiated within the mind, an activity
+      carried on better if it is kept remote from all sullying touch of the
+      senses and external objects. The distinction between sense training and
+      object lessons and laboratory exercises, and pure ideas contained in
+      books, and appropriated&mdash;so it is thought&mdash;by some miraculous
+      output of mental energy, is a fair expression in education of this
+      distinction. Socially, it reflects a division between those who are
+      controlled by direct concern with things and those who are free to
+      cultivate themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another current opposition is that said to exist between the intellect and
+      the emotions. The emotions are conceived to be purely private and
+      personal, having nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in
+      apprehending facts and truths,&mdash;except perhaps the single emotion of
+      intellectual curiosity. The intellect is a pure light; the emotions are a
+      disturbing heat. The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions turn inward
+      to considerations of personal advantage and loss. Thus in education we
+      have that systematic depreciation of interest which has been noted, plus
+      the necessity in practice, with most pupils, of recourse to extraneous and
+      irrelevant rewards and penalties in order to induce the person who has a
+      mind (much as his clothes have a pocket) to apply that mind to the truths
+      to be known. Thus we have the spectacle of professional educators decrying
+      appeal to interest while they uphold with great dignity the need of
+      reliance upon examinations, marks, promotions and emotions, prizes, and
+      the time-honored paraphernalia of rewards and punishments. The effect of
+      this situation in crippling the teacher's sense of humor has not received
+      the attention which it deserves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and doing,
+      theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of action and the
+      body as its organ and means. We shall not repeat what has been said about
+      the source of this dualism in the division of society into a class
+      laboring with their muscles for material sustenance and a class which,
+      relieved from economic pressure, devotes itself to the arts of expression
+      and social direction. Nor is it necessary to speak again of the
+      educational evils which spring from the separation. We shall be content to
+      summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of this
+      conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity. (i) The
+      advance of physiology and the psychology associated with it have shown the
+      connection of mental activity with that of the nervous system. Too often
+      recognition of connection has stopped short at this point; the older
+      dualism of soul and body has been replaced by that of the brain and the
+      rest of the body. But in fact the nervous system is only a specialized
+      mechanism for keeping all bodily activities working together. Instead of
+      being isolated from them, as an organ of knowing from organs of motor
+      response, it is the organ by which they interact responsively with one
+      another. The brain is essentially an organ for effecting the reciprocal
+      adjustment to each other of the stimuli received from the environment and
+      responses directed upon it. Note that the adjusting is reciprocal; the
+      brain not only enables organic activity to be brought to bear upon any
+      object of the environment in response to a sensory stimulation, but this
+      response also determines what the next stimulus will be. See what happens,
+      for example, when a carpenter is at work upon a board, or an etcher upon
+      his plate&mdash;or in any case of a consecutive activity. While each motor
+      response is adjusted to the state of affairs indicated through the sense
+      organs, that motor response shapes the next sensory stimulus. Generalizing
+      this illustration, the brain is the machinery for a constant reorganizing
+      of activity so as to maintain its continuity; that is to say, to make such
+      modifications in future action as are required because of what has already
+      been done. The continuity of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it
+      from a routine repetition of identically the same motion, and from a
+      random activity where there is nothing cumulative. What makes it
+      continuous, consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act prepares
+      the way for later acts, while these take account of or reckon with the
+      results already attained&mdash;the basis of all responsibility. No one who
+      has realized the full force of the facts of the connection of knowing with
+      the nervous system and of the nervous system with the readjusting of
+      activity continuously to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing has
+      to do with reorganizing activity, instead of being something isolated from
+      all activity, complete on its own account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its discovery
+      of evolution. For the philosophic significance of the doctrine of
+      evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon continuity of simpler and
+      more complex organic forms until we reach man. The development of organic
+      forms begins with structures where the adjustment of environment and
+      organism is obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is at a
+      minimum. As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a greater number
+      of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a more and more marked
+      role, for it has a larger span of the future to forecast and plan for. The
+      effect upon the theory of knowing is to displace the notion that it is the
+      activity of a mere onlooker or spectator of the world, the notion which
+      goes with the idea of knowing as something complete in itself. For the
+      doctrine of organic development means that the living creature is a part
+      of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes, and making itself
+      secure in its precarious dependence only as it intellectually identifies
+      itself with the things about it, and, forecasting the future consequences
+      of what is going on, shapes its own activities accordingly. If the living,
+      experiencing being is an intimate participant in the activities of the
+      world to which it belongs, then knowledge is a mode of participation,
+      valuable in the degree in which it is effective. It cannot be the idle
+      view of an unconcerned spectator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iii) The development of the experimental method as the method of getting
+      knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not mere opinion&mdash;the
+      method of both discovery and proof&mdash;is the remaining great force in
+      bringing about a transformation in the theory of knowledge. The
+      experimental method has two sides. (i) On one hand, it means that we have
+      no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has actually
+      produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with and confirm
+      the conception entertained. Short of such specific changes, our beliefs
+      are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and are to be
+      entertained tentatively and to be utilized as indications of experiments
+      to be tried. (ii) On the other hand, the experimental method of thinking
+      signifies that thinking is of avail; that it is of avail in just the
+      degree in which the anticipation of future consequences is made on the
+      basis of thorough observation of present conditions. Experimentation, in
+      other words, is not equivalent to blind reacting. Such surplus activity&mdash;a
+      surplus with reference to what has been observed and is now anticipated&mdash;is
+      indeed an unescapable factor in all our behavior, but it is not experiment
+      save as consequences are noted and are used to make predictions and plans
+      in similar situations in the future. The more the meaning of the
+      experimental method is perceived, the more our trying out of a certain way
+      of treating the material resources and obstacles which confront us
+      embodies a prior use of intelligence. What we call magic was with respect
+      to many things the experimental method of the savage; but for him to try
+      was to try his luck, not his ideas. The scientific experimental method is,
+      on the contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even when practically&mdash;or
+      immediately&mdash;unsuccessful, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we learn
+      from our failures when our endeavors are seriously thoughtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The experimental method is new as a scientific resource&mdash;as a
+      systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as a
+      practical device. Hence it is not surprising that men have not recognized
+      its full scope. For the most part, its significance is regarded as
+      belonging to certain technical and merely physical matters. It will
+      doubtless take a long time to secure the perception that it holds equally
+      as to the forming and testing of ideas in social and moral matters. Men
+      still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed by authority, to relieve
+      them of the trouble of thinking and the responsibility of directing their
+      activity by thought. They tend to confine their own thinking to a
+      consideration of which one among the rival systems of dogma they will
+      accept. Hence the schools are better adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to
+      make disciples than inquirers. But every advance in the influence of the
+      experimental method is sure to aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic,
+      and authoritative methods of forming beliefs which have governed the
+      schools of the past, and to transfer their prestige to methods which will
+      procure an active concern with things and persons, directed by aims of
+      increasing temporal reach and deploying greater range of things in space.
+      In time the theory of knowing must be derived from the practice which is
+      most successful in making knowledge; and then that theory will be employed
+      to improve the methods which are less successful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Schools of Method. There are various systems of philosophy with
+      characteristically different conceptions of the method of knowing. Some of
+      them are named scholasticism, sensationalism, rationalism, idealism,
+      realism, empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, etc. Many of them have
+      been criticized in connection with the discussion of some educational
+      problem. We are here concerned with them as involving deviations from that
+      method which has proved most effective in achieving knowledge, for a
+      consideration of the deviations may render clearer the true place of
+      knowledge in experience. In brief, the function of knowledge is to make
+      one experience freely available in other experiences. The word "freely"
+      marks the difference between the principle of knowledge and that of habit.
+      Habit means that an individual undergoes a modification through an
+      experience, which modification forms a predisposition to easier and more
+      effective action in a like direction in the future. Thus it also has the
+      function of making one experience available in subsequent experiences.
+      Within certain limits, it performs this function successfully. But habit,
+      apart from knowledge, does not make allowance for change of conditions,
+      for novelty. Prevision of change is not part of its scope, for habit
+      assumes the essential likeness of the new situation with the old.
+      Consequently it often leads astray, or comes between a person and the
+      successful performance of his task, just as the skill, based on habit
+      alone, of the mechanic will desert him when something unexpected occurs in
+      the running of the machine. But a man who understands the machine is the
+      man who knows what he is about. He knows the conditions under which a
+      given habit works, and is in a position to introduce the changes which
+      will readapt it to new conditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an
+      object which determine its applicability in a given situation. To take an
+      extreme example; savages react to a flaming comet as they are accustomed
+      to react to other events which threaten the security of their life. Since
+      they try to frighten wild animals or their enemies by shrieks, beating of
+      gongs, brandishing of weapons, etc., they use the same methods to scare
+      away the comet. To us, the method is plainly absurd&mdash;so absurd that
+      we fail to note that savages are simply falling back upon habit in a way
+      which exhibits its limitations. The only reason we do not act in some
+      analogous fashion is because we do not take the comet as an isolated,
+      disconnected event, but apprehend it in its connections with other events.
+      We place it, as we say, in the astronomical system. We respond to its
+      connections and not simply to the immediate occurrence. Thus our attitude
+      to it is much freer. We may approach it, so to speak, from any one of the
+      angles provided by its connections. We can bring into play, as we deem
+      wise, any one of the habits appropriate to any one of the connected
+      objects. Thus we get at a new event indirectly instead of immediately&mdash;by
+      invention, ingenuity, resourcefulness. An ideally perfect knowledge would
+      represent such a network of interconnections that any past experience
+      would offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problem
+      presented in a new experience. In fine, while a habit apart from knowledge
+      supplies us with a single fixed method of attack, knowledge means that
+      selection may be made from a much wider range of habits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two aspects of this more general and freer availability of former
+      experiences for subsequent ones may be distinguished. (See ante, p. 77.)
+      (i) One, the more tangible, is increased power of control. What cannot be
+      managed directly may be handled indirectly; or we can interpose barriers
+      between us and undesirable consequences; or we may evade them if we cannot
+      overcome them. Genuine knowledge has all the practical value attaching to
+      efficient habits in any case. (ii) But it also increases the meaning, the
+      experienced significance, attaching to an experience. A situation to which
+      we respond capriciously or by routine has only a minimum of conscious
+      significance; we get nothing mentally from it. But wherever knowledge
+      comes into play in determining a new experience there is mental reward;
+      even if we fail practically in getting the needed control we have the
+      satisfaction of experiencing a meaning instead of merely reacting
+      physically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the content of knowledge is what has happened, what is taken as
+      finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of knowledge is future
+      or prospective. For knowledge furnishes the means of understanding or
+      giving meaning to what is still going on and what is to be done. The
+      knowledge of a physician is what he has found out by personal acquaintance
+      and by study of what others have ascertained and recorded. But it is
+      knowledge to him because it supplies the resources by which he interprets
+      the unknown things which confront him, fills out the partial obvious facts
+      with connected suggested phenomena, foresees their probable future, and
+      makes plans accordingly. When knowledge is cut off from use in giving
+      meaning to what is blind and baffling, it drops out of consciousness
+      entirely or else becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation. There is
+      much emotional satisfaction to be had from a survey of the symmetry and
+      order of possessed knowledge, and the satisfaction is a legitimate one.
+      But this contemplative attitude is aesthetic, not intellectual. It is the
+      same sort of joy that comes from viewing a finished picture or a well
+      composed landscape. It would make no difference if the subject matter were
+      totally different, provided it had the same harmonious organization.
+      Indeed, it would make no difference if it were wholly invented, a play of
+      fancy. Applicability to the world means not applicability to what is past
+      and gone&mdash;that is out of the question by the nature of the case; it
+      means applicability to what is still going on, what is still unsettled, in
+      the moving scene in which we are implicated. The very fact that we so
+      easily overlook this trait, and regard statements of what is past and out
+      of reach as knowledge is because we assume the continuity of past and
+      future. We cannot entertain the conception of a world in which knowledge
+      of its past would not be helpful in forecasting and giving meaning to its
+      future. We ignore the prospective reference just because it is so
+      irretrievably implied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet many of the philosophic schools of method which have been mentioned
+      transform the ignoring into a virtual denial. They regard knowledge as
+      something complete in itself irrespective of its availability in dealing
+      with what is yet to be. And it is this omission which vitiates them and
+      which makes them stand as sponsors for educational methods which an
+      adequate conception of knowledge condemns. For one has only to call to
+      mind what is sometimes treated in schools as acquisition of knowledge to
+      realize how lacking it is in any fruitful connection with the ongoing
+      experience of the students&mdash;how largely it seems to be believed that
+      the mere appropriation of subject matter which happens to be stored in
+      books constitutes knowledge. No matter how true what is learned to those
+      who found it out and in whose experience it functioned, there is nothing
+      which makes it knowledge to the pupils. It might as well be something
+      about Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the
+      individual's own life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to social
+      conditions. It was a method for systematizing and lending rational
+      sanction to material accepted on authority. This subject matter meant so
+      much that it vitalized the defining and systematizing brought to bear upon
+      it. Under present conditions the scholastic method, for most persons,
+      means a form of knowing which has no especial connection with any
+      particular subject matter. It includes making distinctions, definitions,
+      divisions, and classifications for the mere sake of making them&mdash;with
+      no objective in experience. The view of thought as a purely physical
+      activity having its own forms, which are applied to any material as a seal
+      may be stamped on any plastic stuff, the view which underlies what is
+      termed formal logic is essentially the scholastic method generalized. The
+      doctrine of formal discipline in education is the natural counterpart of
+      the scholastic method.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The contrasting theories of the method of knowledge which go by the name
+      of sensationalism and rationalism correspond to an exclusive emphasis upon
+      the particular and the general respectively&mdash;or upon bare facts on
+      one side and bare relations on the other. In real knowledge, there is a
+      particularizing and a generalizing function working together. So far as a
+      situation is confused, it has to be cleared up; it has to be resolved into
+      details, as sharply defined as possible. Specified facts and qualities
+      constitute the elements of the problem to be dealt with, and it is through
+      our sense organs that they are specified. As setting forth the problem,
+      they may well be termed particulars, for they are fragmentary. Since our
+      task is to discover their connections and to recombine them, for us at the
+      time they are partial. They are to be given meaning; hence, just as they
+      stand, they lack it. Anything which is to be known, whose meaning has
+      still to be made out, offers itself as particular. But what is already
+      known, if it has been worked over with a view to making it applicable to
+      intellectually mastering new particulars, is general in function. Its
+      function of introducing connection into what is otherwise unconnected
+      constitutes its generality. Any fact is general if we use it to give
+      meaning to the elements of a new experience. "Reason" is just the ability
+      to bring the subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the
+      significance of the subject matter of a new experience. A person is
+      reasonable in the degree in which he is habitually open to seeing an event
+      which immediately strikes his senses not as an isolated thing but in its
+      connection with the common experience of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without the particulars as they are discriminated by the active responses
+      of sense organs, there is no material for knowing and no intellectual
+      growth. Without placing these particulars in the context of the meanings
+      wrought out in the larger experience of the past&mdash;without the use of
+      reason or thought&mdash;particulars are mere excitations or irritations.
+      The mistake alike of the sensational and the rationalistic schools is that
+      each fails to see that the function of sensory stimulation and thought is
+      relative to reorganizing experience in applying the old to the new,
+      thereby maintaining the continuity or consistency of life. The theory of
+      the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed
+      pragmatic. Its essential feature is to maintain the continuity of knowing
+      with an activity which purposely modifies the environment. It holds that
+      knowledge in its strict sense of something possessed consists of our
+      intellectual resources&mdash;of all the habits that render our action
+      intelligent. Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as
+      to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims
+      and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge.
+      Knowledge is not just something which we are now conscious of, but
+      consists of the dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now
+      happens. Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to
+      consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by conceiving
+      the connection between ourselves and the world in which we live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM25">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Such social divisions as interfere with free and full
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      intercourse react to make the intelligence and knowing of members of the
+      separated classes one-sided. Those whose experience has to do with
+      utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve are practical
+      empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings in
+      whose active production they have had no share are practical rationalists.
+      Those who come in direct contact with things and have to adapt their
+      activities to them immediately are, in effect, realists; those who isolate
+      the meanings of these things and put them in a religious or so-called
+      spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect, idealists. Those
+      concerned with progress, who are striving to change received beliefs,
+      emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those whose chief business it
+      is to withstand change and conserve received truth emphasize the universal
+      and the fixed&mdash;and so on. Philosophic systems in their opposed
+      theories of knowledge present an explicit formulation of the traits
+      characteristic of these cut-off and one-sided segments of experience&mdash;one-sided
+      because barriers to intercourse prevent the experience of one from being
+      enriched and supplemented by that of others who are differently situated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free
+      interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of knowledge
+      which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is made
+      available in giving direction and meaning to another. The recent advances
+      in physiology, biology, and the logic of the experimental sciences supply
+      the specific intellectual instrumentalities demanded to work out and
+      formulate such a theory. Their educational equivalent is the connection of
+      the acquisition of knowledge in the schools with activities, or
+      occupations, carried on in a medium of associated life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Inner and the Outer.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Since morality is concerned with conduct, any dualisms which are set up
+      between mind and activity must reflect themselves in the theory of morals.
+      Since the formulations of the separation in the philosophic theory of
+      morals are used to justify and idealize the practices employed in moral
+      training, a brief critical discussion is in place. It is a commonplace of
+      educational theory that the establishing of character is a comprehensive
+      aim of school instruction and discipline. Hence it is important that we
+      should be on our guard against a conception of the relations of
+      intelligence to character which hampers the realization of the aim, and on
+      the look-out for the conditions which have to be provided in order that
+      the aim may be successfully acted upon. The first obstruction which meets
+      us is the currency of moral ideas which split the course of activity into
+      two opposed factors, often named respectively the inner and outer, or the
+      spiritual and the physical. This division is a culmination of the dualism
+      of mind and the world, soul and body, end and means, which we have so
+      frequently noted. In morals it takes the form of a sharp demarcation of
+      the motive of action from its consequences, and of character from conduct.
+      Motive and character are regarded as something purely "inner," existing
+      exclusively in consciousness, while consequences and conduct are regarded
+      as outside of mind, conduct having to do simply with the movements which
+      carry out motives; consequences with what happens as a result. Different
+      schools identify morality with either the inner state of mind or the outer
+      act and results, each in separation from the other. Action with a purpose
+      is deliberate; it involves a consciously foreseen end and a mental
+      weighing of considerations pro and eon. It also involves a conscious state
+      of longing or desire for the end. The deliberate choice of an aim and of a
+      settled disposition of desire takes time. During this time complete overt
+      action is suspended. A person who does not have his mind made up, does not
+      know what to do. Consequently he postpones definite action so far as
+      possible. His position may be compared to that of a man considering
+      jumping across a ditch. If he were sure he could or could not make it,
+      definite activity in some direction would occur. But if he considers, he
+      is in doubt; he hesitates. During the time in which a single overt line of
+      action is in suspense, his activities are confined to such redistributions
+      of energy within the organism as will prepare a determinate course of
+      action. He measures the ditch with his eyes; he brings himself taut to get
+      a feel of the energy at his disposal; he looks about for other ways
+      across, he reflects upon the importance of getting across. All this means
+      an accentuation of consciousness; it means a turning in upon the
+      individual's own attitudes, powers, wishes, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Obviously, however, this surging up of personal factors into conscious
+      recognition is a part of the whole activity in its temporal development.
+      There is not first a purely psychical process, followed abruptly by a
+      radically different physical one. There is one continuous behavior,
+      proceeding from a more uncertain, divided, hesitating state to a more
+      overt, determinate, or complete state. The activity at first consists
+      mainly of certain tensions and adjustments within the organism; as these
+      are coordinated into a unified attitude, the organism as a whole acts&mdash;some
+      definite act is undertaken. We may distinguish, of course, the more
+      explicitly conscious phase of the continuous activity as mental or
+      psychical. But that only identifies the mental or psychical to mean the
+      indeterminate, formative state of an activity which in its fullness
+      involves putting forth of overt energy to modify the environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our conscious thoughts, observations, wishes, aversions are important,
+      because they represent inchoate, nascent activities. They fulfill their
+      destiny in issuing, later on, into specific and perceptible acts. And
+      these inchoate, budding organic readjustments are important because they
+      are our sole escape from the dominion of routine habits and blind impulse.
+      They are activities having a new meaning in process of development. Hence,
+      normally, there is an accentuation of personal consciousness whenever our
+      instincts and ready formed habits find themselves blocked by novel
+      conditions. Then we are thrown back upon ourselves to reorganize our own
+      attitude before proceeding to a definite and irretrievable course of
+      action. Unless we try to drive our way through by sheer brute force, we
+      must modify our organic resources to adapt them to the specific features
+      of the situation in which we find ourselves. The conscious deliberating
+      and desiring which precede overt action are, then, the methodic personal
+      readjustment implied in activity in uncertain situations. This role of
+      mind in continuous activity is not always maintained, however. Desires for
+      something different, aversion to the given state of things caused by the
+      blocking of successful activity, stimulates the imagination. The picture
+      of a different state of things does not always function to aid ingenious
+      observation and recollection to find a way out and on. Except where there
+      is a disciplined disposition, the tendency is for the imagination to run
+      loose. Instead of its objects being checked up by conditions with
+      reference to their practicability in execution, they are allowed to
+      develop because of the immediate emotional satisfaction which they yield.
+      When we find the successful display of our energies checked by uncongenial
+      surroundings, natural and social, the easiest way out is to build castles
+      in the air and let them be a substitute for an actual achievement which
+      involves the pains of thought. So in overt action we acquiesce, and build
+      up an imaginary world in, mind. This break between thought and conduct is
+      reflected in those theories which make a sharp separation between mind as
+      inner and conduct and consequences as merely outer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the split may be more than an incident of a particular individual's
+      experience. The social situation may be such as to throw the class given
+      to articulate reflection back into their own thoughts and desires without
+      providing the means by which these ideas and aspirations can be used to
+      reorganize the environment. Under such conditions, men take revenge, as it
+      were, upon the alien and hostile environment by cultivating contempt for
+      it, by giving it a bad name. They seek refuge and consolation within their
+      own states of mind, their own imaginings and wishes, which they compliment
+      by calling both more real and more ideal than the despised outer world.
+      Such periods have recurred in history. In the early centuries of the
+      Christian era, the influential moral systems of Stoicism, of monastic and
+      popular Christianity and other religious movements of the day, took shape
+      under the influence of such conditions. The more action which might
+      express prevailing ideals was checked, the more the inner possession and
+      cultivation of ideals was regarded as self-sufficient&mdash;as the essence
+      of morality. The external world in which activity belongs was thought of
+      as morally indifferent. Everything lay in having the right motive, even
+      though that motive was not a moving force in the world. Much the same sort
+      of situation recurred in Germany in the later eighteenth and early
+      nineteenth centuries; it led to the Kantian insistence upon the good will
+      as the sole moral good, the will being regarded as something complete in
+      itself, apart from action and from the changes or consequences effected in
+      the world. Later it led to any idealization of existing institutions as
+      themselves the embodiment of reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purely internal morality of "meaning well," of having a good
+      disposition regardless of what comes of it, naturally led to a reaction.
+      This is generally known as either hedonism or utilitarianism. It was said
+      in effect that the important thing morally is not what a man is inside of
+      his own consciousness, but what he does&mdash;the consequences which
+      issue, the charges he actually effects. Inner morality was attacked as
+      sentimental, arbitrary, dogmatic, subjective&mdash;as giving men leave to
+      dignify and shield any dogma congenial to their self-interest or any
+      caprice occurring to imagination by calling it an intuition or an ideal of
+      conscience. Results, conduct, are what counts; they afford the sole
+      measure of morality. Ordinary morality, and hence that of the schoolroom,
+      is likely to be an inconsistent compromise of both views. On one hand,
+      certain states of feeling are made much of; the individual must "mean
+      well," and if his intentions are good, if he had the right sort of
+      emotional consciousness, he may be relieved of responsibility for full
+      results in conduct. But since, on the other hand, certain things have to
+      be done to meet the convenience and the requirements of others, and of
+      social order in general, there is great insistence upon the doing of
+      certain things, irrespective of whether the individual has any concern or
+      intelligence in their doing. He must toe the mark; he must have his nose
+      held to the grindstone; he must obey; he must form useful habits; he must
+      learn self-control,&mdash;all of these precepts being understood in a way
+      which emphasizes simply the immediate thing tangibly done, irrespective of
+      the spirit of thought and desire in which it is done, and irrespective
+      therefore of its effect upon other less obvious doings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hoped that the prior discussion has sufficiently elaborated the
+      method by which both of these evils are avoided. One or both of these
+      evils must result wherever individuals, whether young or old, cannot
+      engage in a progressively cumulative undertaking under conditions which
+      engage their interest and require their reflection. For only in such cases
+      is it possible that the disposition of desire and thinking should be an
+      organic factor in overt and obvious conduct. Given a consecutive activity
+      embodying the student's own interest, where a definite result is to be
+      obtained, and where neither routine habit nor the following of dictated
+      directions nor capricious improvising will suffice, and there the rise of
+      conscious purpose, conscious desire, and deliberate reflection are
+      inevitable. They are inevitable as the spirit and quality of an activity
+      having specific consequences, not as forming an isolated realm of inner
+      consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Opposition of Duty and Interest. Probably there is no antithesis
+      more often set up in moral discussion than that between acting from
+      "principle" and from "interest." To act on principle is to act
+      disinterestedly, according to a general law, which is above all personal
+      considerations. To act according to interest is, so the allegation runs,
+      to act selfishly, with one's own personal profit in view. It substitutes
+      the changing expediency of the moment for devotion to unswerving moral
+      law. The false idea of interest underlying this opposition has already
+      been criticized (See Chapter X), but some moral aspects of the question
+      will now be considered. A clew to the matter may be found in the fact that
+      the supporters of the "interest" side of the controversy habitually use
+      the term "self-interest." Starting from the premises that unless there is
+      interest in an object or idea, there is no motive force, they end with the
+      conclusion that even when a person claims to be acting from principle or
+      from a sense of duty, he really acts as he does because there "is
+      something in it" for himself. The premise is sound; the conclusion false.
+      In reply the other school argues that since man is capable of generous
+      self-forgetting and even self-sacrificing action, he is capable of acting
+      without interest. Again the premise is sound, and the conclusion false.
+      The error on both sides lies in a false notion of the relation of interest
+      and the self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both sides assume that the self is a fixed and hence isolated quantity. As
+      a consequence, there is a rigid dilemma between acting for an interest of
+      the self and without interest. If the self is something fixed antecedent
+      to action, then acting from interest means trying to get more in the way
+      of possessions for the self&mdash;whether in the way of fame, approval of
+      others, power over others, pecuniary profit, or pleasure. Then the
+      reaction from this view as a cynical depreciation of human nature leads to
+      the view that men who act nobly act with no interest at all. Yet to an
+      unbiased judgment it would appear plain that a man must be interested in
+      what he is doing or he would not do it. A physician who continues to serve
+      the sick in a plague at almost certain danger to his own life must be
+      interested in the efficient performance of his profession&mdash;more
+      interested in that than in the safety of his own bodily life. But it is
+      distorting facts to say that this interest is merely a mask for an
+      interest in something else which he gets by continuing his customary
+      services&mdash;such as money or good repute or virtue; that it is only a
+      means to an ulterior selfish end. The moment we recognize that the self is
+      not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through
+      choice of action, the whole situation clears up. A man's interest in
+      keeping at his work in spite of danger to life means that his self is
+      found in that work; if he finally gave up, and preferred his personal
+      safety or comfort, it would mean that he preferred to be that kind of a
+      self. The mistake lies in making a separation between interest and self,
+      and supposing that the latter is the end to which interest in objects and
+      acts and others is a mere means. In fact, self and interest are two names
+      for the same fact; the kind and amount of interest actively taken in a
+      thing reveals and measures the quality of selfhood which exists. Bear in
+      mind that interest means the active or moving identity of the self with a
+      certain object, and the whole alleged dilemma falls to the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unselfishness, for example, signifies neither lack of interest in what is
+      done (that would mean only machine-like indifference) nor selflessness&mdash;which
+      would mean absence of virility and character. As employed everywhere
+      outside of this particular theoretical controversy, the term
+      "unselfishness" refers to the kind of aims and objects which habitually
+      interest a man. And if we make a mental survey of the kind of interests
+      which evoke the use of this epithet, we shall see that they have two
+      intimately associated features. (i) The generous self consciously
+      identifies itself with the full range of relationships implied in its
+      activity, instead of drawing a sharp line between itself and
+      considerations which are excluded as alien or indifferent; (ii) it
+      readjusts and expands its past ideas of itself to take in new consequences
+      as they become perceptible. When the physician began his career he may not
+      have thought of a pestilence; he may not have consciously identified
+      himself with service under such conditions. But, if he has a normally
+      growing or active self, when he finds that his vocation involves such
+      risks, he willingly adopts them as integral portions of his activity. The
+      wider or larger self which means inclusion instead of denial of
+      relationships is identical with a self which enlarges in order to assume
+      previously unforeseen ties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In such crises of readjustment&mdash;and the crisis may be slight as well
+      as great&mdash;there may be a transitional conflict of "principle" with
+      "interest." It is the nature of a habit to involve ease in the accustomed
+      line of activity. It is the nature of a readjusting of habit to involve an
+      effort which is disagreeable&mdash;something to which a man has
+      deliberately to hold himself. In other words, there is a tendency to
+      identify the self&mdash;or take interest&mdash;in what one has got used
+      to, and to turn away the mind with aversion or irritation when an
+      unexpected thing which involves an unpleasant modification of habit comes
+      up. Since in the past one has done one's duty without having to face such
+      a disagreeable circumstance, why not go on as one has been? To yield to
+      this temptation means to narrow and isolate the thought of the self&mdash;to
+      treat it as complete. Any habit, no matter how efficient in the past,
+      which has become set, may at any time bring this temptation with it. To
+      act from principle in such an emergency is not to act on some abstract
+      principle, or duty at large; it is to act upon the principle of a course
+      of action, instead of upon the circumstances which have attended it. The
+      principle of a physician's conduct is its animating aim and spirit&mdash;the
+      care for the diseased. The principle is not what justifies an activity,
+      for the principle is but another name for the continuity of the activity.
+      If the activity as manifested in its consequences is undesirable, to act
+      upon principle is to accentuate its evil. And a man who prides himself
+      upon acting upon principle is likely to be a man who insists upon having
+      his own way without learning from experience what is the better way. He
+      fancies that some abstract principle justifies his course of action
+      without recognizing that his principle needs justification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Assuming, however, that school conditions are such as to provide desirable
+      occupations, it is interest in the occupation as a whole&mdash;that is, in
+      its continuous development&mdash;which keeps a pupil at his work in spite
+      of temporary diversions and unpleasant obstacles. Where there is no
+      activity having a growing significance, appeal to principle is either
+      purely verbal, or a form of obstinate pride or an appeal to extraneous
+      considerations clothed with a dignified title. Undoubtedly there are
+      junctures where momentary interest ceases and attention flags, and where
+      reinforcement is needed. But what carries a person over these hard
+      stretches is not loyalty to duty in the abstract, but interest in his
+      occupation. Duties are "offices"&mdash;they are the specific acts needed
+      for the fulfilling of a function&mdash;or, in homely language&mdash;doing
+      one's job. And the man who is genuinely interested in his job is the man
+      who is able to stand temporary discouragement, to persist in the face of
+      obstacles, to take the lean with the fat: he makes an interest out of
+      meeting and overcoming difficulties and distraction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Intelligence and Character. A noteworthy paradox often accompanies
+      discussions of morals. On the one hand, there is an identification of the
+      moral with the rational. Reason is set up as a faculty from which proceed
+      ultimate moral intuitions, and sometimes, as in the Kantian theory, it is
+      said to supply the only proper moral motive. On the other hand, the value
+      of concrete, everyday intelligence is constantly underestimated, and even
+      deliberately depreciated. Morals is often thought to be an affair with
+      which ordinary knowledge has nothing to do. Moral knowledge is thought to
+      be a thing apart, and conscience is thought of as something radically
+      different from consciousness. This separation, if valid, is of especial
+      significance for education. Moral education in school is practically
+      hopeless when we set up the development of character as a supreme end, and
+      at the same time treat the acquiring of knowledge and the development of
+      understanding, which of necessity occupy the chief part of school time, as
+      having nothing to do with character. On such a basis, moral education is
+      inevitably reduced to some kind of catechetical instruction, or lessons
+      about morals. Lessons "about morals" signify as matter of course lessons
+      in what other people think about virtues and duties. It amounts to
+      something only in the degree in which pupils happen to be already animated
+      by a sympathetic and dignified regard for the sentiments of others.
+      Without such a regard, it has no more influence on character than
+      information about the mountains of Asia; with a servile regard, it
+      increases dependence upon others, and throws upon those in authority the
+      responsibility for conduct. As a matter of fact, direct instruction in
+      morals has been effective only in social groups where it was a part of the
+      authoritative control of the many by the few. Not the teaching as such but
+      the reinforcement of it by the whole regime of which it was an incident
+      made it effective. To attempt to get similar results from lessons about
+      morals in a democratic society is to rely upon sentimental magic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the other end of the scale stands the Socratic-Platonic teaching which
+      identifies knowledge and virtue&mdash;which holds that no man does evil
+      knowingly but only because of ignorance of the good. This doctrine is
+      commonly attacked on the ground that nothing is more common than for a man
+      to know the good and yet do the bad: not knowledge, but habituation or
+      practice, and motive are what is required. Aristotle, in fact, at once
+      attacked the Platonic teaching on the ground that moral virtue is like an
+      art, such as medicine; the experienced practitioner is better than a man
+      who has theoretical knowledge but no practical experience of disease and
+      remedies. The issue turns, however, upon what is meant by knowledge.
+      Aristotle's objection ignored the gist of Plato's teaching to the effect
+      that man could not attain a theoretical insight into the good except as he
+      had passed through years of practical habituation and strenuous
+      discipline. Knowledge of the good was not a thing to be got either from
+      books or from others, but was achieved through a prolonged education. It
+      was the final and culminating grace of a mature experience of life.
+      Irrespective of Plato's position, it is easy to perceive that the term
+      knowledge is used to denote things as far apart as intimate and vital
+      personal realization,&mdash;a conviction gained and tested in experience,&mdash;and
+      a second-handed, largely symbolic, recognition that persons in general
+      believe so and so&mdash;a devitalized remote information. That the latter
+      does not guarantee conduct, that it does not profoundly affect character,
+      goes without saying. But if knowledge means something of the same sort as
+      our conviction gained by trying and testing that sugar is sweet and
+      quinine bitter, the case stands otherwise. Every time a man sits on a
+      chair rather than on a stove, carries an umbrella when it rains, consults
+      a doctor when ill&mdash;or in short performs any of the thousand acts
+      which make up his daily life, he proves that knowledge of a certain kind
+      finds direct issue in conduct. There is every reason to suppose that the
+      same sort of knowledge of good has a like expression; in fact "good" is an
+      empty term unless it includes the satisfactions experienced in such
+      situations as those mentioned. Knowledge that other persons are supposed
+      to know something might lead one to act so as to win the approbation
+      others attach to certain actions, or at least so as to give others the
+      impression that one agrees with them; there is no reason why it should
+      lead to personal initiative and loyalty in behalf of the beliefs
+      attributed to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not necessary, accordingly, to dispute about the proper meaning of
+      the term knowledge. It is enough for educational purposes to note the
+      different qualities covered by the one name, to realize that it is
+      knowledge gained at first hand through the exigencies of experience which
+      affects conduct in significant ways. If a pupil learns things from books
+      simply in connection with school lessons and for the sake of reciting what
+      he has learned when called upon, then knowledge will have effect upon some
+      conduct&mdash;namely upon that of reproducing statements at the demand of
+      others. There is nothing surprising that such "knowledge" should not have
+      much influence in the life out of school. But this is not a reason for
+      making a divorce between knowledge and conduct, but for holding in low
+      esteem this kind of knowledge. The same thing may be said of knowledge
+      which relates merely to an isolated and technical specialty; it modifies
+      action but only in its own narrow line. In truth, the problem of moral
+      education in the schools is one with the problem of securing knowledge&mdash;the
+      knowledge connected with the system of impulses and habits. For the use to
+      which any known fact is put depends upon its connections. The knowledge of
+      dynamite of a safecracker may be identical in verbal form with that of a
+      chemist; in fact, it is different, for it is knit into connection with
+      different aims and habits, and thus has a different import.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our prior discussion of subject-matter as proceeding from direct activity
+      having an immediate aim, to the enlargement of meaning found in geography
+      and history, and then to scientifically organized knowledge, was based
+      upon the idea of maintaining a vital connection between knowledge and
+      activity. What is learned and employed in an occupation having an aim and
+      involving cooperation with others is moral knowledge, whether consciously
+      so regarded or not. For it builds up a social interest and confers the
+      intelligence needed to make that interest effective in practice. Just
+      because the studies of the curriculum represent standard factors in social
+      life, they are organs of initiation into social values. As mere school
+      studies, their acquisition has only a technical worth. Acquired under
+      conditions where their social significance is realized, they feed moral
+      interest and develop moral insight. Moreover, the qualities of mind
+      discussed under the topic of method of learning are all of them
+      intrinsically moral qualities. Open-mindedness, single-mindedness,
+      sincerity, breadth of outlook, thoroughness, assumption of responsibility
+      for developing the consequences of ideas which are accepted, are moral
+      traits. The habit of identifying moral characteristics with external
+      conformity to authoritative prescriptions may lead us to ignore the
+      ethical value of these intellectual attitudes, but the same habit tends to
+      reduce morals to a dead and machinelike routine. Consequently while such
+      an attitude has moral results, the results are morally undesirable&mdash;above
+      all in a democratic society where so much depends upon personal
+      disposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. The Social and the Moral. All of the separations which we have been
+      criticizing&mdash;and which the idea of education set forth in the
+      previous chapters is designed to avoid&mdash;spring from taking morals too
+      narrowly,&mdash;giving them, on one side, a sentimental goody-goody turn
+      without reference to effective ability to do what is socially needed, and,
+      on the other side, overemphasizing convention and tradition so as to limit
+      morals to a list of definitely stated acts. As a matter of fact, morals
+      are as broad as acts which concern our relationships with others. And
+      potentially this includes all our acts, even though their social bearing
+      may not be thought of at the time of performance. For every act, by the
+      principle of habit, modifies disposition&mdash;it sets up a certain kind
+      of inclination and desire. And it is impossible to tell when the habit
+      thus strengthened may have a direct and perceptible influence on our
+      association with others. Certain traits of character have such an obvious
+      connection with our social relationships that we call them "moral" in an
+      emphatic sense&mdash;truthfulness, honesty, chastity, amiability, etc. But
+      this only means that they are, as compared with some other attitudes,
+      central:&mdash;that they carry other attitudes with them. They are moral
+      in an emphatic sense not because they are isolated and exclusive, but
+      because they are so intimately connected with thousands of other attitudes
+      which we do not explicitly recognize&mdash;which perhaps we have not even
+      names for. To call them virtues in their isolation is like taking the
+      skeleton for the living body. The bones are certainly important, but their
+      importance lies in the fact that they support other organs of the body in
+      such a way as to make them capable of integrated effective activity. And
+      the same is true of the qualities of character which we specifically
+      designate virtues. Morals concern nothing less than the whole character,
+      and the whole character is identical with the man in all his concrete
+      make-up and manifestations. To possess virtue does not signify to have
+      cultivated a few namable and exclusive traits; it means to be fully and
+      adequately what one is capable of becoming through association with others
+      in all the offices of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The moral and the social quality of conduct are, in the last analysis,
+      identical with each other. It is then but to restate explicitly the import
+      of our earlier chapters regarding the social function of education to say
+      that the measure of the worth of the administration, curriculum, and
+      methods of instruction of the school is the extent to which they are
+      animated by a social spirit. And the great danger which threatens school
+      work is the absence of conditions which make possible a permeating social
+      spirit; this is the great enemy of effective moral training. For this
+      spirit can be actively present only when certain conditions are met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (i) In the first place, the school must itself be a community life in all
+      which that implies. Social perceptions and interests can be developed only
+      in a genuinely social medium&mdash;one where there is give and take in the
+      building up of a common experience. Informational statements about things
+      can be acquired in relative isolation by any one who previously has had
+      enough intercourse with others to have learned language. But realization
+      of the meaning of the linguistic signs is quite another matter. That
+      involves a context of work and play in association with others. The plea
+      which has been made for education through continued constructive
+      activities in this book rests upon the fact they afford an opportunity for
+      a social atmosphere. In place of a school set apart from life as a place
+      for learning lessons, we have a miniature social group in which study and
+      growth are incidents of present shared experience. Playgrounds, shops,
+      workrooms, laboratories not only direct the natural active tendencies of
+      youth, but they involve intercourse, communication, and cooperation,&mdash;all
+      extending the perception of connections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) The learning in school should be continuous with that out of school.
+      There should be a free interplay between the two. This is possible only
+      when there are numerous points of contact between the social interests of
+      the one and of the other. A school is conceivable in which there should be
+      a spirit of companionship and shared activity, but where its social life
+      would no more represent or typify that of the world beyond the school
+      walls than that of a monastery. Social concern and understanding would be
+      developed, but they would not be available outside; they would not carry
+      over. The proverbial separation of town and gown, the cultivation of
+      academic seclusion, operate in this direction. So does such adherence to
+      the culture of the past as generates a reminiscent social spirit, for this
+      makes an individual feel more at home in the life of other days than in
+      his own. A professedly cultural education is peculiarly exposed to this
+      danger. An idealized past becomes the refuge and solace of the spirit;
+      present-day concerns are found sordid, and unworthy of attention. But as a
+      rule, the absence of a social environment in connection with which
+      learning is a need and a reward is the chief reason for the isolation of
+      the school; and this isolation renders school knowledge inapplicable to
+      life and so infertile in character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to
+      recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education
+      are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social
+      efficiency, are moral traits&mdash;marks of a person who is a worthy
+      member of that society which it is the business of education to further.
+      There is an old saying to the effect that it is not enough for a man to be
+      good; he must be good for something. The something for which a man must be
+      good is capacity to live as a social member so that what he gets from
+      living with others balances with what he contributes. What he gets and
+      gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions, and ideas, is not
+      external possessions, but a widening and deepening of conscious life&mdash;a
+      more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings. What he
+      materially receives and gives is at most opportunities and means for the
+      evolution of conscious life. Otherwise, it is neither giving nor taking,
+      but a shifting about of the position of things in space, like the stirring
+      of water and sand with a stick. Discipline, culture, social efficiency,
+      personal refinement, improvement of character are but phases of the growth
+      of capacity nobly to share in such a balanced experience. And education is
+      not a mere means to such a life. Education is such a life. To maintain
+      capacity for such education is the essence of morals. For conscious life
+      is a continual beginning afresh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_SUMM26">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The most important problem of moral education in the school
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      concerns the relationship of knowledge and conduct. For unless the
+      learning which accrues in the regular course of study affects character,
+      it is futile to conceive the moral end as the unifying and culminating end
+      of education. When there is no intimate organic connection between the
+      methods and materials of knowledge and moral growth, particular lessons
+      and modes of discipline have to be resorted to: knowledge is not
+      integrated into the usual springs of action and the outlook on life, while
+      morals become moralistic&mdash;a scheme of separate virtues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two theories chiefly associated with the separation of learning from
+      activity, and hence from morals, are those which cut off inner disposition
+      and motive&mdash;the conscious personal factor&mdash;and deeds as purely
+      physical and outer; and which set action from interest in opposition to
+      that from principle. Both of these separations are overcome in an
+      educational scheme where learning is the accompaniment of continuous
+      activities or occupations which have a social aim and utilize the
+      materials of typical social situations. For under such conditions, the
+      school becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community and one
+      in close interaction with other modes of associated experience beyond
+      school walls. All education which develops power to share effectively in
+      social life is moral. It forms a character which not only does the
+      particular deed socially necessary but one which is interested in that
+      continuous readjustment which is essential to growth. Interest in learning
+      from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br><br><br><br><br><br>
+    </div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 852 ***</div>
+  </body>
+</html>
+
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+
+
+
+I have tried to make this the most accurate text possible but I
+am sure that there are still mistakes.  Please feel free to email
+me any errors or mistakes that you find.  Citing the Chapter and
+paragraph.  Haradda@aol.com and davidr@inconnect.com are my email
+addresses for now.  David Reed
+
+I would like to dedicate this etext to my mother who was a
+elementary school teacher for more years than I can remember.
+Thanks.
+
+
+
+
+
+Democracy and Education
+by John Dewey
+
+
+Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
+Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
+Chapter Three: Education as Direction
+Chapter Four: Education as Growth
+Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
+Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
+Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
+Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
+Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
+Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
+Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
+Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
+Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
+Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
+Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
+Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
+Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
+Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
+Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
+Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
+Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and
+        Humanism
+Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
+Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
+Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
+Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
+Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals
+
+
+Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
+
+1.  Renewal of Life by Transmission.  The most notable
+distinction between living and inanimate things is that the
+former maintain themselves by renewal.  A stone when struck
+resists.  If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow
+struck, it remains outwardly unchanged.  Otherwise, it is
+shattered into smaller bits.  Never does the stone attempt to
+react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow,
+much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its
+own continued action.  While the living thing may easily be
+crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the
+energies which act upon it into means of its own further
+existence.  If it cannot do so, it does not just split into
+smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses
+its identity as a living thing.
+
+As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies
+in its own behalf.  It uses light, air, moisture, and the
+material of soil.  To say that it uses them is to say that it
+turns them into means of its own conservation.  As long as it is
+growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to
+account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it
+grows.  Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be
+said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for
+its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use
+it up.  Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the
+environment.
+
+In all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up
+indefinitely.  After a while they succumb; they die.  The
+creature is not equal to the task of indefinite self-renewal.
+But continuity of the life process is not dependent upon the
+prolongation of the existence of any one individual.
+Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous
+sequence.  And though, as the geological record shows, not merely
+individuals but also species die out, the life process continues
+in increasingly complex forms.  As some species die out, forms
+better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they
+struggled in vain come into being.  Continuity of life means
+continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living
+organisms.
+
+We have been speaking of life in its lowest terms -- as a
+physical thing.  But we use the word "Life" to denote the whole
+range of experience, individual and racial.  When we see a book
+called the Life of Lincoln we do not expect to find within its
+covers a treatise on physiology.  We look for an account of
+social antecedents; a description of early surroundings, of the
+conditions and occupation of the family; of the chief episodes in
+the development of character; of signal struggles and
+achievements; of the individual's hopes, tastes, joys and
+sufferings.  In precisely similar fashion we speak of the life of
+a savage tribe, of the Athenian people, of the American nation.
+"Life" covers customs, institutions, beliefs, victories and
+defeats, recreations and occupations.
+
+We employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense.  And
+to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the
+principle of continuity through renewal applies.  With the
+renewal of physical existence goes, in the case of human beings,
+the recreation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and
+practices.  The continuity of any experience, through renewing of
+the social group, is a literal fact.  Education, in its broadest
+sense, is the means of this social continuity of life.  Every one
+of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city
+as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without
+language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards.  Each individual,
+each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group,
+in time passes away.  Yet the life of the group goes on.
+
+The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one
+of the constituent members in a social group determine the
+necessity of education.  On one hand, there is the contrast
+between the immaturity of the new-born members of the group --
+its future sole representatives -- and the maturity of the adult
+members who possess the knowledge and customs of the group.  On
+the other hand, there is the necessity that these immature
+members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers,
+but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes,
+information, skill, and practices of the mature members:
+otherwise the group will cease its characteristic life.  Even in
+a savage tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what
+the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves.
+With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original
+capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the
+elders increases.  Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the
+bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the
+life of the group.  Deliberate effort and the taking of
+thoughtful pains are required.  Beings who are born not only
+unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the
+social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively
+interested.  Education, and education alone, spans the gap.
+
+Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as
+biological life.  This transmission occurs by means of
+communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the
+older to the younger.  Without this communication of ideals,
+hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of
+society who are passing out of the group life to those who are
+coming into it, social life could not survive.  If the members
+who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate
+the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal
+interest rather than social need.  Now it is a work of
+necessity.
+
+If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it
+is obvious that the group would be permanently done for.  Yet the
+death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an
+epidemic took them all at once.  But the graded difference in
+age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible
+through transmission of ideas and practices the constant
+reweaving of the social fabric.  Yet this renewal is not
+automatic.  Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and
+thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will
+relapse into barbarism and then into savagery.  In fact, the
+human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves
+without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire
+the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence.  The
+young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency
+with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers
+needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under
+tuition.  How much more, then, is this the case with respect to
+all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral
+achievements of humanity!
+
+2.  Education and Communication.  So obvious, indeed, is the
+necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of
+a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism.
+But justification is found in the fact that such emphasis is a
+means of getting us away from an unduly scholastic and formal
+notion of education.  Schools are, indeed, one important method
+of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature;
+but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a
+relatively superficial means.  Only as we have grasped the
+necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can
+we make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true
+context.
+
+Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by
+communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in
+transmission, in communication.  There is more than a verbal tie
+between the words common, community, and communication.  Men live
+in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common;
+and communication is the way in which they come to possess things
+in common.  What they must have in common in order to form a
+community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a
+common understanding -- like-mindedness as the
+
+sociologists say.  Such things cannot be passed physically from
+one to another, like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons
+would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces.  The
+communication which insures participation in a common
+understanding is one which secures similar emotional and
+intellectual dispositions -- like ways of responding to
+expectations and requirements.
+
+Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity,
+any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so
+many feet or miles removed from others.  A book or a letter may
+institute a more intimate association between human beings
+separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between
+dwellers under the same roof.  Individuals do not even compose a
+social group because they all work for a common end.  The parts
+of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common
+result, but they do not form a community.  If, however, they were
+all cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that
+they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they
+would form a community.  But this would involve communication.
+Each would have to know what the other was about and would have
+to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own
+purpose and progress.  Consensus demands communication.
+
+We are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most
+social group there are many relations which are not as yet
+social.  A large number of human relationships in any social
+group are still upon the machine-like plane.  Individuals use one
+another so as to get desired results, without reference to the
+emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of those used.
+Such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of
+position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools,
+mechanical or fiscal.  So far as the relations of parent and
+child, teacher and pupil, employer and employee, governor and
+governed, remain upon this level, they form no true social group,
+no matter how closely their respective activities touch one
+another.  Giving and taking of orders modifies action and
+results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a
+communication of interests.
+
+Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
+communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.
+To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and
+changed experience.  One shares in what another has thought and
+felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude
+modified.  Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected.  Try
+the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some
+experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated,
+and you will find your own attitude toward your experience
+changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations.
+The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated.
+To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another
+would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the
+life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can
+appreciate its meaning.  Except in dealing with commonplaces and
+catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of
+another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's
+own experience.  All communication is like art.  It may fairly be
+said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally
+social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate
+in it.  Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine
+way does it lose its educative power.
+
+In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching
+and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of
+living together educates.  It enlarges and enlightens experience;
+it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility
+for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.  A man
+really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would
+have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to
+extract its net meaning.  The inequality of achievement between
+the mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the
+young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense
+stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form which will
+render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.
+
+3.  The Place of Formal Education.  There is, accordingly, a
+marked difference between the education which every one gets from
+living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just
+continuing to subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young.
+In the former case the education is incidental; it is natural and
+important, but it is not the express reason of the association.
+While it may be said, without exaggeration, that the measure of
+the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic,
+political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and
+improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of its
+original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.
+Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to
+secure the favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil
+influences; family life in the desire to gratify appetites and
+secure family perpetuity; systematic labor, for the most part,
+because of enslavement to others, etc.  Only gradually was the
+by-product of the institution, its effect upon the quality and
+extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still
+was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct
+of the institution.  Even today, in our industrial life, apart
+from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the
+intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human
+association under which the world's work is carried on receives
+little attention as compared with physical output.
+
+But in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as
+an immediate human fact, gains in importance.  While it is easy
+to ignore in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon
+their disposition, or to subordinate that educative effect to
+some external and tangible result, it is not so easy as in
+dealing with adults.  The need of training is too evident; the
+pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits is
+too urgent to leave these consequences wholly out of account.
+Since our chief business with them is to enable them to share in
+a common life we cannot help considering whether or no we are
+forming the powers which will secure this ability.  If humanity
+has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of
+every institution is its distinctively human effect -- its effect
+upon conscious experience -- we may well believe that this lesson
+has been learned largely through dealings with the young.
+
+We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational
+process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind
+of education -- that of direct tuition or schooling.  In
+undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching
+and training.  Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed
+dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association
+which keeps adults loyal to their group.  They have no special
+devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in
+connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are
+inducted into full social membership.  For the most part, they
+depend upon children learning the customs of the adults,
+acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in
+what the elders are doing.  In part, this sharing is direct,
+taking part in the occupations of adults and thus serving an
+apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the dramatic
+plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and
+thus learn to know what they are like.  To savages it would seem
+preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was
+going on in order that one might learn.
+
+But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of
+the young and the concerns of adults widens.  Learning by direct
+sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly
+difficult except in the case of the less advanced occupations.
+Much of what adults do is so remote in space and in meaning that
+playful imitation is less and less adequate to reproduce its
+spirit.  Ability to share effectively in adult activities thus
+depends upon a prior training given with this end in view.
+Intentional agencies -- schools--and explicit material -- studies
+-- are devised.  The task of teaching certain things is delegated
+to a special group of persons.
+
+Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all
+the resources and achievements of a complex society.  It also
+opens a way to a kind of experience which would not be accessible
+to the young, if they were left to pick up their training in
+informal association with others, since books and the symbols of
+knowledge are mastered.
+
+But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition
+from indirect to formal education.  Sharing in actual pursuit,
+whether directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and
+vital.  These qualities compensate, in some measure, for the
+narrowness of available opportunities.  Formal instruction, on
+the contrary, easily becomes remote and dead -- abstract and
+bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation.  What
+accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies is at least
+put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists
+with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within
+urgent daily interests.
+
+But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored
+in symbols.  It is far from translation into familiar acts and
+objects.  Such material is relatively technical and superficial.
+Taking the ordinary standard of reality as a measure, it is
+artificial.  For this measure is connection with practical
+concerns.  Such material exists in a world by itself,
+unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression.
+There is the standing danger that the material of formal
+instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools,
+isolated from the subject matter of life- experience.  The
+permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view.
+Those which have not been carried over into the structure of
+social life, but which remain largely matters of technical
+information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in
+schools.  Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the
+notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with
+all human association that affects conscious life, and which
+identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and
+the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition
+of literacy.
+
+Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
+education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance
+between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the
+intentional, modes of education.  When the acquiring of
+information and of technical intellectual skill do not influence
+the formation of a social disposition, ordinary vital experience
+fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far, creates
+only "sharps" in learning -- that is, egoistic specialists.  To
+avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are
+aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and
+what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the
+formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes
+an increasingly delicate task with every development of special
+schooling.
+
+Summary.  It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in
+being.  Since this continuance can be secured only by constant
+renewals, life is a self-renewing process.  What nutrition and
+reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social
+life.  This education consists primarily in transmission through
+communication.  Communication is a process of sharing experience
+till it becomes a common possession.  It modifies the disposition
+of both the parties who partake in it.  That the ulterior
+significance of every mode of human association lies in the
+contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of
+experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the
+immature.  That is to say, while every social arrangement is
+educative in effect, the educative effect first becomes an
+important part of the purpose of the association in connection
+with the association of the older with the younger.  As societies
+become more complex in structure and resources, the need of
+formal or intentional teaching and learning increases.  As formal
+teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of
+creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in
+more direct associations and what is acquired in school.  This
+danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of
+the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and
+technical modes of skill.
+
+Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
+
+1.  The Nature and Meaning of Environment.  We have seen that a
+community or social group sustains itself through continuous
+self-renewal, and that this renewal takes place by means of the
+educational growth of the immature members of the group.  By
+various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society
+transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust
+trustees of its own resources and ideals.  Education is thus a
+fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.  All of these
+words mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth.
+We also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up -- words which
+express the difference of level which education aims to cover.
+Etymologically, the word education means just a process of
+leading or bringing up.  When we have the outcome of the process
+in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding
+activity -- that is, a shaping into the standard form of social
+activity.  In this chapter we are concerned with the general
+features of the way in which a social group brings up its
+immature members into its own social form.
+
+Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of
+experience till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas
+current in the social group, the problem is evidently not one of
+mere physical forming.  Things can be physically transported in
+space; they may be bodily conveyed.  Beliefs and aspirations
+cannot be physically extracted and inserted.  How then are they
+communicated? Given the impossibility of direct contagion or
+literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the method by
+which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or the
+older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves.
+The answer, in general formulation, is: By means of the action of
+the environment in calling out certain responses.  The required
+beliefs cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be
+plastered on.  But the particular medium in which an individual
+exists leads him to see and feel one thing rather than another;
+it leads him to have certain plans in order that he may act
+successfully with others; it strengthens some beliefs and weakens
+others as a condition of winning the approval of others.  Thus it
+gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior, a certain
+disposition of action.  The words "environment," "medium" denote
+something more than surroundings which encompass an individual.
+They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his
+own active tendencies.  An inanimate being is, of course,
+continuous with its surroundings; but the environing
+circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an
+environment.  For the inorganic being is not concerned in the
+influences which affect it.  On the other hand, some things which
+are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a
+human creature, may form his environment even more truly than
+some of the things close to him.  The things with which a man
+varies are his genuine environment.  Thus the activities of the
+astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about which
+he calculates.  Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is
+most intimately his environment.  The environment of an
+antiquarian, as an antiquarian, consists of the remote epoch of
+human life with which he is concerned, and the relics,
+inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes connections with that
+period.
+
+In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that
+promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic
+activities of a living being.  Water is the environment of a fish
+because it is necessary to the fish's activities -- to its life.
+The north pole is a significant element in the environment of an
+arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or not,
+because it defines his activities, makes them what they
+distinctively are.  Just because life signifies not bare passive
+existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting,
+environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as
+a sustaining or frustrating condition.
+
+2.  The Social Environment.  A being whose activities are
+associated with others has a social environment.  What he does
+and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands,
+approvals, and condemnations of others.  A being connected with
+other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the
+activities of others into account.  For they are the
+indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies.
+When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally.  We might as well
+try to imagine a business man doing business, buying and selling,
+all by himself, as to conceive it possible to define the
+activities of an individual in terms of his isolated actions.
+The manufacturer moreover is as truly socially guided in his
+activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his own
+counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling
+his finished goods.  Thinking and feeling that have to do with
+action in association with others is as much a social mode of
+behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.
+
+What we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium
+nurtures its immature members.  There is no great difficulty in
+seeing how it shapes the external habits of action.  Even dogs
+and horses have their actions modified by association with human
+beings; they form different habits because human beings are
+concerned with what they do.  Human beings control animals by
+controlling the natural stimuli which influence them; by creating
+a certain environment in other words.  Food, bits and bridles,
+noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in which the
+natural or instinctive responses of horses occur.  By operating
+steadily to call out certain acts, habits are formed which
+function with the same uniformity as the original stimuli.  If a
+rat is put in a maze and finds food only by making a given number
+of turns in a given sequence, his activity is gradually modified
+till he habitually takes that course rather than another when he
+is hungry.
+
+Human actions are modified in a like fashion.  A burnt child
+dreads the fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every
+time a child touched a certain toy he got burned, the child would
+learn to avoid that toy as automatically as he avoids touching
+fire.  So far, however, we are dealing with what may be called
+training in distinction from educative teaching.  The changes
+considered are in outer action rather than in mental and
+emotional dispositions of behavior.  The distinction is not,
+however, a sharp one.  The child might conceivably generate in
+time a violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to
+the class of toys resembling it.  The aversion might even persist
+after he had forgotten about the original burns; later on he
+might even invent some reason to account for his seemingly
+irrational antipathy.  In some cases, altering the external habit
+of action by changing the environment to affect the stimuli to
+action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in the
+action.  Yet this does not always happen; a person trained to
+dodge a threatening blow, dodges automatically with no
+corresponding thought or emotion.  We have to find, then, some
+differentia of training from education.
+
+A clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really
+share in the social use to which his action is put.  Some one
+else uses the horse to secure a result which is advantageous by
+making it advantageous to the horse to perform the act -- he gets
+food, etc.  But the horse, presumably, does not get any new
+interest.  He remains interested in food, not in the service he
+is rendering.  He is not a partner in a shared activity.  Were he
+to become a copartner, he would, in engaging in the conjoint
+activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment which
+others have.  He would share their ideas and emotions.
+
+Now in many cases -- too many cases -- the activity of the
+immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which
+are useful.  He is trained like an animal rather than educated
+like a human being.  His instincts remain attached to their
+original objects of pain or pleasure.  But to get happiness or to
+avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a way agreeable to
+others.  In other cases, he really shares or participates in the
+common activity.  In this case, his original impulse is modified.
+He not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of others,
+but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused in him
+that animate the others.  A tribe, let us say, is warlike.  The
+successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it
+sets store, are connected with fighting and victory.  The
+presence of this medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy,
+first in games, then in fact when he is strong enough.  As he
+fights he wins approval and advancement; as he refrains, he is
+disliked, ridiculed, shut out from favorable recognition.  It is
+not surprising that his original belligerent tendencies and
+emotions are strengthened at the expense of others, and that his
+ideas turn to things connected with war.  Only in this way can he
+become fully a recognized member of his group.  Thus his mental
+habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his group.
+
+If we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we
+shall perceive that the social medium neither implants certain
+desires and ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain
+purely muscular habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or
+dodging a blow.  Setting up conditions which stimulate certain
+visible and tangible ways of acting is the first step.  Making
+the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so
+that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his
+failure, is the completing step.  As soon as he is possessed by
+the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to
+recognize the special ends at which it aims and the means
+employed to secure success.  His beliefs and ideas, in other
+words, will take a form similar to those of others in the group.
+He will also achieve pretty much the same stock of knowledge
+since that knowledge is an ingredient of his habitual pursuits.
+
+The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the
+chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed
+directly from one to another.  It almost seems as if all we have
+to do to convey an idea into the mind of another is to convey a
+sound into his ear.  Thus imparting knowledge gets assimilated to
+a purely physical process.  But learning from language will be
+found, when analyzed, to confirm the principle just laid down.
+It would probably be admitted with little hesitation that a child
+gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as other persons do; by
+covering the head with it, giving it to others to wear, having it
+put on by others when going out, etc.  But it may be asked how
+this principle of shared activity applies to getting through
+speech or reading the idea of, say, a Greek helmet, where no
+direct use of any kind enters in.  What shared activity is there
+in learning from books about the discovery of America?
+
+Since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning
+about many things, let us see how it works.  The baby begins of
+course with mere sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning,
+expressing, that is, no idea.  Sounds are just one kind of
+stimulus to direct response, some having a soothing effect,
+others tending to make one jump, and so on.  The sound h-a-t
+would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a seemingly
+inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection with an
+action which is participated in by a number of people.  When the
+mother is taking the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she
+puts something on the baby's head.  Being taken out becomes an
+interest to the child; mother and child not only go out with each
+other physically, but both are concerned in the going out; they
+enjoy it in common.  By conjunction with the other factors in
+activity the sound "hat" soon gets the same meaning for the child
+that it has for the parent; it becomes a sign of the activity
+into which it enters.  The bare fact that language consists of
+sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to
+show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared
+experience.
+
+In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way
+that the thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way.  And
+they acquire the same meaning with the child which they have with
+the adult because they are used in a common experience by both.
+The guarantee for the same manner of use is found in the fact
+that the thing and the sound are first employed in a joint
+activity, as a means of setting up an active connection between
+the child and a grownup.  Similar ideas or meanings spring up
+because both persons are engaged as partners in an action where
+what each does depends upon and influences what the other does.
+If two savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a
+certain signal meant "move to the right" to the one who uttered
+it, and "move to the left" to the one who heard it, they
+obviously could not successfully carry on their hunt together.
+Understanding one another means that objects, including sounds,
+have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common
+pursuit.
+
+After sounds have got meaning through connection with other
+things employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in
+connection with other like sounds to develop new meanings,
+precisely as the things for which they stand are combined.  Thus
+the words in which a child learns about, say, the Greek helmet
+originally got a meaning (or were understood) by use in an action
+having a common interest and end.  They now arouse a new meaning
+by inciting the one who hears or reads to rehearse imaginatively
+the activities in which the helmet has its use.  For the time
+being, the one who understands the words "Greek helmet" becomes
+mentally a partner with those who used the helmet.  He engages,
+through his imagination, in a shared activity.  It is not easy to
+get the full meaning of words.  Most persons probably stop with
+the idea that "helmet" denotes a queer kind of headgear a people
+called the Greeks once wore.  We conclude, accordingly, that the
+use of language to convey and acquire ideas is an extension and
+refinement of the principle that things gain meaning by being
+used in a shared experience or joint action; in no sense does it
+contravene that principle.  When words do not enter as factors
+into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they
+operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or
+intellectual value.  They set activity running in a given groove,
+but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.  Thus,
+for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act
+of writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but
+the person performing the act will operate much as an automaton
+would unless he realizes the meaning of what he does.
+
+3.  The Social Medium as Educative.  Our net result thus far is
+that social environment forms the mental and emotional
+disposition of behavior in individuals by engaging them in
+activities that arouse and strengthen certain impulses, that have
+certain purposes and entail certain consequences.  A child
+growing up in a family of musicians will inevitably have whatever
+capacities he has in music stimulated, and, relatively,
+stimulated more than other impulses which might have been
+awakened in another environment.  Save as he takes an interest in
+music and gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he
+is unable to share in the life of the group to which he belongs.
+Some kinds of participation in the life of those with whom the
+individual is connected are inevitable; with respect to them, the
+social environment exercises an educative or formative influence
+unconsciously and apart from any set purpose.
+
+In savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
+(constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we
+have spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the
+young into the practices and beliefs of the group.  Even in
+present-day societies, it furnishes the basic nurture of even the
+most insistently schooled youth.  In accord with the interests
+and occupations of the group, certain things become objects of
+high esteem; others of aversion.  Association does not create
+impulses or affection and dislike, but it furnishes the objects
+to which they attach themselves.  The way our group or class does
+things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and
+thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation and
+memory.  What is strange or foreign (that is to say outside the
+activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and
+intellectually suspect.  It seems almost incredible to us, for
+example, that things which we know very well could have escaped
+recognition in past ages.  We incline to account for it by
+attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by
+assuming superior native intelligence on our own part.  But the
+explanation is that their modes of life did not call for
+attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other
+things.  Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate
+them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination
+do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands
+set up by current social occupations.  The main texture of
+disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such
+influences.  What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at
+most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to
+purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects
+which make their activity more productive of meaning.
+
+While this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so
+subtle and pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and
+mind, it may be worth while to specify a few directions in which
+its effect is most marked.  First, the habits of language.
+Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are
+formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a
+set means of instruction but as a social necessity.  The babe
+acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue.  While speech habits
+thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious
+teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired
+modes of speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into
+their really native tongue.  Secondly, manners.  Example is
+notoriously more potent than precept.  Good manners come, as we
+say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding
+is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli,
+not by conveying information.  Despite the never ending play of
+conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere
+and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners.  And
+manners are but minor morals.  Moreover, in major morals,
+conscious instruction is likely to be efficacious only in the
+degree in which it falls in with the general "walk and
+conversation" of those who constitute the child's social
+environment.  Thirdly, good taste and esthetic appreciation.  If
+the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having
+elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows
+up.  The effect of a tawdry, unarranged, and over-decorated
+environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as meager
+and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty.
+Against such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than
+convey second-hand information as to what others think.  Such
+taste never becomes spontaneous and personally engrained, but
+remains a labored reminder of what those think to whom one has
+been taught to look up.  To say that the deeper standards of
+judgments of value are framed by the situations into which a
+person habitually enters is not so much to mention a fourth
+point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned.
+We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates
+of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of
+which we are not conscious at all.  But in general it may be said
+that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or
+reflection are just the things which determine our conscious
+thinking and decide our conclusions.  And these habitudes which
+lie below the level of reflection are just those which have been
+formed in the constant give and take of relationship with others.
+
+4.  The School as a Special Environment.  The chief importance of
+this foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on
+willy-nilly is to lead us to note that the only way in which
+adults consciously control the kind of education which the
+immature get is by controlling the environment in which they act,
+and hence think and feel.  We never educate directly, but
+indirectly by means of the environment.  Whether we permit chance
+environments to do the work, or whether we design environments
+for the purpose makes a great difference.  And any environment is
+a chance environment so far as its educative influence is
+concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with
+reference to its educative effect.  An intelligent home differs
+from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and
+intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the
+thought of their bearing upon the development of children.  But
+schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments
+framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral
+disposition of their members.
+
+Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions
+are so complex that a considerable part of the social store is
+committed to writing and transmitted through written symbols.
+Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than
+spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with
+others.  In addition, the written form tends to select and record
+matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life.  The
+achievements accumulated from generation to generation are
+deposited in it even though some of them have fallen temporarily
+out of use.  Consequently as soon as a community depends to any
+considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and
+its own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of
+schools to insure adequate transmission of all its resources.  To
+take an obvious illustration: The life of the ancient Greeks and
+Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in
+which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of
+our ordinary experiences.  In similar fashion, peoples still
+existing, but remote in space, British, Germans, Italians,
+directly concern our own social affairs, but the nature of the
+interaction cannot be understood without explicit statement and
+attention.  In precisely similar fashion, our daily associations
+cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part played in
+our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible
+structures.  Hence a special mode of social intercourse is
+instituted, the school, to care for such matters.
+
+This mode of association has three functions sufficiently
+specific, as compared with ordinary associations of life, to be
+noted.  First, a complex civilization is too complex to be
+assimilated in toto.  It has to be broken up into portions, as it
+were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a gradual and graded way.
+The relationships of our present social life are so numerous and
+so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable position
+could not readily share in many of the most important of them.
+Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to
+him, would not become a part of his own mental disposition.
+There would be no seeing the trees because of the forest.
+Business, politics, art, science, religion, would make all at
+once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome.  The
+first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide
+a simplified environment.  It selects the features which are
+fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to by the
+young.  Then it establishes a progressive order, using the
+factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is
+more complicated.
+
+In the second place, it is the business of the school environment
+to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the
+existing environment from influence upon mental habitudes.  It
+establishes a purified medium of action.  Selection aims not only
+at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable.  Every
+society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from
+the past, and with what is positively perverse.  The school has
+the duty of omitting such things from the environment which it
+supplies, and thereby doing what it can to counteract their
+influence in the ordinary social environment.  By selecting the
+best for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the power of
+this best.  As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes
+that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of
+its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better
+future society.  The school is its chief agency for the
+accomplishment of this end.
+
+In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to
+balance the various elements in the social environment, and to
+see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from
+the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to
+come into living contact with a broader environment.  Such words
+as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for
+they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing
+corresponding to the single word.  As a matter of fact, a modern
+society is many societies more or less loosely connected.  Each
+household with its immediate extension of friends makes a
+society; the village or street group of playmates is a community;
+each business group, each club, is another.  Passing beyond these
+more intimate groups, there is in a country like our own a
+variety of races, religious affiliations, economic divisions.
+Inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal political unity,
+there are probably more communities, more differing customs,
+traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control, than
+existed in an entire continent at an earlier epoch.
+
+Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active
+dispositions of its members.  A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's
+household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative
+environments for those who enter into their collective or
+conjoint activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a
+business partnership, or a political party.  Each of them is a
+mode of associated or community life, quite as much as is a
+family, a town, or a state.  There are also communities whose
+members have little or no direct contact with one another, like
+the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the members of the
+professional learned class scattered over the face of the earth.
+For they have aims in common, and the activity of each member is
+directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing.
+
+In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a
+geographical matter.  There were many societies, but each, within
+its own territory, was comparatively homogeneous.  But with the
+development of commerce, transportation, intercommunication, and
+emigration, countries like the United States are composed of a
+combination of different groups with different traditional
+customs.  It is this situation which has, perhaps more than any
+other one cause, forced the demand for an educational institution
+which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced
+environment for the young.  Only in this way can the centrifugal
+forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and
+the same political unit be counteracted.  The intermingling in
+the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and
+unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment.
+Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a
+broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while
+it is isolated.  The assimilative force of the American public
+school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and
+balanced appeal.
+
+The school has the function also of coordinating within the
+disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the
+various social environments into which he enters.  One code
+prevails in the family; another, on the street; a third, in the
+workshop or store; a fourth, in the religious association.  As a
+person passes from one of the environments to another, he is
+subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is in danger of being split
+into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion
+for different occasions.  This danger imposes upon the school a
+steadying and integrating office.
+
+
+Summary.  The development within the young of the attitudes and
+dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of
+a society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs,
+emotions, and knowledge.  It takes place through the intermediary
+of the environment.  The environment consists of the sum total of
+conditions which are concerned in the execution of the activity
+characteristic of a living being.  The social environment
+consists of all the activities of fellow beings that are bound up
+in the carrying on of the activities of any one of its members.
+It is truly educative in its effect in the degree in which an
+individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity.  By
+doing his share in the associated activity, the individual
+appropriates the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with
+its methods and subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is
+saturated with its emotional spirit.
+
+The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition
+comes, without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake
+of the activities of the various groups to which they may belong.
+As a society becomes more complex, however, it is found necessary
+to provide a special social environment which shall especially
+look after nurturing the capacities of the immature.  Three of
+the more important functions of this special environment are:
+simplifying and ordering the factors of the disposition it is
+wished to develop; purifying and idealizing the existing social
+customs; creating a wider and better balanced environment than
+that by which the young would be likely, if left to themselves,
+to be influenced.
+
+Chapter Three: Education as Direction
+
+1.  The Environment as Directive.
+
+We now pass to one of the special forms which the general
+function of education assumes: namely, that of direction,
+control, or guidance.  Of these three words, direction, control,
+and guidance, the last best conveys the idea of assisting through
+cooperation the natural capacities of the individuals guided;
+control conveys rather the notion of an energy brought to bear
+from without and meeting some resistance from the one controlled;
+direction is a more neutral term and suggests the fact that the
+active tendencies of those directed are led in a certain
+continuous course, instead of dispersing aimlessly.  Direction
+expresses the basic function, which tends at one extreme to
+become a guiding assistance and at another, a regulation or
+ruling.  But in any case, we must carefully avoid a meaning
+sometimes read into the term "control." It is sometimes assumed,
+explicitly or unconsciously, that an individual's tendencies are
+naturally purely individualistic or egoistic, and thus
+antisocial.  Control then denotes the process by which he is
+brought to subordinate his natural impulses to public or common
+ends.  Since, by conception, his own nature is quite alien to
+this process and opposes it rather than helps it, control has in
+this view a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it.  Systems
+of government and theories of the state have been built upon this
+notion, and it has seriously affected educational ideas and
+practices.  But there is no ground for any such view.
+Individuals are certainly interested, at times, in having their
+own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of others.
+But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the
+whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part
+in conjoint and cooperative doings.  Otherwise, no such thing as
+a community would be possible.  And there would not even be any
+one interested in furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of
+harmony unless he thought that thereby he could gain some
+personal advantage.  Control, in truth, means only an emphatic
+form of direction of powers, and covers the regulation gained by
+an individual through his own efforts quite as much as that
+brought about when others take the lead.
+
+In general, every stimulus directs activity.  It does not simply
+excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object.  Put
+the other way around, a response is not just a re-action, a
+protest, as it were, against being disturbed; it is, as the word
+indicates, an answer.  It meets the stimulus, and corresponds
+with it.  There is an adaptation of the stimulus and response to
+each other.  A light is the stimulus to the eye to see something,
+and the business of the eye is to see.  If the eyes are open and
+there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a condition of
+the fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an
+outside interruption.  To some extent, then, all direction or
+control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an
+assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to
+do.
+
+This general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two
+respects.  In the first place, except in the case of a small
+number of instincts, the stimuli to which an immature human being
+is subject are not sufficiently definite to call out, in the
+beginning, specific responses.  There is always a great deal of
+superfluous energy aroused.  This energy may be wasted, going
+aside from the point; it may also go against the successful
+performance of an act.  It does harm by getting in the way.
+Compare the behavior of a beginner in riding a bicycle with that
+of the expert.  There is little axis of direction in the energies
+put forth; they are largely dispersive and centrifugal.
+Direction involves a focusing and fixating of action in order
+that it may be truly a response, and this requires an elimination
+of unnecessary and confusing movements.  In the second place,
+although no activity can be produced in which the person does not
+cooperate to some extent, yet a response may be of a kind which
+does not fit into the sequence and continuity of action.  A
+person boxing may dodge a particular blow successfully, but in
+such a way as to expose himself the next instant to a still
+harder blow.  Adequate control means that the successive acts are
+brought into a continuous order; each act not only meets its
+immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow.
+
+In short, direction is both simultaneous and successive.  At a
+given time, it requires that, from all the tendencies that are
+partially called out, those be selected which center energy upon
+the point of need.  Successively, it requires that each act be
+balanced with those which precede and come after, so that order
+of activity is achieved.  Focusing and ordering are thus the two
+aspects of direction, one spatial, the other temporal.  The first
+insures hitting the mark; the second keeps the balance required
+for further action.  Obviously, it is not possible to separate
+them in practice as we have distinguished them in idea.  Activity
+must be centered at a given time in such a way as to prepare for
+what comes next.  The problem of the immediate response is
+complicated by one's having to be on the lookout for future
+occurrences.
+
+Two conclusions emerge from these general statements.  On the one
+hand, purely external direction is impossible.  The environment
+can at most only supply stimuli to call out responses.  These
+responses proceed from tendencies already possessed by the
+individual.  Even when a person is frightened by threats into
+doing something, the threats work only because the person has an
+instinct of fear.  If he has not, or if, though having it, it is
+under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him
+than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.  While
+the customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli which direct as
+well as evoke the activities of the young, the young, after all,
+participate in the direction which their actions finally take.
+In the strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into
+them.  To overlook this fact means to distort and pervert human
+nature.  To take into account the contribution made by the
+existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct them
+economically and wisely.  Speaking accurately, all direction is
+but re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into
+another channel.  Unless one is cognizant of the energies which
+are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost
+surely go amiss.
+
+On the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and
+regulations of others may be short-sighted.  It may accomplish
+its immediate effect, but at the expense of throwing the
+subsequent action of the person out of balance.  A threat may,
+for example, prevent a person from doing something to which he is
+naturally inclined by arousing fear of disagreeable consequences
+if he persists.  But he may be left in the position which exposes
+him later on to influences which will lead him to do even worse
+things.  His instincts of cunning and slyness may be aroused, so
+that things henceforth appeal to him on the side of evasion and
+trickery more than would otherwise have been the case.  Those
+engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger
+of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of
+those they direct.
+
+2.  Modes of Social Direction.  Adults are naturally most
+conscious of directing the conduct of others when they are
+immediately aiming so to do.  As a rule, they have such an aim
+consciously when they find themselves resisted; when others are
+doing things they do not wish them to do.  But the more permanent
+and influential modes of control are those which operate from
+moment to moment continuously without such deliberate intention
+on our part.
+
+1.  When others are not doing what we would like them to or are
+threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of
+controlling them and of the influences by which they are
+controlled.  In such cases, our control becomes most direct, and
+at this point we are most likely to make the mistakes just spoken
+of.  We are even likely to take the influence of superior force
+for control, forgetting that while we may lead a horse to water
+we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in
+a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent.  In all such cases of
+immediate action upon others, we need to discriminate between
+physical results and moral results.  A person may be in such a
+condition that forcible feeding or enforced confinement is
+necessary for his own good.  A child may have to be snatched with
+roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt.  But no
+improvement of disposition, no educative effect, need follow.  A
+harsh and commanding tone may be effectual in keeping a child
+away from the fire, and the same desirable physical effect will
+follow as if he had been snatched away.  But there may be no more
+obedience of a moral sort in one case than in the other.  A man
+can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by
+shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his
+disposition to commit burglary.  When we confuse a physical with
+an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the
+person's own participating disposition in getting the result
+desired, and thereby of developing within him an intrinsic and
+persisting direction in the right way.
+
+In general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control
+should be limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive
+that the one performing them has no means of foreseeing their
+outcome.  If a person cannot foresee the consequences of his act,
+and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its
+outcome by those with more experience, it is impossible for him
+to guide his act intelligently.  In such a state, every act is
+alike to him.  Whatever moves him does move him, and that is all
+there is to it.  In some cases, it is well to permit him to
+experiment, and to discover the consequences for himself in order
+that he may act intelligently next time under similar
+circumstances.  But some courses of action are too discommoding
+and obnoxious to others to allow of this course being pursued.
+Direct disapproval is now resorted to.  Shaming, ridicule,
+disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used.  Or contrary
+tendencies in the child are appealed to to divert him from his
+troublesome line of behavior.  His sensitiveness to approbation,
+his hope of winning favor by an agreeable act, are made use of to
+induce action in another direction.
+
+2.  These methods of control are so obvious (because so
+intentionally employed) that it would hardly be worth while to
+mention them if it were not that notice may now be taken, by way
+of contrast, of the other more important and permanent mode of
+control.  This other method resides in the ways in which persons,
+with whom the immature being is associated, use things; the
+instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own ends.  The
+very existence of the social medium in which an individual lives,
+moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of
+directing his activity.
+
+This fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail
+what is meant by the social environment.  We are given to
+separating from each other the physical and social environments
+in which we live.  The separation is responsible on one hand for
+an exaggeration of the moral importance of the more direct or
+personal modes of control of which we have been speaking; and on
+the other hand for an exaggeration, in current psychology and
+philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of contact with a
+purely physical environment.  There is not, in fact, any such
+thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart
+from use of the physical environment as an intermediary.  A
+smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all
+involve some physical change.  Otherwise, the attitude of one
+would not get over to alter the attitude of another.
+Comparatively speaking, such modes of influence may be regarded
+as personal.  The physical medium is reduced to a mere means of
+personal contact.  In contrast with such direct modes of mutual
+influence, stand associations in common pursuits involving the
+use of things as means and as measures of results.  Even if the
+mother never told her daughter to help her, or never rebuked her
+for not helping, the child would be subjected to direction in her
+activities by the mere fact that she was engaged, along with the
+parent, in the household life.  Imitation, emulation, the need of
+working together, enforce control.
+
+If the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must
+reach the thing in order to get it.  Where there is giving there
+must be taking.  The way the child handles the thing after it is
+got, the use to which it is put, is surely influenced by the fact
+that the child has watched the mother.  When the child sees the
+parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to
+look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it
+was, under other circumstances, to receive it.  Multiply such an
+instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one
+has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving
+direction to the activities of the young.
+
+In saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously
+about participating in a joint activity as the chief way of
+forming disposition.  We have explicitly added, however, the
+recognition of the part played in the joint activity by the use
+of things.  The philosophy of learning has been unduly dominated
+by a false psychology.  It is frequently stated that a person
+learns by merely having the qualities of things impressed upon
+his mind through the gateway of the senses.  Having received a
+store of sensory impressions, association or some power of mental
+synthesis is supposed to combine them into ideas--into things
+with a meaning.  An object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is
+supposed to convey different impressions of color, shape, size,
+hardness, smell, taste, etc., which aggregated together
+constitute the characteristic meaning of each thing.  But as
+matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to which the thing
+is put, because of its specific qualities, which supplies the
+meaning with which it is identified.  A chair is a thing which is
+put to one use; a table, a thing which is employed for another
+purpose; an orange is a thing which costs so much, which is grown
+in warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable
+odor and refreshing taste, etc.
+
+The difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a
+mental act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its
+meaning; the former does not.  A noise may make me jump without
+my mind being implicated.  When I hear a noise and run and get
+water and put out a blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound
+meant fire, and fire meant need of being extinguished.  I bump
+into a stone, and kick it to one side purely physically.  I put
+it to one side for fear some one will stumble upon it,
+intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has.  I am
+startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not -- more
+likely, if I do not recognize it.  But if I say, either out loud
+or to myself, that is thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a
+meaning.  My behavior has a mental quality.  When things have a
+meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they
+do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.
+
+In both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are
+directed or controlled.  But in the merely blind response,
+direction is also blind.  There may be training, but there is no
+education.  Repeated responses to recurrent stimuli may fix a
+habit of acting in a certain way.  All of us have many habits of
+whose import we are quite unaware, since they were formed without
+our knowing what we were about.  Consequently they possess us,
+rather than we them.  They move us; they control us.  Unless we
+become aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the
+worth of the result, we do not control them.  A child might be
+made to bow every time he met a certain person by pressure on his
+neck muscles, and bowing would finally become automatic.  It
+would not, however, be an act of recognition or deference on his
+part, till he did it with a certain end in view -- as having a
+certain meaning.  And not till he knew what he was about and
+performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to
+be "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way.  To have an
+idea of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from
+it.  It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its
+place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the
+drift and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us
+and of our action upon it.  To have the same ideas about things
+which others have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to be
+really members of a social group, is therefore to attach the same
+meanings to things and to acts which others attach.  Otherwise,
+there is no common understanding, and no community life.  But in
+a shared activity, each person refers what he is doing to what
+the other is doing and vice-versa.  That is, the activity of each
+is placed in the same inclusive situation.  To pull at a rope at
+which others happen to be pulling is not a shared or conjoint
+activity, unless the pulling is done with knowledge that others
+are pulling and for the sake of either helping or hindering what
+they are doing.  A pin may pass in the course of its manufacture
+through the hands of many persons.  But each may do his part
+without knowledge of what others do or without any reference to
+what they do; each may operate simply for the sake of a separate
+result--his own pay.  There is, in this case, no common
+consequence to which the several acts are referred, and hence no
+genuine intercourse or association, in spite of juxtaposition,
+and in spite of the fact that their respective doings contribute
+to a single outcome.  But if each views the consequences of his
+own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes
+into account the consequences of their behavior upon himself,
+then there is a common mind; a common intent in behavior.  There
+is an understanding set up between the different contributors;
+and this common understanding controls the action of each.
+Suppose that conditions were so arranged that one person
+automatically caught a ball and then threw it to another person
+who caught and automatically returned it; and that each so acted
+without knowing where the ball came from or went to.  Clearly,
+such action would be without point or meaning.  It might be
+physically controlled, but it would not be socially directed.
+But suppose that each becomes aware of what the other is doing,
+and becomes interested in the other's action and thereby
+interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the
+action of the other.  The behavior of each would then be
+intelligent; and socially intelligent and guided.  Take one more
+example of a less imaginary kind.  An infant is hungry, and cries
+while food is prepared in his presence.  If he does not connect
+his own state with what others are doing, nor what they are doing
+with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with increasing
+impatience to his own increasing discomfort.  He is physically
+controlled by his own organic state.  But when he makes a back
+and forth reference, his whole attitude changes.  He takes an
+interest, as we say; he takes note and watches what others are
+doing.  He no longer reacts just to his own hunger, but behaves
+in the light of what others are doing for its prospective
+satisfaction.  In that way, he also no longer just gives way to
+hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or recognizes, or
+identifies his own state.  It becomes an object for him.  His
+attitude toward it becomes in some degree intelligent.  And in
+such noting of the meaning of the actions of others and of his
+own state, he is socially directed.
+
+It will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides.  One
+of them has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do
+not influence mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are
+implicated in action for prospective consequences.  The other
+point is persons modify one another's dispositions only through
+the special use they make of physical conditions.  Consider first
+the case of so-called expressive movements to which others are
+sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning, clinching of fists,
+natural gestures of all kinds.  In themselves, these are not
+expressive.  They are organic parts of a person's attitude.  One
+does not blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but
+because the capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli.
+But others use the blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of
+the muscles of a person with whom they are associated, as a sign
+of the state in which that person finds himself, and as an
+indication of what course to pursue.  The frown signifies an
+imminent rebuke for which one must prepare, or an uncertainty and
+hesitation which one must, if possible, remove by saying or doing
+something to restore confidence.  A man at some distance is
+waving his arms wildly.  One has only to preserve an attitude of
+detached indifference, and the motions of the other person will
+be on the level of any remote physical change which we happen to
+note.  If we have no concern or interest, the waving of the arms
+is as meaningless to us as the gyrations of the arms of a
+windmill.  But if interest is aroused, we begin to participate.
+We refer his action to something we are doing ourselves or that
+we should do.  We have to judge the meaning of his act in order
+to decide what to do.  Is he beckoning for help? Is he warning us
+of an explosion to be set off, against which we should guard
+ourselves? In one case, his action means to run toward him; in
+the other case, to run away.  In any case, it is the change he
+effects in the physical environment which is a sign to us of how
+we should conduct ourselves.  Our action is socially controlled
+because we endeavor to refer what we are to do to the same
+situation in which he is acting.
+
+Language is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this
+joint reference of our own action and that of another to a common
+situation.  Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social
+direction.  But language would not be this efficacious instrument
+were it not that it takes place upon a background of coarser and
+more tangible use of physical means to accomplish results.  A
+child sees persons with whom he lives using chairs, hats, tables,
+spades, saws, plows, horses, money in certain ways.  If he has
+any share at all in what they are doing, he is led thereby to use
+things in the same way, or to use other things in a way which
+will fit in.  If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign
+that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he
+is to extend his; and so on in a never ending stream of detail.
+The prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the
+raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and
+most pervasive mode of social control.  When children go to
+school, they already have "minds" -- they have knowledge and
+dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to through the use
+of language.  But these "minds" are the organized habits of
+intelligent response which they have previously required by
+putting things to use in connection with the way other persons
+use things.  The control is inescapable; it saturates
+disposition.  The net outcome of the discussion is that the
+fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual.
+It is not "moral" in the sense that a person is moved by direct
+personal appeal from others, important as is this method at
+critical junctures.  It consists in the habits of understanding,
+which are set up in using objects in correspondence with others,
+whether by way of cooperation and assistance or rivalry and
+competition.  Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to
+understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized
+mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which
+they are turned in joint or shared situations.  And mind in this
+sense is the method of social control.
+
+3.  Imitation and Social Psychology.  We have already noted the
+defects of a psychology of learning which places the individual
+mind naked, as it were, in contact with physical objects, and
+which believes that knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from
+their interaction.  Only comparatively recently has the
+predominating influence of association with fellow beings in the
+formation of mental and moral disposition been perceived.  Even
+now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an alleged
+method of learning by direct contact with things, and as merely
+supplementing knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of
+persons.  The purport of our discussion is that such a view makes
+an absurd and impossible separation between persons and things.
+Interaction with things may form habits of external adjustment.
+But it leads to activity having a meaning and conscious intent
+only when things are used to produce a result.  And the only way
+one person can modify the mind of another is by using physical
+conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering
+activity from him.  Such are our two main conclusions.  It is
+desirable to amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast
+with the theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct
+relationships of human beings to one another as an adjunct to the
+psychology of the supposed direct relation of an individual to
+physical objects.  In substance, this so-called social psychology
+has been built upon the notion of imitation.  Consequently, we
+shall discuss the nature and role of imitation in the formation
+of mental disposition.
+
+According to this theory, social control of individuals rests
+upon the instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy
+the actions of others.  The latter serve as models.  The
+imitative instinct is so strong that the young devote themselves
+to conforming to the patterns set by others and reproducing them
+in their own scheme of behavior.  According to our theory, what
+is here called imitation is a misleading name for partaking with
+others in a use of things which leads to consequences of common
+interest.  The basic error in the current notion of imitation is
+that it puts the cart before the horse.  It takes an effect for
+the cause of the effect.  There can be no doubt that individuals
+in forming a social group are like-minded; they understand one
+another.  They tend to act with the same controlling ideas,
+beliefs, and intentions, given similar circumstances.  Looked at
+from without, they might be said to be engaged in "imitating" one
+another.  In the sense that they are doing much the same sort of
+thing in much the same sort of way, this would be true enough.
+But "imitation" throws no light upon why they so act; it repeats
+the fact as an explanation of itself.  It is an explanation of
+the same order as the famous saying that opium puts men to sleep
+because of its dormitive power.
+
+Objective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in
+being in conformity with others are baptized by the name
+imitation.  This social fact is then taken for a psychological
+force, which produced the likeness.  A considerable portion of
+what is called imitation is simply the fact that persons being
+alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli.
+Quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted get angry
+and attack the insulter.  This statement may be met by citing the
+undoubted fact that response to an insult takes place in
+different ways in groups having different customs.  In one group,
+it may be met by recourse to fisticuffs, in another by a
+challenge to a duel, in a third by an exhibition of contemptuous
+disregard.  This happens, so it is said, because the model set
+for imitation is different.  But there is no need to appeal to
+imitation.  The mere fact that customs are different means that
+the actual stimuli to behavior are different.  Conscious
+instruction plays a part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a
+large influence.  Still more effective is the fact that unless an
+individual acts in the way current in his group, he is literally
+out of it.  He can associate with others on intimate and equal
+terms only by behaving in the way in which they behave.  The
+pressure that comes from the fact that one is let into the group
+action by acting in one way and shut out by acting in another way
+is unremitting.  What is called the effect of imitation is mainly
+the product of conscious instruction and of the selective
+influence exercised by the unconscious confirmations and
+ratifications of those with whom one associates.
+
+Suppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and
+rolls it back, and the game goes on.  Here the stimulus is not
+just the sight of the ball, or the sight of the other rolling it.
+It is the situation -- the game which is playing.  The response
+is not merely rolling the ball back; it is rolling it back so
+that the other one may catch and return it, -- that the game may
+continue.  The "pattern" or model is not the action of the other
+person.  The whole situation requires that each should adapt his
+action in view of what the other person has done and is to do.
+Imitation may come in but its role is subordinate.  The child has
+an interest on his own account; he wants to keep it going.  He
+may then note how the other person catches and holds the ball in
+order to improve his own acts.  He imitates the means of doing,
+not the end or thing to be done.  And he imitates the means
+because he wishes, on his own behalf, as part of his own
+initiative, to take an effective part in the game.  One has only
+to consider how completely the child is dependent from his
+earliest days for successful execution of his purposes upon
+fitting his acts into those of others to see what a premium is
+put upon behaving as others behave, and of developing an
+understanding of them in order that he may so behave.  The
+pressure for likemindedness in action from this source is so
+great that it is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation.  As
+matter of fact, imitation of ends, as distinct from imitation of
+means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and transitory
+affair which leaves little effect upon disposition.  Idiots are
+especially apt at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts
+but not the meaning of their performance.  When we find children
+engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as
+we would do if it were an important means of social control) we
+are more likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy
+cats.  Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other
+hand, an intelligent act.  It involves close observation, and
+judicious selection of what will enable one to do better
+something which he already is trying to do.  Used for a purpose,
+the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become a
+factor in the development of effective action.
+
+This excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing
+the conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of
+a certain mental disposition; a way of understanding objects,
+events, and acts which enables one to participate effectively in
+associated activities.  Only the friction engendered by meeting
+resistance from others leads to the view that it takes place by
+forcing a line of action contrary to natural inclinations.  Only
+failure to take account of the situations in which persons are
+mutually concerned (or interested in acting responsively to one
+another) leads to treating imitation as the chief agent in
+promoting social control.
+
+4.  Some Applications to Education.  Why does a savage group
+perpetuate savagery, and a civilized group civilization?
+Doubtless the first answer to occur to mind is because savages
+are savages; being of low-grade intelligence and perhaps
+defective moral sense.  But careful study has made it doubtful
+whether their native capacities are appreciably inferior to those
+of civilized man.  It has made it certain that native differences
+are not sufficient to account for the difference in culture.  In
+a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a
+cause, of their backward institutions.  Their social activities
+are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest,
+and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development.  Even as
+regards the objects that come within the scope of attention,
+primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and
+imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind.
+Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of
+natural objects enter into associated behavior.  Only a small
+number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked
+for what they are worth.  The advance of civilization means that
+a larger number of natural forces and objects have been
+transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for
+securing ends.  We start not so much with superior capacities as
+with superior stimuli for evocation and direction of our
+capacities.  The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have
+weighted stimuli.  Prior human efforts have made over natural
+conditions.  As they originally existed they were indifferent to
+human endeavors.  Every domesticated plant and animal, every
+tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article,
+every esthetic decoration, every work of art means a
+transformation of conditions once hostile or indifferent to
+characteristic human activities into friendly and favoring
+conditions.  Because the activities of children today are
+controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are
+able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed
+slow, tortured ages to attain.  The dice have been loaded by all
+the successes which have preceded.
+
+Stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as
+our system of roads and means of transportation, our ready
+command of heat, light, and electricity, our ready-made machines
+and apparatus for every purpose, do not, by themselves or in
+their aggregate, constitute a civilization.  But the uses to
+which they are put are civilization, and without the things the
+uses would be impossible.  Time otherwise necessarily devoted to
+wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment and securing a
+precarious protection against its inclemencies is freed.  A body
+of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which is
+guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is
+incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of
+nature.  Thus these appliances of art supply a protection,
+perhaps our chief protection, against a recrudescence of these
+superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and infertile
+imaginings about nature in which so much of the best intellectual
+power of the past has been spent.  If we add one other factor,
+namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the
+interests of a truly shared or associated life, then the
+appliances become the positive resources of civilization.  If
+Greece, with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a
+worthy and noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because
+Greece operated for social ends such resources as it had.
+But whatever the situation, whether one of barbarism or
+civilization, whether one of stinted control of physical forces,
+or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet made tributary
+to a shared experience, things as they enter into action furnish
+the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation
+of mental and moral disposition.
+
+Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a
+specially selected environment, the selection being made on the
+basis of materials and method specifically promoting growth in
+the desired direction.  Since language represents the physical
+conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation
+in the interests of social life -- physical things which have
+lost their original quality in becoming social tools -- it is
+appropriate that language should play a large part compared with
+other appliances.  By it we are led to share vicariously in past
+human experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of
+the present.  We are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to
+anticipate situations.  In countless ways, language condenses
+meanings that record social outcomes and presage social
+outlooks.  So significant is it of a liberal share in what is
+worth while in life that unlettered and uneducated have become
+almost synonymous.
+
+The emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however,
+its dangers -- dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in
+practice.  Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by
+pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally
+condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That
+education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an
+active and constructive process, is a principle almost as
+generally violated in practice as conceded in theory.  Is not
+this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is
+itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written
+about.  But its enactment into practice requires that the school
+environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and
+physical materials, to an extent rarely attained.  It requires
+that methods of instruction and administration be modified to
+allow and to secure direct and continuous occupations with
+things.  Not that the use of language as an educational resource
+should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and fruitful
+by having its normal connection with shared activities.  "These
+things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others
+undone." And for the school "these things" mean equipment with
+the instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.
+
+For when the schools depart from the educational conditions
+effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily
+substitute a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social
+spirit.  Children doubtless go to school to learn, but it has yet
+to be proved that learning occurs most adequately when it is made
+a separate conscious business.  When treating it as a business of
+this sort tends to preclude the social sense which comes from
+sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the effort at
+isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim.  We may
+secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an
+individual by himself, but we cannot thereby get him to
+understand the meaning which things have in the life of which he
+is a part.  We may secure technical specialized ability in
+algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence which
+directs ability to useful ends.  Only by engaging in a joint
+activity, where one person's use of material and tools is
+consciously referred to the use other persons are making of their
+capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition
+attained.
+
+Summary.  The natural or native impulses of the young do not
+agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are
+born.  Consequently they have to be directed or guided.  This
+control is not the same thing as physical compulsion; it consists
+in centering the impulses acting at any one time upon some
+specific end and in introducing an order of continuity into the
+sequence of acts.  The action of others is always influenced by
+deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions.  But in some
+cases as in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and disapprovals,
+the stimuli proceed from persons with a direct view to
+influencing action.  Since in such cases we are most conscious of
+controlling the action of others, we are likely to exaggerate the
+importance of this sort of control at the expense of a more
+permanent and effective method.  The basic control resides in the
+nature of the situations in which the young take part.  In social
+situations the young have to refer their way of acting to what
+others are doing and make it fit in.  This directs their action
+to a common result, and gives an understanding common to the
+participants.  For all mean the same thing, even when performing
+different acts.  This common understanding of the means and ends
+of action is the essence of social control.  It is indirect, or
+emotional and intellectual, not direct or personal.  Moreover it
+is intrinsic to the disposition of the person, not external and
+coercive.  To achieve this internal control through identity of
+interest and understanding is the business of education.  While
+books and conversation can do much, these agencies are usually
+relied upon too exclusively.  Schools require for their full
+efficiency more opportunity for conjoint activities in which
+those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social
+sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances
+used.
+
+
+Chapter Four: Education as Growth
+
+1.  The Conditions of Growth.
+
+In directing the activities of the young, society determines its
+own future in determining that of the young.  Since the young at
+a given time will at some later date compose the society of that
+period, the latter's nature will largely turn upon the direction
+children's activities were given at an earlier period.  This
+cumulative movement of action toward a later result is what is
+meant by growth.
+
+The primary condition of growth is immaturity.  This may seem to
+be a mere truism -- saying that a being can develop only in some
+point in which he is undeveloped.  But the prefix "im" of the
+word immaturity means something positive, not a mere void or
+lack.  It is noteworthy that the terms "capacity" and
+"potentiality" have a double meaning, one sense being negative,
+the other positive.  Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like
+the capacity of a quart measure.  We may mean by potentiality a
+merely dormant or quiescent state -- a capacity to become
+something different under external influences.  But we also mean
+by capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency,
+force.  Now when we say that immaturity means the possibility of
+growth, we are not referring to absence of powers which may exist
+at a later time; we express a force positively present -- the
+ability to develop.
+
+Our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as
+something which fills up the gap between the immature and the
+mature is due to regarding childhood comparatively, instead of
+intrinsically.  We treat it simply as a privation because we are
+measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard.  This fixes
+attention upon what the child has not, and will not have till he
+becomes a man.  This comparative standpoint is legitimate enough
+for some purposes, but if we make it final, the question arises
+whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption.
+Children, if they could express themselves articulately and
+sincerely, would tell a different tale; and there is excellent
+adult authority for the conviction that for certain moral and
+intellectual purposes adults must become as little children.
+The seriousness of the assumption of the negative quality of the
+possibilities of immaturity is apparent when we reflect that it
+sets up as an ideal and standard a static end.  The fulfillment
+of growing is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is to
+say, an Ungrowth, something which is no longer growing.  The
+futility of the assumption is seen in the fact that every adult
+resents the imputation of having no further possibilities of
+growth; and so far as he finds that they are closed to him mourns
+the fact as evidence of loss, instead of falling back on the
+achieved as adequate manifestation of power.  Why an unequal
+measure for child and man?
+
+Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates
+a positive force or ability, -- the pouter to grow.  We do not
+have to draw out or educe positive activities from a child, as
+some educational doctrines would have it.  Where there is life,
+there are already eager and impassioned activities.  Growth is
+not something done to them; it is something they do.  The
+positive and constructive aspect of possibility gives the key to
+understanding the two chief traits of immaturity, dependence and
+plasticity.
+
+(1) It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something
+positive, still more absurd as a power.  Yet if helplessness were
+all there were in dependence, no development could ever take
+place.  A merely impotent being has to be carried, forever, by
+others.  The fact that dependence is accompanied by growth in
+ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into parasitism,
+suggests that it is already something constructive.  Being merely
+sheltered by others would not promote growth.  For
+
+(2) it would only build a wall around impotence.  With reference
+to the physical world, the child is helpless.  He lacks at birth
+and for a long time thereafter power to make his way physically,
+to make his own living.  If he had to do that by himself, he
+would hardly survive an hour.  On this side his helplessness is
+almost complete.  The young of the brutes are immeasurably his
+superiors.  He is physically weak and not able to turn the
+strength which he possesses to coping with the physical
+environment.
+
+1.  The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests,
+however, some compensating power.  The relative ability of the
+young of brute animals to adapt themselves fairly well to
+physical conditions from an early period suggests the fact that
+their life is not intimately bound up with the life of those
+about them.  They are compelled, so to speak, to have physical
+gifts because they are lacking in social gifts.  Human infants,
+on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
+because of their social capacity.  We sometimes talk and think as
+if they simply happened to be physically in a social environment;
+as if social forces exclusively existed in the adults who take
+care of them, they being passive recipients.  If it were said
+that children are themselves marvelously endowed with power to
+enlist the cooperative attention of others, this would be thought
+to be a backhanded way of saying that others are marvelously
+attentive to the needs of children.  But observation shows that
+children are gifted with an equipment of the first order for
+social intercourse.  Few grown-up persons retain all of the
+flexible and sensitive ability of children to vibrate
+sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about
+them.  Inattention to physical things (going with incapacity to
+control them) is accompanied by a corresponding intensification
+of interest and attention as to the doings of people.  The native
+mechanism of the child and his impulses all tend to facile social
+responsiveness.  The statement that children, before adolescence,
+are egotistically self-centered, even if it were true, would not
+contradict the truth of this statement.  It would simply indicate
+that their social responsiveness is employed on their own behalf,
+not that it does not exist.  But the statement is not true as
+matter of fact.  The facts which are cited in support of the
+alleged pure egoism of children really show the intensity and
+directness with which they go to their mark.  If the ends which
+form the mark seem narrow and selfish to adults, it is only
+because adults (by means of a similar engrossment in their day)
+have mastered these ends, which have consequently ceased to
+interest them.  Most of the remainder of children's alleged
+native egoism is simply an egoism which runs counter to an
+adult's egoism.  To a grown-up person who is too absorbed in his
+own affairs to take an interest in children's affairs, children
+doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own affairs.
+
+From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than
+a weakness; it involves interdependence.  There is always a
+danger that increased personal independence will decrease the
+social capacity of an individual.  In making him more
+self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead
+to aloofness and indifference.  It often makes an individual so
+insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion
+of being really able to stand and act alone -- an unnamed form of
+insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable
+suffering of the world.
+
+2.  The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
+constitutes his plasticity.  This is something quite different
+from the plasticity of putty or wax.  It is not a capacity to
+take on change of form in accord with external pressure.  It lies
+near the pliable elasticity by which some persons take on the
+color of their surroundings while retaining their own bent.  But
+it is something deeper than this.  It is essentially the ability
+to learn from experience; the power to retain from one experience
+something which is of avail in coping with the difficulties of a
+later situation.  This means power to modify actions on the basis
+of the results of prior experiences, the power to develop
+dispositions.  Without it, the acquisition of habits is
+impossible.
+
+It is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and
+especially the human young, have to learn to utilize their
+instinctive reactions.  The human being is born with a greater
+number of instinctive tendencies than other animals.  But the
+instincts of the lower animals perfect themselves for appropriate
+action at an early period after birth, while most of those of the
+human infant are of little account just as they stand.  An
+original specialized power of adjustment secures immediate
+efficiency, but, like a railway ticket, it is good for one route
+only.  A being who, in order to use his eyes, ears, hands, and
+legs, has to experiment in making varied combinations of their
+reactions, achieves a control that is flexible and varied.  A
+chick, for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few
+hours after hatching.  This means that definite coordinations of
+activities of the eyes in seeing and of the body and head in
+striking are perfected in a few trials.  An infant requires about
+six months to be able to gauge with approximate accuracy the
+action in reaching which will coordinate with his visual
+activities; to be able, that is, to tell whether he can reach a
+seen object and just how to execute the reaching.  As a result,
+the chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original
+endowment.  The infant has the advantage of the multitude of
+instinctive tentative reactions and of the experiences that
+accompany them, even though he is at a temporary disadvantage
+because they cross one another.  In learning an action, instead
+of having it given ready-made, one of necessity learns to vary
+its factors, to make varied combinations of them, according to
+change of circumstances.  A possibility of continuing progress is
+opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are
+developed good for use in other situations.  Still more important
+is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning.
+He learns to learn.
+
+The importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and
+variable control has been summed up in the doctrine of the
+significance of prolonged infancy.  1 This prolongation is
+significant from the standpoint of the adult members of the group
+as well as from that of the young.  The presence of dependent and
+learning beings is a stimulus to nurture and affection.  The need
+for constant continued care was probably a chief means in
+transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent unions.  It
+certainly was a chief influence in forming habits of affectionate
+and sympathetic watchfulness; that constructive interest in the
+well-being of others which is essential to associated life.
+Intellectually, this moral development meant the introduction of
+many new objects of attention; it stimulated foresight and
+planning for the future.  Thus there is a reciprocal influence.
+Increasing complexity of social life requires a longer period of
+infancy in which to acquire the needed powers; this prolongation
+of dependence means prolongation of plasticity, or power of
+acquiring variable and novel modes of control.  Hence it provides
+a further push to social progress.
+
+2.  Habits as Expressions of Growth.  We have already noted that
+plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior
+experience factors which modify subsequent activities.  This
+signifies the capacity to acquire habits, or develop definite
+dispositions.  We have now to consider the salient features of
+habits.  In the first place, a habit is a form of executive
+skill, of efficiency in doing.  A habit means an ability to use
+natural conditions as means to ends.  It is an active control of
+the environment through control of the organs of action.  We are
+perhaps apt to emphasize the control of the body at the expense
+of control of the environment.  We think of walking, talking,
+playing the piano, the specialized skills characteristic of the
+etcher, the surgeon, the bridge-builder, as if they were simply
+ease, deftness, and accuracy on the part of the organism.  They
+are that, of course; but the measure of the value of these
+qualities lies in the economical and effective control of the
+environment which they secure.  To be able to walk is to have
+certain properties of nature at our disposal--and so with all
+other habits.
+
+Education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the
+acquisition of those habits that effect an adjustment of an
+individual and his environment.  The definition expresses an
+essential phase of growth.  But it is essential that adjustment
+be understood in its active sense of control of means for
+achieving ends.  If we think of a habit simply as a change
+wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change
+consists in ability to effect subsequent changes in the
+environment, we shall be led to think of "adjustment" as a
+conformity to environment as wax conforms to the seal which
+impresses it.  The environment is thought of as something fixed,
+providing in its fixity the end and standard of changes taking
+place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting ourselves to
+this fixity of external conditions.  2 Habit as habituation is
+indeed something relatively passive; we get used to our
+surroundings -- to our clothing, our shoes, and gloves; to the
+atmosphere as long as it is fairly equable; to our daily
+associates, etc.  Conformity to the environment, a change wrought
+in the organism without reference to ability to modify
+surroundings, is a marked trait of such habituations.  Aside from
+the fact that we are not entitled to carry over the traits of
+such adjustments (which might well be called accommodations, to
+mark them off from active adjustments) into habits of active use
+of our surroundings, two features of habituations are worth
+notice.  In the first place, we get used to things by first using
+them.
+
+Consider getting used to a strange city.  At first, there is
+excessive stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response.
+Gradually certain stimuli are selected because of their
+relevancy, and others are degraded.  We can say either that we do
+not respond to them any longer, or more truly that we have
+effected a persistent response to them -- an equilibrium of
+adjustment.  This means, in the second place, that this enduring
+adjustment supplies the background upon which are made specific
+adjustments, as occasion arises.  We are never interested in
+changing the whole environment; there is much that we take for
+granted and accept just as it already is.  Upon this background
+our activities focus at certain points in an endeavor to
+introduce needed changes.  Habituation is thus our adjustment to
+an environment which at the time we are not concerned with
+modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active habits.
+Adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the
+environment to our own activities as of our activities to the
+environment.  A savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain.
+It adapts itself.  But its adaptation involves a maximum of
+accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a
+maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control,
+of subjection to use.  A civilized people enters upon the scene.
+It also adapts itself.  It introduces irrigation; it searches the
+world for plants and animals that will flourish under such
+conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are
+growing there.  As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a
+rose.  The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has
+habits which transform the environment.
+
+The significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its
+executive and motor phase.  It means formation of intellectual
+and emotional disposition as well as an increase in ease,
+economy, and efficiency of action.  Any habit marks an
+inclination -- an active preference and choice for the conditions
+involved in its exercise.  A habit does not wait, Micawber-like,
+for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy; it actively
+seeks for occasions to pass into full operation.  If its
+expression is unduly blocked, inclination shows itself in
+uneasiness and intense craving.  A habit also marks an
+intellectual disposition.  Where there is a habit, there is
+acquaintance with the materials and equipment to which action is
+applied.  There is a definite way of understanding the situations
+in which the habit operates.  Modes of thought, of observation
+and reflection, enter as forms of skill and of desire into the
+habits that make a man an engineer, an architect, a physician, or
+a merchant.  In unskilled forms of labor, the intellectual
+factors are at minimum precisely because the habits involved are
+not of a high grade.  But there are habits of judging and
+reasoning as truly as of handling a tool, painting a picture, or
+conducting an experiment.  Such statements are, however,
+understatements.  The habits of mind involved in habits of the
+eye and hand supply the latter with their significance.  Above
+all, the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of
+the habit to varied and elastic use, and hence to continued
+growth.  We speak of fixed habits.  Well, the phrase may mean
+powers so well established that their possessor always has them
+as resources when needed.  But the phrase is also used to mean
+ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness, open- mindedness, and
+originality.  Fixity of habit may mean that something has a fixed
+hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold upon things.
+This fact explains two points in a common notion about habits:
+their identification with mechanical and external modes of action
+to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the tendency to
+give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad habits."
+Many a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his
+chosen profession called a habit, and would naturally think of
+his use of tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the
+meaning of habit.  A habit is to him something which has a hold
+on him, something not easily thrown off even though judgment
+condemn it.
+
+Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate
+into ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree
+in which intelligence is disconnected from them.  Routine habits
+are unthinking habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from
+reason that they are opposed to the conclusions of conscious
+deliberation and decision.  As we have seen, the acquiring of
+habits is due to an original plasticity of our natures: to our
+ability to vary responses till we find an appropriate and
+efficient way of acting.  Routine habits, and habits that possess
+us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to
+plasticity.  They mark the close of power to vary.  There can be
+no doubt of the tendency of organic plasticity, of the
+physiological basis, to lessen with growing years.  The
+instinctively mobile and eagerly varying action of childhood, the
+love of new stimuli and new developments, too easily passes into
+a "settling down," which means aversion to change and a resting
+on past achievements.  Only an environment which secures the full
+use of intelligence in the process of forming habits can
+counteract this tendency.  Of course, the same hardening of the
+organic conditions affects the physiological structures which are
+involved in thinking.  But this fact only indicates the need of
+persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is
+invoked to its maximum possibility.  The short-sighted method
+which falls back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure
+external efficiency of habit, motor skill without accompanying
+thought, marks a deliberate closing in of surroundings upon
+growth.
+
+3.  The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development.
+We have had so far but little to say in this chapter about
+education.  We have been occupied with the conditions and
+implications of growth.  If our conclusions are justified, they
+carry with them, however, definite educational consequences.
+When it is said that education is development, everything depends
+upon how development is conceived.  Our net conclusion is that
+life is development, and that developing, growing, is life.
+Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that
+the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own
+end; and that (ii) the educational process is one of continual
+reorganizing, reconstructing, transforming.
+
+1.  Development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that
+is, with respect to the special traits of child and adult life,
+means the direction of power into special channels: the formation
+of habits involving executive skill, definiteness of interest,
+and specific objects of observation and thought.  But the
+comparative view is not final.  The child has specific powers; to
+ignore that fact is to stunt or distort the organs upon which his
+growth depends.  The adult uses his powers to transform his
+environment, thereby occasioning new stimuli which redirect his
+powers and keep them developing.  Ignoring this fact means
+arrested development, a passive accommodation.  Normal child and
+normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing.  The
+difference between them is not the difference between growth and
+no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to
+different conditions.  With respect to the development of powers
+devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems
+we may say the child should be growing in manhood.  With respect
+to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness
+of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in
+childlikeness.  One statement is as true as the other.
+
+Three ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely
+privative nature of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed
+environment, and rigidity of habit, are all connected with a
+false idea of growth or development, -- that it is a movement
+toward a fixed goal.  Growth is regarded as having an end,
+instead of being an end.  The educational counterparts of the
+three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take account of the
+instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly, failure to
+develop initiative in coping with novel situations; thirdly, an
+undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure
+automatic skill at the expense of personal perception.  In all
+cases, the adult environment is accepted as a standard for the
+child.  He is to be brought up to it.
+
+Natural instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances
+-- as obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be
+brought into conformity with external standards.  Since
+conformity is the aim, what is distinctively individual in a
+young person is brushed aside, or regarded as a source of
+mischief or anarchy.  Conformity is made equivalent to
+uniformity.  Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in
+the novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and
+the unknown.  Since the end of growth is outside of and beyond
+the process of growing, external agents have to be resorted to to
+induce movement toward it.  Whenever a method of education is
+stigmatized as mechanical, we may be sure that external pressure
+is brought to bear to reach an external end.
+
+2.  Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative
+save more growth, there is nothing to which education is
+subordinate save more education.  It is a commonplace to say that
+education should not cease when one leaves school.  The point of
+this commonplace is that the purpose of school education is to
+insure the continuance of education by organizing the powers that
+insure growth.  The inclination to learn from life itself and to
+make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the
+process of living is the finest product of schooling.
+
+When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of
+fixed comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to
+give up thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits.
+Abandoning this notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit
+of thinking of instruction as a method of supplying this lack by
+pouring knowledge into a mental and moral hole which awaits
+filling.  Since life means growth, a living creature lives as
+truly and positively at one stage as at another, with the same
+intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims.  Hence education
+means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure
+growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age.  We first look
+with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as something to be
+got over as rapidly as possible.  Then the adult formed by such
+educative methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood
+and youth as a scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers.
+This ironical situation will endure till it is recognized that
+living has its own intrinsic quality and that the business of
+education is with that quality.  Realization that life is growth
+protects us from that so-called idealizing of childhood which in
+effect is nothing but lazy indulgence.  Life is not to be
+identified with every superficial act and interest.  Even though
+it is not always easy to tell whether what appears to be mere
+surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained power,
+we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as
+ends in themselves.  They are signs of possible growth.  They are
+to be turned into means of development, of carrying power
+forward, not indulged or cultivated for their own sake.
+Excessive attention to surface phenomena (even in the way of
+rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to their fixation
+and thus to arrested development.  What impulses are moving
+toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for
+parent and teacher.  The true principle of respect for immaturity
+cannot be better put than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the
+child.  Be not too much his parent.  Trespass not on his
+solitude.  But I hear the outcry which replies to this
+suggestion: Would you verily throw up the reins of public and
+private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad
+career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a
+respect for the child's nature? I answer, -- Respect the child,
+respect him to the end, but also respect yourself....  The two
+points in a boy's training are, to keep his naturel and train off
+all but that; to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar,
+fooling, and horseplay; keep his nature and arm it with knowledge
+in the very direction in which it points." And as Emerson goes on
+to show this reverence for childhood and youth instead of opening
+up an easy and easy-going path to the instructors, "involves at
+once, immense claims on the time, the thought, on the life of the
+teacher.  It requires time, use, insight, event, all the great
+lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it
+implies character and profoundness."
+
+Summary.  Power to grow depends upon need for others and
+plasticity.  Both of these conditions are at their height in
+childhood and youth.  Plasticity or the power to learn from
+experience means the formation of habits.  Habits give control
+over the environment, power to utilize it for human purposes.
+Habits take the form both of habituation, or a general and
+persistent balance of organic activities with the surroundings,
+and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new
+conditions.  The former furnishes the background of growth; the
+latter constitute growing.  Active habits involve thought,
+invention, and initiative in applying capacities to new aims.
+They are opposed to routine which marks an arrest of growth.
+Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one
+with growing; it has no end beyond itself.  The criterion of the
+value of school education is the extent in which it creates a
+desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the
+desire effective in fact.
+
+1 Intimations of its significance are found in a number of
+writers, but John Fiske, in his Excursions of an Evolutionist, is
+accredited with its first systematic exposition.
+
+2 This conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the
+conceptions of the external relation of stimulus and response,
+considered in the last chapter, and of the negative conceptions
+of immaturity and plasticity noted in this chapter.
+
+
+Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
+
+1.  Education as Preparation.  We have laid it down that the
+educative process is a continuous process of growth, having as
+its aim at every stage an added capacity of growth.  This
+conception contrasts sharply with other ideas which have
+influenced practice.  By making the contrast explicit, the
+meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to light.
+The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process
+of preparation or getting ready.  What is to be prepared for is,
+of course, the responsibilities and privileges of adult life.
+Children are not regarded as social members in full and regular
+standing.  They are looked upon as candidates; they are placed on
+the waiting list.  The conception is only carried a little
+farther when the life of adults is considered as not having
+meaning on its own account, but as a preparatory probation for
+"another life." The idea is but another form of the notion of the
+negative and privative character of growth already criticized;
+hence we shall not repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the evil
+consequences which flow from putting education on this basis.
+In the first place, it involves loss of impetus.  Motive power is
+not utilized.  Children proverbially live in the present; that is
+not only a fact not to be evaded, but it is an excellence.  The
+future just as future lacks urgency and body.  To get ready for
+something, one knows not what nor why, is to throw away the
+leverage that exists, and to seek for motive power in a vague
+chance.  Under such circumstances, there is, in the second place,
+a premium put on shilly-shallying and procrastination.  The
+future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of time will
+intervene before it becomes a present.  Why be in a hurry about
+getting ready for it? The temptation to postpone is much
+increased because the present offers so many wonderful
+opportunities and proffers such invitations to adventure.
+Naturally attention and energy go to them; education accrues
+naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education than if the full
+stress of effort had been put upon making conditions as educative
+as possible.  A third undesirable result is the substitution of a
+conventional average standard of expectation and requirement for
+a standard which concerns the specific powers of the individual
+under instruction.  For a severe and definite judgment based upon
+the strong and weak points of the individual is substituted a
+vague and wavering opinion concerning what youth may be expected,
+upon the average, to become in some more or less remote future;
+say, at the end of the year, when promotions are to take place,
+or by the time they are ready to go to college or to enter upon
+what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as the
+serious business of life.  It is impossible to overestimate the
+loss which results from the deflection of attention from the
+strategic point to a comparatively unproductive point.  It fails
+most just where it thinks it is succeeding -- in getting a
+preparation for the future.
+
+Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on
+a large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and
+pain.  The future having no stimulating and directing power when
+severed from the possibilities of the present, something must be
+hitched on to it to make it work.  Promises of reward and threats
+of pain are employed.  Healthy work, done for present reasons and
+as a factor in living, is largely unconscious.  The stimulus
+resides in the situation with which one is actually confronted.
+But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to be told that
+if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
+accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the
+future, rewards for their present sacrifices.  Everybody knows
+how largely systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by
+educational systems which neglect present possibilities in behalf
+of preparation for a future.  Then, in disgust with the harshness
+and impotency of this method, the pendulum swings to the opposite
+extreme, and the dose of information required against some later
+day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be fooled into taking
+something which they do not care for.
+
+It is not of course a question whether education should prepare
+for the future.  If education is growth, it must progressively
+realize present possibilities, and thus make individuals better
+fitted to cope with later requirements.  Growing is not something
+which is completed in odd moments; it is a continuous leading
+into the future.  If the environment, in school and out, supplies
+conditions which utilize adequately the present capacities of the
+immature, the future which grows out of the present is surely
+taken care of.  The mistake is not in attaching importance to
+preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of
+present effort.  Because the need of preparation for a
+continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every
+energy should be bent to making the present experience as rich
+and significant as possible.  Then as the present merges
+insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of.
+
+2.  Education as Unfolding.  There is a conception of education
+which professes to be based upon the idea of development.  But it
+takes back with one hand what it proffers with the other.
+Development is conceived not as continuous growing, but as the
+unfolding of latent powers toward a definite goal.  The goal is
+conceived of as completion, -perfection.  Life at any stage short
+of attainment of this goal is merely an unfolding toward it.
+Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the preparation
+theory.  Practically the two differ in that the adherents of the
+latter make much of the practical and professional duties for
+which one is preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks
+of the ideal and spiritual qualities of the principle which is
+unfolding.
+
+The conception that growth and progress are just approximations
+to a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in
+its transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life.
+It simulates the style of the latter.  It pays the tribute of
+speaking much of development, process, progress.  But all of
+these operations are conceived to be merely transitional; they
+lack meaning on their own account.  They possess significance
+only as movements toward something away from what is now going
+on.  Since growth is just a movement toward a completed being,
+the final ideal is immobile.  An abstract and indefinite future
+is in control with all which that connotes in depreciation of
+present power and opportunity.
+
+Since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is
+very far away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is
+unattainable.  Consequently, in order to be available for present
+guidance it must be translated into something which stands for
+it.  Otherwise we should be compelled to regard any and every
+manifestation of the child as an unfolding from within, and hence
+sacred.  Unless we set up some definite criterion representing
+the ideal end by which to judge whether a given attitude or act
+is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is to
+withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere
+with proper development.  Since that is not practicable, a
+working substitute is set up.  Usually, of course, this is some
+idea which an adult would like to have a child acquire.
+Consequently, by "suggestive questioning" or some other
+pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out" from the
+pupil what is desired.  If what is desired is obtained, that is
+evidence that the child is unfolding properly.  But as the pupil
+generally has no initiative of his own in this direction, the
+result is a random groping after what is wanted, and the
+formation of habits of dependence upon the cues furnished by
+others.  Just because such methods simulate a true principle and
+claim to have its sanction they may do more harm than would
+outright "telling," where, at least, it remains with the child
+how much will stick.
+
+Within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two
+typical attempts to provide a working representative of the
+absolute goal.  Both start from the conception of a whole -- an
+absolute -- which is "immanent" in human life.  The perfect or
+complete ideal is not a mere ideal; it is operative here and now.
+But it is present only implicitly, "potentially," or in an
+enfolded condition.  What is termed development is the gradual
+making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up.  Froebel
+and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes referred
+to, have different ideas of the path by which the progressive
+realization of manifestation of the complete principle is
+effected.  According to Hegel, it is worked out through a series
+of historical institutions which embody the different factors in
+the Absolute.  According to Froebel, the actuating force is the
+presentation of symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding to
+the essential traits of the Absolute.  When these are presented
+to the child, the Whole, or perfection, sleeping within him, is
+awakened.  A single example may indicate the method.  Every one
+familiar with the kindergarten is acquainted with the circle in
+which the children gather.  It is not enough that the circle is a
+convenient way of grouping the children.  It must be used
+"because it is a symbol of the collective life of mankind in
+general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the native
+capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his
+influence in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the
+most effective single force in modern educational theory in
+effecting widespread acknowledgment of the idea of growth.  But
+his formulation of the notion of development and his organization
+of devices for promoting it were badly hampered by the fact that
+he conceived development to be the unfolding of a ready-made
+latent principle.  He failed to see that growing is growth,
+developing is development, and consequently placed the emphasis
+upon the completed product.  Thus he set up a goal which meant
+the arrest of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to
+immediate guidance of powers, save through translation into
+abstract and symbolic formulae.
+
+A remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical
+philosophic language, transcendental.  That is, it is something
+apart from direct experience and perception.  So far as
+experience is concerned, it is empty; it represents a vague
+sentimental aspiration rather than anything which can be
+intelligently grasped and stated.  This vagueness must be
+compensated for by some a priori formula.  Froebel made the
+connection between the concrete facts of experience and the
+transcendental ideal of development by regarding the former as
+symbols of the latter.  To regard known things as symbols,
+according to some arbitrary a priori formula -- and every a
+priori conception must be arbitrary -- is an invitation to
+romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal to it and
+treat them as laws.  After the scheme of symbolism has been
+settled upon, some definite technique must be invented by which
+the inner meaning of the sensible symbols used may be brought
+home to children.  Adults being the formulators of the symbolism
+are naturally the authors and controllers of the technique.  The
+result was that Froebel's love of abstract symbolism often got
+the better of his sympathetic insight; and there was substituted
+for development as arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of
+dictation as the history of instruction has ever seen.
+
+With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete
+counterpart of the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional,
+rather than symbolic, form.  His philosophy, like Froebel's,
+marks in one direction an indispensable contribution to a valid
+conception of the process of life.  The weaknesses of an abstract
+individualistic philosophy were evident to him; he saw the
+impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical institutions,
+of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and nurtured in
+fraud.  In his philosophy of history and society culminated the
+efforts of a whole series of German writers -- Lessing, Herder,
+Kant, Schiller, Goethe -- to appreciate the nurturing influence
+of the great collective institutional products of humanity.  For
+those who learned the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth
+impossible to conceive of institutions or of culture as
+artificial.  It destroyed completely -- in idea, not in fact --
+the psychology that regarded "mind" as a ready-made possession of
+a naked individual by showing the significance of "objective
+mind" -- language, government, art, religion -- in the formation
+of individual minds.  But since Hegel was haunted by the
+conception of an absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange
+institutions as they concretely exist, on a stepladder of
+ascending approximations.  Each in its time and place is
+absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing
+process of the absolute mind.  Taken as such a step or stage, its
+existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an
+integral element in the total, which is Reason.  Against
+institutions as they are, individuals have no spiritual rights;
+personal development, and nurture, consist in obedient
+assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions.  Conformity,
+not transformation, is the essence of education.  Institutions
+change as history shows; but their change, the rise and fall of
+states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the
+great "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit,
+have no share or lot in it.  In the later nineteenth century,
+this type of idealism was amalgamated with the doctrine of
+biological evolution.
+
+"Evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end.  As
+against it, or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and
+preference of individuals are impotent.  Or, rather, they are but
+the means by which it works itself out.  Social progress is an
+"organic growth," not an experimental selection.  Reason is all
+powerful, but only Absolute Reason has any power.
+
+The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the
+Greeks) that great historic institutions are active factors in
+the intellectual nurture of mind was a great contribution to
+educational philosophy.  It indicated a genuine advance beyond
+Rousseau, who had marred his assertion that education must be a
+natural development and not something forced or grafted upon
+individuals from without, by the notion that social conditions
+are not natural.  But in its notion of a complete and
+all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory swallowed
+up concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual in
+the abstract.  Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the
+claims of the Whole and of individuality by the conception of
+society as an organic whole, or organism.  That social
+organization is presupposed in the adequate exercise of
+individual capacity is not to be doubted.  But the social
+organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of the
+body to each other and to the whole body, means that each
+individual has a certain limited place and function, requiring to
+be supplemented by the place and functions of the other organs.
+As one portion of the bodily tissue is differentiated so that it
+can be the hand and the hand only, another, the eye, and so on,
+all taken together making the organism, so one individual is
+supposed to be differentiated for the exercise of the mechanical
+operations of society, another for those of a statesman, another
+for those of a scholar, and so on.  The notion of "organism" is
+thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class distinctions in
+social organization--a notion which in its educational
+application again means external dictation instead of growth.
+
+3.  Education as Training of Faculties.  A theory which has had
+great vogue and which came into existence before the notion of
+growth had much influence is known as the theory of "formal
+discipline." It has in view a correct ideal; one outcome of
+education should be the creation of specific powers of
+accomplishment.  A trained person is one who can do the chief
+things which it is important for him to do better than he could
+without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency,
+economy, promptness, etc.  That this is an outcome of education
+was indicated in what was said about habits as the product of
+educative development.  But the theory in question takes, as it
+were, a short cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named)
+as the direct and conscious aims of instruction, and not simply
+as the results of growth.  There is a definite number of powers
+to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of strokes which
+a golfer has to master.  Consequently education should get
+directly at the business of training them.  But this implies that
+they are already there in some untrained form; otherwise their
+creation would have to be an indirect product of other activities
+and agencies.  Being there already in some crude form, all that
+remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions,
+and they will inevitably be refined and perfected.  In the phrase
+"formal discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline"
+refers both to the outcome of trained power and to the method of
+training through repeated exercise.
+
+The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties
+of perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending,
+willing, feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then
+shaped by exercise upon material presented.  In its classic form,
+this theory was expressed by Locke.  On the one hand, the outer
+world presents the material or content of knowledge through
+passively received sensations.  On the other hand, the mind has
+certain ready powers, attention, observation, retention,
+comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc.  Knowledge results if
+the mind discriminates and combines things as they are united and
+divided in nature itself.  But the important thing for education
+is the exercise or practice of the faculties of the mind till
+they become thoroughly established habitudes.  The analogy
+constantly employed is that of a billiard player or gymnast, who
+by repeated use of certain muscles in a uniform way at last
+secures automatic skill.  Even the faculty of thinking was to be
+formed into a trained habit by repeated exercises in making and
+combining simple distinctions, for which, Locke thought,
+mathematics affords unrivaled opportunity.
+
+Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day.  It
+seemed to do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and
+the world.  One of the two supplied the matter of knowledge and
+the object upon which mind should work.  The other supplied
+definite mental powers, which were few in number and which might
+be trained by specific exercises.  The scheme appeared to give
+due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and yet it
+insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception and
+storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of
+attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization.
+It was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material
+whatever is received from without; it was idealistic in that
+final stress fell upon the formation of intellectual powers.  It
+was objective and impersonal in its assertion that the individual
+cannot possess or generate any true ideas on his own account; it
+was individualistic in placing the end of education in the
+perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset by the
+individual.  This kind of distribution of values expressed with
+nicety the state of opinion in the generations following upon
+Locke.  It became, without explicit reference to Locke, a
+common-place of educational theory and of psychology.
+Practically, it seemed to provide the educator with definite,
+instead of vague, tasks.  It made the elaboration of a technique
+of instruction relatively easy.  All that was necessary was to
+provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers.  This
+practice consists in repeated acts of attending, observing,
+memorizing, etc.  By grading the difficulty of the acts, making
+each set of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set
+which preceded it, a complete scheme of instruction is evolved.
+There are various ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing this
+conception, in both its alleged foundations and in its
+educational application.  (1) Perhaps the most direct mode of
+attack consists in pointing out that the supposed original
+faculties of observation, recollection, willing, thinking, etc.,
+are purely mythological.  There are no such ready-made powers
+waiting to be exercised and thereby trained.  There are, indeed,
+a great number of original native tendencies, instinctive modes
+of action, based on the original connections of neurones in the
+central nervous system.  There are impulsive tendencies of the
+eyes to follow and fixate light; of the neck muscles to turn
+toward light and sound; of the hands to reach and grasp; and turn
+and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to make sounds; of
+the mouth to spew out unpleasant substances; to gag and to curl
+the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number.  But these
+tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off
+from one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with
+one another in all kinds of subtle ways.  (b) Instead of being
+latent intellectual powers, requiring only exercise for their
+perfecting, they are tendencies to respond in certain ways to
+changes in the environment so as to bring about other changes.
+Something in the throat makes one cough; the tendency is to eject
+the obnoxious particle and thus modify the subsequent stimulus.
+The hand touches a hot thing; it is impulsively, wholly
+unintellectually, snatched away.  But the withdrawal alters the
+stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with the
+needs of the organism.  It is by such specific changes of organic
+activities in response to specific changes in the medium that
+that control of the environment of which we have spoken (see
+ante, p.  24) is effected.  Now all of our first seeings and
+hearings and touchings and smellings and tastings are of this
+kind.  In any legitimate sense of the words mental or
+intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these qualities,
+and no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any
+intellectual properties of observation, judgment, or intentional
+action (volition) upon them.
+
+(2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive
+activities is not a refinement and perfecting achieved by
+"exercise" as one might strengthen a muscle by practice.  It
+consists rather (a) in selecting from the diffused responses
+which are evoked at a given time those which are especially
+adapted to the utilization of the stimulus.  That is to say,
+among the reactions of the body in general
+
+occur upon stimulation of the eye by light, all except those
+which are specifically adapted to reaching, grasping, and
+manipulating the object effectively are gradually eliminated--or
+else no training occurs.  As we have already noted, the primary
+reactions, with a very few exceptions are too diffused and
+general to be practically of much use in the case of the human
+infant.  Hence the identity of training with selective response.
+(Compare p.  25.) (b) Equally important is the specific
+coordination of different factors of response which takes place.
+There is not merely a selection of the hand reactions which
+effect grasping, but of the particular visual stimuli which call
+out just these reactions and no others, and an establishment of
+connection between the two.  But the coordinating does not stop
+here.  Characteristic temperature reactions may take place when
+the object is grasped.  These will also be brought in; later, the
+temperature reaction may be connected directly with the optical
+stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed--as a bright flame,
+independent of close contact, may steer one away.  Or the child
+in handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a
+sound issues.  The ear response is then brought into the system
+of response.  If a certain sound (the conventional name) is made
+by others and accompanies the activity, response of both ear and
+the vocal apparatus connected with auditory stimulation will also
+become an associated factor in the complex response.  2
+
+(3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus
+to each other (for, taking the sequence of activities into
+account, the stimuli are adapted to reactions as well as
+reactions to stimuli) the more rigid and the less generally
+available is the training secured.  In equivalent language, less
+intellectual or educative quality attaches to the training.  The
+usual way of stating this fact is that the more specialized the
+reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing and
+perfecting it transferable to other modes of behavior.  According
+to the orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in studying
+his spelling lesson acquires, besides ability to spell those
+particular words, an increase of power of observation, attention,
+and recollection which may be employed whenever these powers are
+needed.  As matter of fact, the more he confines himself to
+noticing and fixating the forms of words, irrespective of
+connection with other things (such as the meaning of the words,
+the context in which they are habitually used, the derivation and
+classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely is he to
+acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the mere
+noting of verbal visual forms.  He may not even be increasing his
+ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to
+say nothing of ability to observe in general.  He is merely
+selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and
+the motor reactions of oral or written reproduction.  The scope
+of coordination (to use our prior terminology) is extremely
+limited.  The connections which are employed in other
+observations and recollections (or reproductions) are
+deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon
+forms of letters and words.  Having been excluded, they cannot be
+restored when needed.  The ability secured to observe and to
+recall verbal forms is not available for perceiving and recalling
+other things.  In the ordinary phraseology, it is not
+transferable.  But the wider the context--that is to say, the
+more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated--the more the
+ability acquired is available for the effective performance of
+other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any
+"transfer," but because the wide range of factors employed in the
+specific act is equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a
+flexible, instead of to a narrow and rigid, coordination.
+(4) Going to the root of the matter, the fundamental fallacy of
+the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its separation of
+activities and capacities from subject matter.  There is no such
+thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there
+is only the ability to see or hear or remember something.  To
+talk about training a power, mental or physical, in general,
+apart from the subject matter involved in its exercise, is
+nonsense.  Exercise may react upon circulation, breathing, and
+nutrition so as to develop vigor or strength, but this reservoir
+is available for specific ends only by use in connection with the
+material means which accomplish them.  Vigor will enable a man to
+play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he would if he
+were weak.  But only by employing ball and racket, ball and club,
+sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any
+one of them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another
+only so far as it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular
+coordinations or as the same kind of coordination is involved in
+all of them.  Moreover, the difference between the training of
+ability to spell which comes from taking visual forms in a narrow
+context and one which takes them in connection with the
+activities required to grasp meaning, such as context,
+affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the difference
+between exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to
+"develop" certain muscles, and a game or sport.  The former is
+uniform and mechanical; it is rigidly specialized.  The latter is
+varied from moment to moment; no two acts are quite alike; novel
+emergencies have to be met; the coordinations forming have to be
+kept flexible and elastic.  Consequently, the training is much
+more "general"; that is to say, it covers a wider territory and
+includes more factors.  Exactly the same thing holds of special
+and general education of the mind.
+
+A monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill
+in one special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it
+bookkeeping or calculations in logarithms or experiments in
+hydrocarbons.  One may be an authority in a particular field and
+yet of more than usually poor judgment in matters not closely
+allied, unless the training in the special field has been of a
+kind to ramify into the subject matter of the other fields.
+(5) Consequently, such powers as observation, recollection,
+judgment, esthetic taste, represent organized results of the
+occupation of native active tendencies with certain subject
+matters.  A man does not observe closely and fully by pressing a
+button for the observing faculty to get to work (in other words
+by "willing" to observe); but if he has something to do which can
+be accomplished successfully only through intensive and extensive
+use of eye and hand, he naturally observes.  Observation is an
+outcome, a consequence, of the interaction of sense organ and
+subject matter.  It will vary, accordingly, with the subject
+matter employed.
+
+It is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development
+of faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first
+determined what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to
+become expert in observing and recalling and for what purpose.
+And it is only repeating in another form what has already been
+said, to declare that the criterion here must be social.  We want
+the person to note and recall and judge those things which make
+him an effective competent member of the group in which he is
+associated with others.  Otherwise we might as well set the pupil
+to observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to
+memorizing meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue--which
+is about what we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of
+formal discipline.  If the observing habits of a botanist or
+chemist or engineer are better habits than those which are thus
+formed, it is because they deal with subject matter which is more
+significant in life.  In concluding this portion of the
+discussion, we note that the distinction between special and
+general education has nothing to do with the transferability of
+function or power.  In the literal sense, any transfer is
+miraculous and impossible.  But some activities are broad; they
+involve a coordination of many factors.  Their development
+demands continuous alternation and readjustment.  As conditions
+change, certain factors are subordinated, and others which had
+been of minor importance come to the front.  There is constant
+redistribution of the focus of the action, as is seen in the
+illustration of a game as over against pulling a fixed weight by
+a series of uniform motions.  Thus there is practice in prompt
+making of new combinations with the focus of activity shifted to
+meet change in subject matter.  Wherever an activity is broad in
+scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of
+sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to
+change direction in its progressive development, general
+education is bound to result.  For this is what "general" means;
+broad and flexible.  In practice, education meets these
+conditions, and hence is general, in the degree in which it takes
+account of social relationships.  A person may become expert in
+technical philosophy, or philology, or mathematics or engineering
+or financiering, and be inept and ill-advised in his action and
+judgment outside of his specialty.  If however his concern with
+these technical subject matters has been connected with human
+activities having social breadth, the range of active responses
+called into play and flexibly integrated is much wider.
+Isolation of subject matter from a social context is the chief
+obstruction in current practice to securing a general training of
+mind.  Literature, art, religion, when thus dissociated, are just
+as narrowing as the technical things which the professional
+upholders of general education strenuously oppose.
+
+Summary.  The conception that the result of the educative process
+is capacity for further education stands in contrast with some
+other ideas which have profoundly influenced practice.  The first
+contrasting conception considered is that of preparing or getting
+ready for some future duty or privilege.  Specific evil effects
+were pointed out which result from the fact that this aim diverts
+attention of both teacher and taught from the only point to which
+it may be fruitfully directed -- namely, taking advantage of the
+needs and possibilities of the immediate present.  Consequently
+it defeats its own professed purpose.  The notion that education
+is an unfolding from within appears to have more likeness to the
+conception of growth which has been set forth.  But as worked out
+in the theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves ignoring the
+interaction of present organic tendencies with the present
+environment, just as much as the notion of preparation.  Some
+implicit whole is regarded as given ready-made and the
+significance of growth is merely transitory; it is not an end in
+itself, but simply a means of making explicit what is already
+implicit.  Since that which is not explicit cannot be made
+definite use of, something has to be found to represent it.
+According to Froebel, the mystic symbolic value of certain
+objects and acts (largely mathematical) stand for the Absolute
+Whole which is in process of unfolding.  According to Hegel,
+existing institutions are its effective actual representatives.
+Emphasis upon symbols and institutions tends to divert perception
+from the direct growth of experience in richness of meaning.
+Another influential but defective theory is that which conceives
+that mind has, at birth, certain mental faculties or powers, such
+as perceiving, remembering, willing, judging, generalizing,
+attending, etc., and that education is the training of these
+faculties through repeated exercise.  This theory treats subject
+matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its value
+residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of the
+general powers.  Criticism was directed upon this separation of
+the alleged powers from one another and from the material upon
+which they act.  The outcome of the theory in practice was shown
+to be an undue emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized
+modes of skill at the expense of initiative, inventiveness, and
+readaptability -- qualities which depend upon the broad and
+consecutive interaction of specific activities with one another.
+1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is so great, there are
+so many paths of construction, that every stimulus brings about
+some change in all of the organs of response.  We are accustomed
+however to ignore most of these modifications of the total
+organic activity, concentrating upon that one which is most
+specifically adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the moment.
+2 This statement should be compared with what was said earlier
+about the sequential ordering of responses (p.  25).  It is
+merely a more explicit statement of the way in which that
+consecutive arrangement occurs.
+
+
+Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
+
+1.  Education as Formation.  We now come to a type of theory
+which denies the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique
+role of subject matter in the development of mental and
+moral disposition.  According to it, education is neither a
+process of unfolding from within nor is it a training of
+faculties resident in mind itself.  It is rather the formation of
+mind by setting up certain associations or connections of content
+by means of a subject matter presented from without.  Education
+proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a
+building into the mind from without.  That education is formative
+of mind is not questioned; it is the conception already
+propounded.  But formation here has a technical meaning dependent
+upon the idea of something operating from without.  Herbart is
+the best historical representative of this type of theory.  He
+denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties.  The mind is
+simply endowed with the power of producing various qualities in
+reaction to the various realities which act upon it.  These
+qualitatively different reactions are called presentations
+(Vorstellungen).  Every presentation once called into being
+persists; it may be driven below the "threshold" of consciousness
+by new and stronger presentations, produced by the reaction of
+the soul to new material, but its activity continues by its own
+inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness.  What are
+termed faculties -- attention, memory, thinking, perception, even
+the sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and
+complications, formed by the interaction of these submerged
+presentations with one another and with new presentations.
+Perception, for example, is the complication of presentations
+which result from the rise of old presentations to greet and
+combine with new ones; memory is the evoking of an old
+presentation above the threshold of consciousness by getting
+entangled with another presentation, etc.  Pleasure is the result
+of reinforcement among the independent activities of
+presentations; pain of their pulling different ways, etc.
+
+The concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the
+various arrangements formed by the various presentations in their
+different qualities.  The "furniture" of the mind is the mind.
+Mind is wholly a matter of "contents." The educational
+implications of this doctrine are threefold.
+
+(1) This or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects
+which evoke this or that kind of reaction and which produce this
+or that arrangement among the reactions called out.  The
+formation of mind is wholly a matter of the presentation of the
+proper educational materials.
+
+(2) Since the earlier presentations constitute the "apperceiving
+organs" which control the assimilation of new presentations,
+their character is all important.  The effect of new
+presentations is to reinforce groupings previously formed.  The
+business of the educator is, first, to select the proper material
+in order to fix the nature of the original reactions, and,
+secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations on
+the basis of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions.
+The control is from behind, from the past, instead of, as in the
+unfolding conception, in the ultimate goal.
+
+(3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid
+down.  Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the
+central thing, but since knowing consists in the way in which
+this interacts with the contents already submerged below
+consciousness, the first thing is the step of "preparation," --
+that is, calling into special activity and getting above the
+floor of consciousness those older presentations which are to
+assimilate the new one.  Then after the presentation, follow the
+processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the
+application of the newly formed content to the performance of
+some task.  Everything must go through this course; consequently
+there is a perfectly uniform method in instruction in all
+subjects for all pupils of all ages.
+
+Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of
+the region of routine and accident.  He brought it into the
+sphere of conscious method; it became a conscious business with a
+definite aim and procedure, instead of being a compound of casual
+inspiration and subservience to tradition.  Moreover, everything
+in teaching and discipline could be specified, instead of our
+having to be content with vague and more or less mystic
+generalities about ultimate ideals and speculative spiritual
+symbols.  He abolished the notion of ready-made faculties, which
+might be trained by exercise upon any sort of material, and made
+attention to concrete subject matter, to the content,
+all-important.  Herbart undoubtedly has had a greater influence
+in bringing to the front questions connected with the material of
+study than any other educational philosopher.  He stated problems
+of method from the standpoint of their connection with subject
+matter: method having to do with the manner and sequence of
+presenting new subject matter to insure its proper interaction
+with old.
+
+The fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring
+the existence in a living being of active and specific functions
+which are developed in the redirection and combination which
+occur as they are occupied with their environment.  The theory
+represents the Schoolmaster come to his own.  This fact expresses
+at once its strength and its weakness.  The conception that the
+mind consists of what has been taught, and that the importance of
+what has been taught consists in its availability for further
+teaching, reflects the pedagogue's view of life.  The philosophy
+is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in instructing pupils;
+it is almost silent regarding his privilege of learning.  It
+emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment upon the
+mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves a
+personal sharing in common experiences.  It exaggerates beyond
+reason the possibilities of consciously formulated and used
+methods, and underestimates the role of vital, unconscious,
+attitudes.  It insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly
+over the operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable.  It
+takes, in brief, everything educational into account save its
+essence, -- vital energy seeking opportunity for effective
+exercise.  All education forms character, mental and moral, but
+formation consists in the selection and coordination of native
+activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the
+social environment.  Moreover, the formation is not only a
+formation of native activities, but it takes place through them.
+It is a process of reconstruction, reorganization.
+
+2.  Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection.  A peculiar
+combination of the ideas of development and formation from
+without has given rise to the recapitulation theory of education,
+biological and cultural.  The individual develops, but his proper
+development consists in repeating in orderly stages the past
+evolution of animal life and human history.  The former
+recapitulation occurs physiologically; the latter should be made
+to occur by means of education.  The alleged biological truth
+that the individual in his growth from the simple embryo to
+maturity repeats the history of the evolution of animal life in
+the progress of forms from the simplest to the most complex (or
+expressed technically, that ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis)
+does not concern us, save as it is supposed to afford scientific
+foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past.  Cultural
+recapitulation says, first, that children at a certain age are in
+the mental and moral condition of savagery; their instincts are
+vagrant and predatory because their ancestors at one time lived
+such a life.  Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper
+subject matter of their education at this time is the
+material -- especially the literary material of myths, folk-tale,
+and song -- produced by humanity in the analogous stage.  Then
+the child passes on to something corresponding, say, to the
+pastoral stage, and so on till at the time when he is ready to
+take part in contemporary life, he arrives at the present epoch
+of culture.
+
+In this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a
+small school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part),
+has had little currency.  But the idea which underlies it is
+that education is essentially retrospective; that it looks
+primarily to the past and especially to the literary products of
+the past, and that mind is adequately formed in the degree in
+which it is patterned upon the spiritual heritage of the past.
+This idea has had such immense influence upon higher instruction
+especially, that it is worth examination in its extreme
+formulation.
+
+In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious.
+Embyronic growth of the human infant preserves, without doubt,
+some of the traits of lower forms of life.  But in no respect is
+it a strict traversing of past stages.  If there were any strict
+"law" of repetition, evolutionary development would clearly not
+have taken place.  Each new generation would simply have repeated
+its predecessors' existence.  Development, in short, has taken
+place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in the prior
+scheme of growth.  And this suggests that the aim of education is
+to facilitate such short-circuited growth.  The great advantage
+of immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to
+emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown
+past.  The business of education is rather to liberate the young
+from reviving and retraversing the past than to lead them to a
+recapitulation of it.  The social environment of the young is
+constituted by the presence and action of the habits of thinking
+and feeling of civilized men.  To ignore the directive influence
+of this present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate
+the educational function.  A biologist has said: "The history of
+development in different animals .  .  .  offers to us .  .  .  a
+series of ingenious, determined, varied but more or less
+unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of
+recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral method a more
+direct method." Surely it would be foolish if education did not
+deliberately attempt to facilitate similar efforts in conscious
+experience so that they become increasingly successful.
+
+The two factors of truth in the conception may easily be
+disentangled from association with the false context which
+perverts them.  On the biological side we have simply the fact
+that any infant starts with precisely the assortment of impulsive
+activities with which he does start, they being blind, and many
+of them conflicting with one another, casual, sporadic, and
+unadapted to their immediate environment.  The other point is
+that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of past
+history so far as they are of help for the future.  Since they
+represent the results of prior experience, their value for future
+experience may, of course, be indefinitely great.  Literatures
+produced in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and
+use of them, a part of the present environment of individuals;
+but there is an enormous difference between availing ourselves of
+them as present resources and taking them as standards and
+patterns in their retrospective character.
+
+(1) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through
+misuse of the idea of heredity.  It is assumed that heredity
+means that past life has somehow predetermined the main traits of
+an individual, and that they are so fixed that little serious
+change can be introduced into them.  Thus taken, the influence of
+heredity is opposed to that of the environment, and the efficacy
+of the latter belittled.  But for educational purposes heredity
+means neither more nor less than the original endowment of an
+individual.  Education must take the being as he is; that a
+particular individual has just such and such an equipment of
+native activities is a basic fact.  That they were produced in
+such and such a way, or that they are derived from one's
+ancestry, is not especially important for the educator, however
+it may be with the biologist, as compared with the fact that they
+now exist.  Suppose one had to advise or direct a person
+regarding his inheritance of property.  The fallacy of assuming
+that the fact it is an inheritance, predetermines its future use,
+is obvious.  The advisor is concerned with making the best use of
+what is there -- putting it at work under the most favorable
+conditions.  Obviously he cannot utilize what is not there;
+neither can the educator.  In this sense, heredity is a limit of
+education.  Recognition of this fact prevents the waste of energy
+and the irritation that ensue from the too prevalent habit of
+trying to make by instruction something out of an individual
+which he is not naturally fitted to become.  But the doctrine
+does not determine what use shall be made of the capacities which
+exist.  And, except in the case of the imbecile, these original
+capacities are much more varied and potential, even in the case
+of the more stupid, than we as yet know properly how to utilize.
+Consequently, while a careful study of the native aptitudes and
+deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary necessity,
+the subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment
+which will adequately function whatever activities are present.
+The relation of heredity and environment is well expressed in the
+case of language.  If a being had no vocal organs from which
+issue articulate sounds, if he had no auditory or other sense-
+receptors and no connections between the two sets of apparatus,
+it would be a sheer waste of time to try to teach him to
+converse.  He is born short in that respect, and education must
+accept the limitation.  But if he has this native equipment, its
+possession in no way guarantees that he will ever talk any
+language or what language he will talk.  The environment in which
+his activities occur and by which they are carried into execution
+settles these things.  If he lived in a dumb unsocial environment
+where men refused to talk to one another and used only that
+minimum of gestures without which they could not get along, vocal
+language would be as unachieved by him as if he had no vocal
+organs.  If the sounds which he makes occur in a medium of
+persons speaking the Chinese language, the activities which make
+like sounds will be selected and coordinated.  This illustration
+may be applied to the entire range of the educability of any
+individual.  It places the heritage from the past in its right
+connection with the demands and opportunities of the present.
+
+(2) The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is
+found in the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or
+more specifically in the particular literatures which were
+produced in the culture epoch which is supposed to correspond
+with the stage of development of those taught) affords another
+instance of that divorce between the process and product of
+growth which has been criticized.  To keep the process alive, to
+keep it alive in ways which make it easier to keep it alive in
+the future, is the function of educational subject matter.  But
+an individual can live only in the present.  The present is not
+just something which comes after the past; much less something
+produced by it.  It is what life is in leaving the past behind
+it.  The study of past products will not help us understand the
+present, because the present is not due to the products, but to
+the life of which they were the products.  A knowledge of the
+past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters
+into the present, but not otherwise.  And the mistake of making
+the records and remains of the past the main material of
+education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and
+past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the
+present a more or less futile imitation of the past.  Under such
+circumstances, culture becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge
+and an asylum.  Men escape from the crudities of the present to
+live in its imagined refinements, instead of using what the past
+offers as an agency for ripening these crudities.  The present,
+in short, generates the problems which lead us to search the past
+for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when
+we search.  The past is the past precisely because it does not
+include what is characteristic in the present.  The moving
+present includes the past on condition that it uses the past to
+direct its own movement.  The past is a great resource for the
+imagination; it adds a new dimension to life, but OD condition
+that it be seen as the past of the present, and not as another
+and disconnected world.  The principle which makes little of the
+present act of living and operation of growing, the only thing
+always present, naturally looks to the past because the future
+goal which it sets up is remote and empty.  But having turned its
+back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it laden
+with the spoils of the past.  A mind that is adequately sensitive
+to the needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the
+liveliest of motives for interest in the background of the
+present, and will never have to hunt for a way back because it
+will never have lost connection.
+
+3.  Education as Reconstruction.  In its contrast with the ideas
+both of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the
+formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the
+cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the
+conception that education is a constant reorganizing or
+reconstructing of experience.  It has all the time an immediate
+end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that
+end -- the direct transformation of the quality of experience.
+Infancy, youth, adult life, -- all stand on the same educative
+level in the sense that what is really learned at any and every
+stage of experience constitutes the value of that experience, and
+in the sense that it is the chief business of life at every point
+to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of its own
+perceptible meaning.
+
+We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
+reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the
+meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the
+course of subsequent experience.  (1) The increment of meaning
+corresponds to the increased perception of the connections and
+continuities of the activities in which we are engaged.  The
+activity begins in an impulsive form; that is, it is blind.  It
+does not know what it is about; that is to say, what are its
+interactions with other activities.  An activity which brings
+education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of the
+connections which had been imperceptible.  To recur to our simple
+example, a child who reaches for a bright light gets burned.
+Henceforth he knows that a certain act of touching in connection
+with a certain act of vision (and vice-versa) means heat and
+pain; or, a certain light means a source of heat.  The acts by
+which a scientific man in his laboratory learns more about flame
+differ no whit in principle.  By doing certain things, he makes
+perceptible certain connections of heat with other things, which
+had been previously ignored.  Thus his acts in relation to these
+things get more meaning; he knows better what he is doing or "is
+about" when he has to do with them; he can intend consequences
+instead of just letting them happen -- all synonymous ways of
+saying the same thing.  At the same stroke, the flame has gained
+in meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation, about
+light and temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its
+intellectual content.
+
+(2) The other side of an educative experience is an added power
+of subsequent direction or control.  To say that one knows what
+he is about, or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of
+course, that he can better anticipate what is going to happen;
+that he can, therefore, get ready or prepare in advance so as to
+secure beneficial consequences and avert undesirable ones.  A
+genuinely educative experience, then, one in which instruction is
+conveyed and ability increased, is contradistinguished from a
+routine activity on one hand, and a capricious activity on the
+other.  (a) In the latter one "does not care what happens"; one
+just lets himself go and avoids connecting the consequences of
+one's act (the evidences of its connections with other things)
+with the act.  It is customary to frown upon such aimless random
+activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or
+lawlessness.  But there is a tendency to seek the cause of such
+aimless activities in the youth's own disposition, isolated from
+everything else.  But in fact such activity is explosive, and due
+to maladjustment with surroundings.  Individuals act capriciously
+whenever they act under external dictation, or from being told,
+without having a purpose of their own or perceiving the bearing
+of the deed upon other acts.  One may learn by doing something
+which he does not understand; even in the most intelligent
+action, we do much which we do not mean, because the largest
+portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend are
+not perceived or anticipated.  But we learn only because after
+the act is performed we note results which we had not noted
+before.  But much work in school consists in setting up rules by
+which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils
+have acted, they are not led to see the connection between the
+result -- say the answer -- and the method pursued.  So far as
+they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of
+miracle.  Such action is essentially capricious, and leads to
+capricious habits.  (b) Routine action, action which is
+automatic, may increase skill to do a particular thing.  In so
+far, it might be said to have an educative effect.  But it does
+not lead to new perceptions of bearings and connections; it
+limits rather than widens the meaning-horizon.  And since the
+environment changes and our way of acting has to be modified in
+order successfully to keep a balanced connection with things, an
+isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at some
+critical moment.  The vaunted "skill" turns out gross ineptitude.
+
+The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
+reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have
+been criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it
+identifies the end (the result) and the process.  This is
+verbally self-contradictory, but only verbally.  It means that
+experience as an active process occupies time and that its later
+period completes its earlier portion; it brings to light
+connections involved, but hitherto unperceived.  The later
+outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the
+experience as a whole establishes a bent or disposition toward
+the things possessing this meaning.  Every such continuous
+experience or activity is educative, and all education resides in
+having such experiences.
+
+It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample
+attention later) that the reconstruction of experience may be
+social as well as personal.  For purposes of simplification we
+have spoken in the earlier chapters somewhat as if the education
+of the immature which fills them with the spirit of the social
+group to which they belong, were a sort of catching up of the
+child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult group.  In
+static societies, societies which make the maintenance of
+established custom their measure of value, this conception
+applies in the main.  But not in progressive communities.  They
+endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of
+reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and
+thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own.
+Men have long had some intimation of the extent to which
+education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social
+evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce
+these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be
+made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men.  But we
+are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of
+education as a constructive agency of improving society, from
+realizing that it represents not only a development of children
+and youth but also of the future society of which they will be
+the constituents.
+
+Summary.  Education may be conceived either retrospectively or
+prospectively.  That is to say, it may be treated as process of
+accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the
+past for a resource in a developing future.  The former finds its
+standards and patterns in what has gone before.  The mind may be
+regarded as a group of contents resulting from having certain
+things presented.  In this case, the earlier presentations
+constitute the material to which the later are to be assimilated.
+Emphasis upon the value of the early experiences of immature
+beings is most important, especially because of the tendency to
+regard them as of little account.  But these experiences do not
+consist of externally presented material, but of interaction of
+native activities with the environment which progressively
+modifies both the activities and the environment.  The defect of
+the Herbartian theory of formation through presentations
+consists in slighting this constant interaction and change.
+The same principle of criticism applies to theories which find
+the primary subject matter of study in the cultural products --
+especially the literary products -- of man's history.  Isolated
+from their connection with the present environment in which
+individuals have to act, they become a kind of rival and
+distracting environment.  Their value lies in their use to
+increase the meaning of the things with which we have actively to
+do at the present time.  The idea of education advanced in these
+chapters is formally summed up in the idea of continuous
+reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off from
+education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as
+external formation, and as recapitulation of the past.
+
+
+Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
+
+For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been
+concerned with education as it may exist in any social group.  We
+have now to make explicit the differences in the spirit,
+material, and method of education as it operates in different
+types of community life.  To say that education is a social
+function, securing direction and development in the immature
+through their participation in the life of the group to which
+they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with
+the quality of life which prevails in a group.  Particularly is
+it true that a society which not only changes but-which has the
+ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different
+standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at
+the perpetuation of its own customs.  To make the general ideas
+set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is,
+therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature
+of present social life.
+
+1.  The Implications of Human Association.  Society is one word,
+but many things.  Men associate together in all kinds of ways and
+for all kinds of purposes.  One man is concerned in a multitude
+of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite
+different.  It often seems as if they had nothing in common
+except that they are modes of associated life.  Within every
+larger social organization there are numerous minor groups: not
+only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific,
+religious, associations.  There are political parties with
+differing aims, social sets, cliques, gangs, corporations,
+partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties of blood, and
+so on in endless variety.  In many modern states and in some
+ancient, there is great diversity of populations, of varying
+languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions.  From this
+standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities,
+for example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies,
+rather than an inclusive and permeating community of action and
+thought.  (See ante, p.  20.)
+
+The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous.  They have both
+a eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a
+meaning de jure and a meaning de facto.  In social philosophy,
+the former connotation is almost always uppermost.  Society is
+conceived as one by its very nature.  The qualities which
+accompany this unity, praiseworthy community of purpose and
+welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of sympathy, are
+emphasized.  But when we look at the facts which the term denotes
+instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation,
+we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad.
+Men banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business
+aggregations that prey upon the public while serving it,
+political machines held together by the interest of plunder, are
+included.  If it is said that such organizations are not
+societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the
+notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of
+society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having no
+reference to facts; and in part, that each of these
+organizations, no matter how opposed to the interests of other
+groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of "Society"
+which hold it together.  There is honor among thieves, and a band
+of robbers has a common interest as respects its members.  Gangs
+are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense
+loyalty to their own codes.  Family life may be marked by
+exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and
+yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within.  Any education
+given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality
+and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims
+of the group.  Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the
+worth of any given mode of social life.  In seeking this measure,
+we have to avoid two extremes.  We cannot set up, out of our
+heads, something we regard as an ideal society.  We must base our
+conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have
+any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one.  But, as we
+have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which
+are actually found.  The problem is to extract the desirable
+traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and
+employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest
+improvement.  Now in any social group whatever, even in a gang of
+thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a
+certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with
+other groups.  From these two traits we derive our standard.  How
+numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously
+shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of
+association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal
+band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members
+together are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest
+in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate the
+group from other groups with respect to give and take of the
+values of life.  Hence, the education such a society gives is
+partial and distorted.  If we take, on the other hand, the kind
+of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there
+are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all
+participate and that the progress of one member has worth for the
+experience of other members -- it is readily communicable -- and
+that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately
+into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all
+the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar groups,
+and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in
+return receives support from it.  In short, there are many
+interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are
+varied and free points of contact with other modes of
+association.
+
+I.  Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a
+despotically governed state.  It is not true there is no common
+interest in such an organization between governed and governors.
+The authorities in command must make some appeal to the native
+activities of the subjects, must call some of their powers into
+play.  Talleyrand said that a government could do everything with
+bayonets except sit on them.  This cynical declaration is at
+least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of
+coercive force.  It may be said, however, that the activities
+appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading -- that such a
+government calls into functioning activity simply capacity for
+fear.  In a way, this statement is true.  But it overlooks the
+fact that fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience.
+Caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future
+events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are
+as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is
+cowardice and abject submission.  The real difficulty is that the
+appeal to fear is isolated.  In evoking dread and hope of
+specific tangible reward -- say comfort and ease -- many other
+capacities are left untouched.  Or rather, they are affected, but
+in such a way as to pervert them.  Instead of operating on their
+own account they are reduced to mere servants of attaining
+pleasure and avoiding pain.
+
+This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of
+common interests; there is no free play back and forth among the
+members of the social group.  Stimulation and response are
+exceedingly one-sided.  In order to have a large number of values
+in common, all the members of the group must have an equable
+opportunity to receive and to take from others.  There must be a
+large variety of shared undertakings and experiences.  Otherwise,
+the influences which educate some into masters, educate others
+into slaves.  And the experience of each party loses in meaning,
+when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience is
+arrested.  A separation into a privileged and a subject-class
+prevents social endosmosis.  The evils thereby affecting the
+superior class are less material and less perceptible, but
+equally real.  Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned
+back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and
+artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge
+overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.
+
+Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a
+variety of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation
+unbalanced.  Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty
+means challenge to thought.  The more activity is restricted to a
+few definite lines -- as it is when there are rigid class lines
+preventing adequate interplay of experiences -- the more action
+tends to become routine on the part of the class at a
+disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part
+of the class having the materially fortunate position.  Plato
+defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes
+which control his conduct.  This condition obtains even where
+there is no slavery in the legal sense.  It is found wherever men
+are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose
+service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
+Much is said about scientific management of work.  It is a narrow
+view which restricts the science which secures efficiency of
+operation to movements of the muscles.  The chief opportunity for
+science is the discovery of the relations of a man to his
+work--including his relations to others who take part -- which
+will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is doing.
+Efficiency in production often demands division of labor.  But it
+is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the
+technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in
+what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation
+furnished by such perceptions.  The tendency to reduce such
+things as efficiency of activity and scientific management to
+purely technical externals is evidence of the one-sided
+stimulation of thought given to those in control of industry --
+those who supply its aims.  Because of their lack of all-round
+and well-balanced social interest, there is not sufficient
+stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in
+industry.  Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
+technical production and marketing of goods.  No doubt, a very
+acute and intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be
+developed, but the failure to take into account the significant
+social factors means none the less an absence of mind, and a
+corresponding distortion of emotional life.  II.  This
+illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations
+lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point.
+The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its
+antisocial spirit into relief.  But this same spirit is found
+wherever one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out
+from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing
+purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of
+reorganization and progress through wider relationships.  It
+marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which
+seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with
+a larger life; schools when separated from the interest of home
+and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and
+unlearned.  The essential point is that isolation makes for
+rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and
+selfish ideals within the group.  That savage tribes regard
+aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental.  It springs
+from the fact that they have identified their experience with
+rigid adherence to their past customs.  On such a basis it is
+wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact
+might dissolve custom.  It would certainly occasion
+reconstruction.  It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding
+mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the
+physical environment.  But the principle applies even more
+significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it -- the
+sphere of social contacts.  Every expansive era in the history of
+mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have
+tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes
+previously hemmed off from one another.  Even the alleged
+benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
+fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse
+between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one
+another, and thereby to expand their horizons.  Travel, economic
+and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down
+external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and
+more perceptible connection with one another.  It remains for the
+most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance
+of this physical annihilation of space.
+
+2.  The Democratic Ideal.  The two elements in our criterion both
+point to democracy.  The first signifies not only more numerous
+and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater
+reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in
+social control.  The second means not only freer interaction
+between social groups (once isolated so far as intention could
+keep up a separation) but change in social habit -- its
+continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations
+produced by varied intercourse.  And these two traits are
+precisely what characterize the democratically constituted
+society.
+
+Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of
+a form of social life in which interests are mutually
+interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an
+important consideration, makes a democratic community more
+interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate
+and systematic education.  The devotion of democracy to education
+is a familiar fact.  The superficial explanation is that a
+government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful
+unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated.
+Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external
+authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and
+interest; these can be created only by education.  But there is a
+deeper explanation.  A democracy is more than a form of
+government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of
+conjoint communicated experience.  The extension in space of the
+number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each
+has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider
+the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is
+equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race,
+and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full
+import of their activity.  These more numerous and more varied
+points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which
+an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on
+variation in his action.  They secure a liberation of powers
+which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are
+partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness
+shuts out many interests.
+
+The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation
+of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize
+a democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and
+conscious effort.  On the contrary, they were caused by the
+development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel,
+migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the command
+of science over natural energy.  But after greater
+individualization on one hand, and a broader community of
+interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of
+deliberate effort to sustain and extend them.  Obviously a
+society to which stratification into separate classes would be
+fatal, must see to it that intellectual opportunities are
+accessible to all on equable and easy terms.  A society marked
+off into classes need he specially attentive only to the
+education of its ruling elements.  A society which is mobile,
+which is full of channels for the distribution of a change
+occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated
+to personal initiative and adaptability.  Otherwise, they will be
+overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose
+significance or connections they do not perceive.  The result
+will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves
+the results of the blind and externally directed activities of
+others.
+
+3.  The Platonic Educational Philosophy.  Subsequent chapters
+will be devoted to making explicit the implications of the
+democratic ideas in education.  In the remaining portions of this
+chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which have
+been evolved in three epochs when the social import of education
+was especially conspicuous.  The first one to be considered is
+that of Plato.  No one could better express than did he the fact
+that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing
+that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be
+useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he
+belongs); and that it is the business of education to discover
+these aptitudes and progressively to train them for social use.
+Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first
+consciously taught the world.  But conditions which he could not
+intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in their
+application.  He never got any conception of the indefinite
+plurality of activities which may characterize an individual and
+a social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited
+number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements.
+Plato's starting point is that the organization of society
+depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence.  If we
+do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and
+caprice.  Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no
+criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are
+which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be
+ordered.  We shall have no conception of the proper limits and
+distribution of activities -- what he called justice -- as a
+trait of both individual and social organization.  But how is the
+knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved? In
+dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly insuperable
+obstacle that such knowledge is not possible save in a just and
+harmonious social order.  Everywhere else the mind is distracted
+and misled by false valuations and false perspectives.  A
+disorganized and factional society sets up a number of different
+models and standards.  Under such conditions it is impossible for
+the individual to attain consistency of mind.  Only a complete
+whole is fully self-consistent.  A society which rests upon the
+supremacy of some factor over another irrespective of its
+rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads thought
+astray.  It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over
+others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and
+distorted.  Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns
+furnished by institutions, customs, and laws.  Only in a just
+state will these be such as to give the right education; and only
+those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize
+the end, and ordering principle of things.  We seem to be caught
+in a hopeless circle.  However, Plato suggested a way out.  A few
+men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom -- or truth -- may by study
+learn at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence.
+If a powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns,
+then its regulations could be preserved.  An education could be
+given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were
+good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in
+life for which his nature fits him.  Each doing his own part, and
+never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
+maintained.
+
+It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic
+thought a more adequate recognition on one hand of the
+educational significance of social arrangements and, on the
+other, of the dependence of those arrangements upon the means
+used to educate the young.  It would be impossible to find a
+deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and
+developing personal capacities, and training them so that they
+would connect with the activities of others.  Yet the society in
+which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato
+could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he
+clearly saw.
+
+While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual
+in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any
+conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the
+process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of
+individuals.  For him they fall by nature into classes, and into
+a very small number of classes at that.  Consequently the testing
+and sifting function of education only shows to which one of
+three classes an individual belongs.  There being no recognition
+that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be no
+recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
+combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable.
+There were only three types of faculties or powers in the
+individual's constitution.  Hence education would soon reach a
+static limit in each class, for only diversity makes change and
+progress.
+
+In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are
+assigned to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and
+supplies human wants.  Others reveal, upon education, that over
+and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively
+courageous disposition.  They become the citizen-subjects of the
+state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace.
+But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a
+capacity to grasp the universal.  Those who possess this are
+capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time the
+legislators of the state -- for laws are the universals which
+control the particulars of experience.  Thus it is not true that
+in intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole.
+But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of
+every individual, his incommensurability with others, and
+consequently not recognizing that a society might change and yet
+be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net
+effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality.  We
+cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is happy and
+society well organized when each individual engages in those
+activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his
+conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover
+this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective
+use.  But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the
+superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their
+original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has
+taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and
+variable.  It is but the other side of this fact to say that in
+the degree in which society has become democratic, social
+organization means utilization of the specific and variable
+qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.
+Although his educational philosophy was revolutionary, it was
+none the less in bondage to static ideals.  He thought that
+change or alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true
+reality was unchangeable.  Hence while he would radically change
+the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state
+in which change would subsequently have no place.  The final end
+of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not
+even minor details are to be altered.  Though they might not be
+inherently important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds
+of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and
+anarchic.  The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in
+the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in
+education to bring about a better society which should then
+improve education, and so on indefinitely.  Correct education
+could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and
+after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation.
+For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some
+happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to
+coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.
+
+4.  The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century.  In
+the eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very
+different circle of ideas.  "Nature" still means something
+antithetical to existing social organization; Plato exercised a
+great influence upon Rousseau.  But the voice of nature now
+speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for the need of
+free development of individuality in all its variety.  Education
+in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of
+instruction and discipline.  Moreover, the native or original
+endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even
+as antisocial.  Social arrangements were thought of as mere
+external expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might
+secure a greater amount of private happiness for themselves.
+Nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate idea of
+the true significance of the movement.  In reality its chief
+interest was in progress and in social progress.  The seeming
+antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an 
+impetus toward a wider and freer society -- toward cosmopolitanism.
+The positive ideal was humanity.  In membership in humanity, as
+distinct from a state, man's capacities would be liberated; while
+in existing political organizations his powers were hampered and
+distorted to meet the requirements and selfish interests of the
+rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme individualism was
+but the counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite
+perfectibility of man and of a social organization having a scope
+as wide as humanity. The emancipated individual was to become
+the organ and agent of a comprehensive and progressive society.
+
+The heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of
+the social estate in which they found themselves.  They
+attributed these evils to the limitations imposed upon the free
+powers of man.  Such limitation was both distorting and
+corrupting.  Their impassioned devotion to emancipation of life
+from external restrictions which operated to the exclusive
+advantage of the class to whom a past feudal system consigned
+power, found intellectual formulation in a worship of nature.  To
+give "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial, corrupt,
+and inequitable social order by a new and better kingdom of
+humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a
+working power was strengthened by the advances of natural
+science.  Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial restraints
+of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of
+law.  The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of
+natural law, was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force
+balanced with every other.  Natural law would accomplish the same
+result in human relations, if men would only get rid of the
+artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.
+
+Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step
+in insuring this more social society.  It was plainly seen that
+economic and political limitations were ultimately dependent upon
+limitations of thought and feeling.  The first step in freeing
+men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal
+chains of false beliefs and ideals.  What was called social life,
+existing institutions, were too false and corrupt to be intrusted
+with this work.  How could it be expected to undertake it when
+the undertaking meant its own destruction? "Nature" must then be
+the power to which the enterprise was to be left.  Even the
+extreme sensationalistic theory of knowledge which was current
+derived itself from this conception.  To insist that mind is
+originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the
+possibilities of education.  If the mind was a wax tablet to be
+written upon by objects, there were no limits to the possibility
+of education by means of the natural environment.  And since the
+natural world of objects is a scene of harmonious "truth," this
+education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.
+
+5.  Education as National and as Social.  As soon as the first
+enthusiasm for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the
+constructive side became obvious.  Merely to leave everything to
+nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea of education;
+it was to trust to the accidents of circumstance.  Not only was
+some method required but also some positive organ, some
+administrative agency for carrying on the process of instruction.
+The "complete and harmonious development of all powers," having
+as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive
+humanity, required definite organization for its realization.
+Private individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel;
+they could not execute the work.  A Pestalozzi could try
+experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined persons having
+wealth and power to follow his example.  But even Pestalozzi saw
+that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required
+the support of the state.  The realization of the new education
+destined to produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon
+the activities of existing states.  The movement for the
+democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly
+conducted and administered schools.
+
+So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified
+the movement for a state-supported education with the
+nationalistic movement in political life -- a fact of
+incalculable significance for subsequent movements.  Under the
+influence of German thought in particular, education became a
+civic function and the civic function was identified with the
+realization of the ideal of the national state.  The "state" was
+substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to
+nationalism.  To form the citizen, not the "man," became the aim
+of education.  1 The historic situation to which reference is
+made is the after-effects of the Napoleonic conquests, especially
+in Germany.  The German states felt (and subsequent events
+demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that systematic
+attention to education was the best means of recovering and
+maintaining their political integrity and power.  Externally they
+were weak and divided.  Under the leadership of Prussian
+statesmen they made this condition a stimulus to the development
+of an extensive and thoroughly grounded system of public
+education.
+
+This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in
+theory.  The individualistic theory receded into the background.
+The state furnished not only the instrumentalities of public
+education but also its goal.  When the actual practice was such
+that the school system, from the elementary grades through the
+university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen and soldier
+and the future state official and administrator and furnished the
+means for military, industrial, and political defense and
+expansion, it was impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim
+of social efficiency.  And with the immense importance attached
+to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and
+more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to
+interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan
+humanitarianism.  Since the maintenance of a particular national
+sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior
+interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles
+for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was
+understood to imply a like subordination.  The educational
+process was taken to be one of disciplinary training rather than
+of personal development.  Since, however, the ideal of culture as
+complete development of personality persisted, educational
+philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas.  The
+reconciliation took the form of the conception of the "organic"
+character of the state.  The individual in his isolation is
+nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and
+meaning of organized institutions does he attain true
+personality.  What appears to be his subordination to political
+authority and the demand for sacrifice of himself to the commands
+of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective
+reason manifested in the state -- the only way in which he can
+become truly rational.  The notion of development which we have
+seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the
+Hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine
+the two ideas of complete realization of personality and
+thoroughgoing "disciplinary" subordination to existing
+institutions.  The extent of the transformation of educational
+philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation occupied
+by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence, may
+be gathered from Kant, who well expresses the earlier
+individual-cosmopolitan ideal.  In his treatise on Pedagogics,
+consisting of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth
+century, he defines education as the process by which man becomes
+man.  Mankind begins its history submerged in nature -- not as
+Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only
+instinct and appetite.  Nature offers simply the germs which
+education is to develop and perfect.  The peculiarity of truly
+human life is that man has to create himself by his own voluntary
+efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational, and free
+being.  This creative effort is carried on by the educational
+activities of slow generations.  Its acceleration depends upon
+men consciously striving to educate their successors not for the
+existing state of affairs but so as to make possible a future
+better humanity.  But there is the great difficulty.  Each
+generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in
+the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of
+education: the promotion of the best possible realization of
+humanity as humanity.  Parents educate their children so that
+they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of
+their own purposes.
+
+Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve?
+We must depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their
+private capacity.  "All culture begins with private men and
+spreads outward from them.  Simply through the efforts of persons
+of enlarged inclinations, who are capable of grasping the ideal
+of a future better condition, is the gradual approximation of
+human nature to its end possible.  Rulers are simply interested
+in such training as will make their subjects better tools for
+their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of privately
+conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded.  For the rulers'
+interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is
+best for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the
+schools, wish to draw their plans.  We have in this view an
+express statement of the points characteristic of the eighteenth
+century individualistic cosmopolitanism.  The full development of
+private personality is identified with the aims of humanity as a
+whole and with the idea of progress.  In addition we have an
+explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and
+state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas.
+But in less than two decades after this time, Kant's philosophic
+successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief
+function of the state is educational; that in particular the
+regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education
+carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
+individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being,
+enslaved to his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits
+voluntarily to the educative discipline of state institutions and
+laws.  In this spirit, Germany was the first country to undertake
+a public, universal, and compulsory system of education extending
+from the primary school through the university, and to submit to
+jealous state regulation and supervision all private educational
+enterprises.  Two results should stand out from this brief
+historical survey.  The first is that such terms as the
+individual and the social conceptions of education are quite
+meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context.  Plato
+had the ideal of an education which should equate individual
+realization and social coherency and stability.  His situation
+forced his ideal into the notion of a society organized in
+stratified classes, losing the individual in the class.  The
+eighteenth century educational philosophy was highly
+individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a noble
+and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include
+humanity, and providing for the indefinite perfectibility of
+mankind.  The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early
+nineteenth century endeavored again to equate the ideals of a
+free and complete development of cultured personality with social
+discipline and political subordination.  It made the national
+state an intermediary between the realization of private
+personality on one side and of humanity on the other.
+Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating
+principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of
+"harmonious development of all the powers of personality" or in
+the more recent terminology of "social efficiency." All this
+reinforces the statement which opens this chapter: The conception
+of education as a social process and function has no definite
+meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.
+These considerations pave the way for our second conclusion.  One
+of the fundamental problems of education in and for a democratic
+society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider
+social aim.  The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian"
+conception suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite
+organs of execution and agencies of administration.  In Europe,
+in the Continental states particularly, the new idea of the
+importance of education for human welfare and progress was
+captured by national interests and harnessed to do a work whose
+social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive.  The social aim
+of education and its national aim were identified, and the result
+was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.
+
+This confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human
+intercourse.  On the one hand, science, commerce, and art
+transcend national boundaries.  They are largely international in
+quality and method.  They involve interdependencies and
+cooperation among the peoples inhabiting different countries.  At
+the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has never been as
+accentuated in politics as it is at the present time.  Each
+nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient war
+with its neighbors.  Each is supposed to be the supreme judge of
+its own interests, and it is assumed as matter of course that
+each has interests which are exclusively its own.  To question
+this is to question the very idea of national sovereignty which
+is assumed to be basic to political practice and political
+science.  This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the
+wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and
+the narrower sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile
+pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer
+conception of the meaning of "social" as a function and test of
+education than has yet been attained.  Is it possible for an
+educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet
+the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted,
+constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to face
+the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split
+society into classes some of which are made merely tools for the
+higher culture of others.  Externally, the question is concerned
+with the reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with
+superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends,
+irrespective of national political boundaries.  Neither phase of
+the problem can be worked out by merely negative means.  It is
+not enough to see to it that education is not actively used as an
+instrument to make easier the exploitation of one class by
+another.  School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and
+efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the
+effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of
+the nation equality of equipment for their future careers.
+Accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate
+administrative provision of school facilities, and such
+supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take
+advantage of them, but also such modification of traditional
+ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and traditional
+methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth
+under educational influences until they are equipped to be
+masters of their own economic and social careers.  The ideal may
+seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education
+is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and
+more dominates our public system of education.  The same
+principle has application on the side of the considerations which
+concern the relations of one nation to another.  It is not enough
+to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything which would
+stimulate international jealousy and animosity.  The emphasis
+must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative
+human pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations.
+The secondary and provisional character of national sovereignty
+in respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association
+and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be
+instilled as a working disposition of mind.  If these
+applications seem to be remote from a consideration of the
+philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning of
+the idea of education previously developed has not been
+adequately grasped.  This conclusion is bound up with the very
+idea of education as a freeing of individual capacity in a
+progressive growth directed to social aims.  Otherwise a
+democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently
+applied.
+
+Summary.  Since education is a social process, and there are many
+kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and
+construction implies a particular social ideal.  The two points
+selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life
+are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by
+all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it
+interacts with other groups.  An undesirable society, in other
+words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to
+free intercourse and communication of experience.  A society
+which makes provision for participation in its good of all its
+members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of
+its institutions through interaction of the different forms of
+associated life is in so far democratic.  Such a society must
+have a type of education which gives individuals a personal
+interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of
+mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.
+Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered
+from this point of view.  The Platonic was found to have an ideal
+formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised
+in its working out by making a class rather than an individual
+the social unit.  The so-called individualism of the eighteenth-
+century enlightenment was found to involve the notion of a
+society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual
+was to be the organ.  But it lacked any agency for securing the
+development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back
+upon Nature.  The institutional idealistic philosophies of the
+nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the national
+state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the
+social aim to those who were members of the same political unit,
+and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual
+to the institution.  1 There is a much neglected strain in
+Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction.  He opposed
+the existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed
+neither the citizen nor the man.  Under existing conditions, he
+preferred to try for the latter rather than for the former.  But
+there are many sayings of his which point to the formation of the
+citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate that his own
+endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was simply the best makeshift
+the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch.
+
+
+Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
+
+1.  The Nature of an Aim.
+
+The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
+anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
+education in a democratic community.  For it assumed that the aim
+of education is to enable individuals to continue their education
+-- or that the object and reward of learning is continued
+capacity for growth.  Now this idea cannot be applied to all the
+members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is
+mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the
+reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide
+stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests.  And
+this means a democratic society.  In our search for aims in
+education, we are not concerned, therefore, with finding an end
+outside of the educative process to which education is
+subordinate.  Our whole conception forbids.  We are rather
+concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within
+the process in which they operate and when they are set up from
+without.  And the latter state of affairs must obtain when social
+relationships are not equitably balanced.  For in that case, some
+portions of the whole social group will find their aims
+determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise
+from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal
+aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than
+truly their own.
+
+Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it
+falls within an activity, instead of being furnished from
+without.  We approach the definition by a contrast of mere
+results with ends.  Any exhibition of energy has results.  The
+wind blows about the sands of the desert; the position of the
+grains is changed.  Here is a result, an effect, but not an end.
+For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills
+what went before it.  There is mere spatial redistribution.  One
+state of affairs is just as good as any other.  Consequently
+there is no basis upon which to select an earlier state of
+affairs as a beginning, a later as an end, and to consider what
+intervenes as a process of transformation and realization.
+
+Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the
+changes in the sands when the wind blows them about.  The results
+of the bees' actions may be called ends not because they are
+designed or consciously intended, but because they are true
+terminations or completions of what has preceded.  When the bees
+gather pollen and make wax and build cells, each step prepares
+the way for the next.  When cells are built, the queen lays eggs
+in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood them
+and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them.  When they
+are hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of
+themselves.  Now we are so familiar with such facts, that we are
+apt to dismiss them on the ground that life and instinct are a
+kind of miraculous thing anyway.  Thus we fail to note what the
+essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the
+significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the
+way each prior event leads into its successor while the successor
+takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage,
+until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and
+finishes off the process.  Since aims relate always to results,
+the first thing to look to when it is a question of aims, is
+whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity.  Or is
+it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and
+then another? To talk about an educational aim when approximately
+each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the only
+order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the
+assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is
+to talk nonsense.  It is equally fatal to an aim to permit
+capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous
+self- expression.  An aim implies an orderly and ordered
+activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive
+completing of a process.  Given an activity having a time span
+and cumulative growth within the time succession, an aim means
+foresight in advance of the end or possible termination.  If bees
+anticipated the consequences of their activity, if they perceived
+their end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary
+element in an aim.  Hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of
+education--or any other undertaking--where conditions do not
+permit of foresight of results, and do not stimulate a person to
+look ahead to see what the outcome of a given activity is to be.
+In the next place the aim as a foreseen end gives direction to
+the activity; it is not an idle view of a mere spectator, but
+influences the steps taken to reach the end.  The foresight
+functions in three ways.  In the first place, it involves careful
+observation of the given conditions to see what are the means
+available for reaching the end, and to discover the hindrances in
+the way.  In the second place, it suggests the proper order or
+sequence in the use of means.  It facilitates an economical
+selection and arrangement.  In the third place, it makes choice
+of alternatives possible.  If we can predict the outcome of
+acting this way or that, we can then compare the value of the two
+courses of action; we can pass judgment upon their relative
+desirability.  If we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes
+and that they are likely to carry disease, we can, disliking that
+anticipated result, take steps to avert it.  Since we do not
+anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons
+concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which
+produces the result.  We intervene to bring about this result or
+that.
+
+Of course these three points are closely connected with one
+another.  We can definitely foresee results only as we make
+careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance of the
+outcome supplies the motive for observations.  The more adequate
+our observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and
+obstructions that presents itself, and the more numerous are the
+alternatives between which choice may be made.  In turn, the more
+numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or
+alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity
+possess, and the more flexibly controllable is it.  Where only a
+single outcome has been thought of, the mind has nothing else to
+think of; the meaning attaching to the act is limited.  One only
+steams ahead toward the mark.  Sometimes such a narrow course may
+be effective.  But if unexpected difficulties offer themselves,
+one has not as many resources at command as if he had chosen the
+same line of action after a broader survey of the possibilities
+of the field.  He cannot make needed readjustments readily.
+
+The net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with
+acting intelligently.  To foresee a terminus of an act is to have
+a basis upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects
+and our own capacities.  To do these things means to have a mind
+-- for mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity
+controlled by perception of facts and their relationships to one
+another.  To have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future
+possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment; it is
+to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and
+the obstructions in the way, -- or, if it is really a mind to do
+the thing and not a vague aspiration -- it is to have a plan
+which takes account of resources and difficulties.  Mind is
+capacity to refer present conditions to future results, and
+future consequences to present conditions.  And these traits are
+just what is meant by having an aim or a purpose.  A man is
+stupid or blind or unintelligent -- lacking in mind -- just in
+the degree in which in any activity he does not know what he is
+about, namely, the probable consequences of his acts.  A man is
+imperfectly intelligent when he contents himself with looser
+guesses about the outcome than is needful, just taking a chance
+with his luck, or when he forms plans apart from study of the
+actual conditions, including his own capacities.  Such relative
+absence of mind means to make our feelings the measure of what is
+to happen.  To be intelligent we must "stop, look, listen" in
+making the plan of an activity.
+
+To identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough
+to show its value -- its function in experience.  We are only too
+given to making an entity out of the abstract noun
+"consciousness." We forget that it comes from the adjective
+"conscious." To be conscious is to be aware of what we are about;
+conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning traits of
+activity.  Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes
+idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon
+it by physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of
+an activity, for the fact that it is directed by an aim.  Put the
+other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like
+an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to
+perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent.
+
+2.  The Criteria of Good Aims.  We may apply the results of our
+discussion to a consideration of the criteria involved in a
+correct establishing of aims.  (1) The aim set up must be an
+outgrowth of existing conditions.  It must be based upon a
+consideration of what is already going on; upon the resources and
+difficulties of the situation.  Theories about the proper end of
+our activities -- educational and moral theories -- often violate
+this principle.  They assume ends lying outside our activities;
+ends foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which
+issue from some outside source.  Then the problem is to bring our
+activities to bear upon the realization of these externally
+supplied ends.  They are something for which we ought to act.  In
+any case such "aims" limit intelligence; they are not the
+expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice of the
+better among alternative possibilities.  They limit intelligence
+because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority
+external to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a
+mechanical choice of means.
+
+(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to
+the attempt to realize them.  This impression must now be
+qualified.  The aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative
+sketch.  The act of striving to realize it tests its worth.  If
+it suffices to direct activity successfully, nothing more is
+required, since its whole function is to set a mark in advance;
+and at times a mere hint may suffice.  But usually -- at least in
+complicated situations -- acting upon it brings to light
+conditions which had been overlooked.  This calls for revision of
+the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from.  An
+aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to
+meet circumstances.  An end established externally to the process
+of action is always rigid.  Being inserted or imposed from
+without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the
+concrete conditions of the situation.  What happens in the course
+of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it.  Such an end
+can only be insisted upon.  The failure that results from its
+lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of
+conditions, not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under
+the circumstances.  The value of a legitimate aim, on the
+contrary, lies in the fact that we can use it to change
+conditions.  It is a method for dealing with conditions so as to
+effect desirable alterations in them.  A farmer who should
+passively accept things just as he finds them would make as great
+a mistake as he who framed his plans in complete disregard of
+what soil, climate, etc., permit.  One of the evils of an
+abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very
+inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard
+snatching at immediate conditions.  A good aim surveys the
+present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative
+plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet
+modifies it as conditions develop.  The aim, in short, is
+experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in
+action.
+
+(3) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities.  The
+term end in view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the
+termination or conclusion of some process.  The only way in which
+we can define an activity is by putting before ourselves the
+objects in which it terminates -- as one's aim in shooting is the
+target.  But we must remember that the object is only a mark or
+sign by which the mind specifies the activity one desires to
+carry out.  Strictly speaking, not the target but hitting the
+target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the target,
+but also by the sight on the gun.  The different objects which
+are thought of are means of directing the activity.  Thus one
+aims at, say, a rabbit; what he wants is to shoot straight: a
+certain kind of activity.  Or, if it is the rabbit he wants, it
+is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor in
+activity; he wants to eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence
+of his marksmanship -- he wants to do something with it.  The
+doing with the thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end.
+The object is but a phase of the active end, -- continuing the
+activity successfully.  This is what is meant by the phrase, used
+above, "freeing activity."
+
+In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity
+may go on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed
+from without the activity.  It is always conceived of as fixed;
+it is something to be attained and possessed.  When one has such
+a notion, activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else;
+it is not significant or important on its own account.  As
+compared with the end it is but a necessary evil; something which
+must be gone through before one can reach the object which is
+alone worth while.  In other words, the external idea of the aim
+leads to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows
+up within an activity as plan for its direction is always both
+ends and means, the distinction being only one of convenience.
+Every means is a temporary end until we have attained it.  Every
+end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is
+achieved.  We call it end when it marks off the future direction
+of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off
+the present direction.  Every divorce of end from means
+diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and
+tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if
+he could.  A farmer has to use plants and animals to carry on his
+farming activities.  It certainly makes a great difference to his
+life whether he is fond of them, or whether he regards them
+merely as means which he has to employ to get something else in
+which alone he is interested.  In the former case, his entire
+course of activity is significant; each phase of it has its own
+value.  He has the experience of realizing his end at every
+stage; the postponed aim, or end in view, being merely a sight
+ahead by which to keep his activity going fully and freely.  For
+if he does not look ahead, he is more likely to find himself
+blocked.  The aim is as definitely a means of action as is any
+other portion of an activity.
+
+3.  Applications in Education.  There is nothing peculiar about
+educational aims.  They are just like aims in any directed
+occupation.  The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to
+do, certain resources with which to do, and certain obstacles
+with which to contend.  The conditions with which the farmer
+deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own
+structure and operation independently of any purpose of his.
+Seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight
+comes, the seasons change.  His aim is simply to utilize these
+various conditions; to make his activities and their energies
+work together, instead of against one another.  It would be
+absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any
+reference to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristic of
+plant growth, etc.  His purpose is simply a foresight of the
+consequences of his energies connected with those of the things
+about him, a foresight used to direct his movements from day to
+day.  Foresight of possible consequences leads to more careful
+and extensive observation of the nature and performances of the
+things he had to do with, and to laying out a plan -- that is, of
+a certain order in the acts to be performed.
+
+It is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher.  It
+is as absurd for the latter to set up his "own" aims as the
+proper objects of the growth of the children as it would be for
+the farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of
+conditions.  Aims mean acceptance of responsibility for the
+observations, anticipations, and arrangements required in
+carrying on a function -- whether farming or educating.  Any aim
+is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and
+planning in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour
+to hour; if it gets in the way of the individual's own common
+sense (as it will surely do if imposed from without or accepted
+on authority) it does harm.
+
+And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no
+aims.  Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not
+an abstract idea like education.  And consequently their purposes
+are indefinitely varied, differing with different children,
+changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on
+the part of the one who teaches.  Even the most valid aims which
+can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than good unless
+one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to
+educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to
+choose in liberating and directing the energies of the concrete
+situations in which they find themselves.  As a recent writer has
+said: "To lead this boy to read Scott's novels instead of old
+Sleuth's stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root out the
+habit of bullying from John's make-up; to prepare this class to
+study medicine, -- these are samples of the millions of aims we
+have actually before us in the concrete work of education."
+Bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state
+some of the characteristics found in all good educational aims.
+(1) An educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic
+activities and needs (including original instincts and acquired
+habits) of the given individual to be educated.  The tendency of
+such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing
+powers, and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or
+responsibility.  In general, there is a disposition to take
+considerations which are dear to the hearts of adults and set
+them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of those educated.
+There is also an inclination to propound aims which are so
+uniform as to neglect the specific powers and requirements of an
+individual, forgetting that all learning is something which
+happens to an individual at a given time and place.  The larger
+range of perception of the adult is of great value in observing
+the abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they
+may amount to.  Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit
+what certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did
+not have the adult achievements we should be without assurance as
+to the significance of the drawing, reproducing, modeling,
+coloring activities of childhood.  So if it were not for adult
+language, we should not be able to see the import of the babbling
+impulses of infancy.  But it is one thing to use adult
+accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the
+doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up
+as a fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those
+educated.
+
+(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of
+cooperating with the activities of those undergoing instruction.
+It must suggest the kind of environment needed to liberate and to
+organize their capacities.  Unless it lends itself to the
+construction of specific procedures, and unless these procedures
+test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter is worthless.
+Instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it prevents the
+use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the
+situation.  It operates to exclude recognition of everything
+except what squares up with the fixed end in view.  Every rigid
+aim just because it is rigidly given seems to render it
+unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete conditions.
+Since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting details
+which do not count?
+
+The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots.  Teachers
+receive them from superior authorities; these authorities accept
+them from what is current in the community.  The teachers impose
+them upon children.  As a first consequence, the intelligence of
+the teacher is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims
+laid down from above.  Too rarely is the individual teacher so
+free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on
+methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his
+mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject
+matter.  This distrust of the teacher's experience is then
+reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils.  The
+latter receive their aims through a double or treble external
+imposition, and are constantly confused by the conflict between
+the aims which are natural to their own experience at the time
+and those in which they are taught to acquiesce.  Until the
+democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every
+growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually
+confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims.
+
+(3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are
+alleged to be general and ultimate.  Every activity, however
+specific, is, of course, general in its ramified connections, for
+it leads out indefinitely into other things.  So far as a general
+idea makes us more alive to these connections, it cannot be too
+general.  But "general" also means "abstract," or detached from
+all specific context.  And such abstractness means remoteness,
+and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as mere
+means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the means.
+That education is literally and all the time its own reward means
+that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is
+worth while in its own immediate having.  A truly general aim
+broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to take more consequences
+(connections) into account.  This means a wider and more flexible
+observation of means.  The more interacting forces, for example,
+the farmer takes into account, the more varied will be his
+immediate resources.  He will see a greater number of possible
+starting places, and a greater number of ways of getting at what
+he wants to do.  The fuller one's conception of possible future
+achievements, the less his present activity is tied down to a
+small number of alternatives.  If one knew enough, one could
+start almost anywhere and sustain his activities continuously and
+fruitfully.
+
+Understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply
+in the sense of a broad survey of the field of present
+activities, we shall take up some of the larger ends which have
+currency in the educational theories of the day, and consider
+what light they throw upon the immediate concrete and diversified
+aims which are always the educator's real concern.  We premise
+(as indeed immediately follows from what has been said) that
+there is no need of making a choice among them or regarding them
+as competitors.  When we come to act in a tangible way we have to
+select or choose a particular act at a particular time, but any
+number of comprehensive ends may exist without competition, since
+they mean simply different ways of looking at the same scene.
+One cannot climb a number of different mountains simultaneously,
+but the views had when different mountains are ascended
+supplement one another: they do not set up incompatible,
+competing worlds.  Or, putting the matter in a slightly different
+way, one statement of an end may suggest certain questions and
+observations, and another statement another set of questions,
+calling for other observations.  Then the more general ends we
+have, the better.  One statement will emphasize what another
+slurs over.  What a plurality of hypotheses does for the
+scientific investigator, a plurality of stated aims may do for
+the instructor.
+
+Summary.  An aim denotes the result of any natural process
+brought to consciousness and made a factor in determining present
+observation and choice of ways of acting.  It signifies that an
+activity has become intelligent.  Specifically it means foresight
+of the alternative consequences attendant upon acting in a given
+situation in different ways, and the use of what is anticipated
+to direct observation and experiment.  A true aim is thus opposed
+at every point to an aim which is imposed upon a process of
+action from without.  The latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a
+stimulus to intelligence in the given situation, but is an
+externally dictated order to do such and such things.  Instead of
+connecting directly with present activities, it is remote,
+divorced from the means by which it is to be reached.  Instead of
+suggesting a freer and better balanced activity, it is a limit
+set to activity.  In education, the currency of these externally
+imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the notion
+of preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of
+both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.
+
+
+Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
+
+1.  Nature as Supplying the Aim.  We have just pointed out the
+futility of trying to establish the aim of education--some one
+final aim which subordinates all others to itself.  We have
+indicated that since general aims are but prospective points of
+view from which to survey the existing conditions and estimate
+their possibilities, we might have any number of them, all
+consistent with one another.  As matter of fact, a large number
+have been stated at different times, all having great local
+value.  For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a
+given time.  And we do not emphasize things which do not require
+emphasis--that is, such things as are taking care of themselves
+fairly well.  We tend rather to frame our statement on the basis
+of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation; we take
+for granted, without explicit statement which would be of no use,
+whatever is right or approximately so.  We frame our explicit
+aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about.  It is,
+then, DO paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or
+generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just
+the things which it has least of in actual fact.  A time of
+domination by authority will call out as response the
+desirability of great individual freedom; one of disorganized
+individual activities the need of social control as an
+educational aim.
+
+The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim
+thus balance each other.  At different times such aims as
+complete living, better methods of language study, substitution
+of things for words, social efficiency, personal culture, social
+service, complete development of personality, encyclopedic
+knowledge, discipline, a esthetic contemplation, utility, etc.,
+have served.  The following discussion takes up three statements
+of recent influence; certain others have been incidentally
+discussed in the previous chapters, and others will be considered
+later in a discussion of knowledge and of the values of studies.
+We begin with a consideration that education is a process of
+development in accordance with nature, taking Rousseau's
+statement, which opposed natural to social (See ante, p.  91);
+and then pass over to the antithetical conception of social
+efficiency, which often opposes social to natural.
+
+(1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and
+artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are
+prone to resort to nature as a standard.  Nature is supposed to
+furnish the law and the end of development; ours it is to follow
+and conform to her ways.  The positive value of this conception
+lies in the forcible way in which it calls attention to the
+wrongness of aims which do not have regard to the natural
+endowment of those educated.  Its weakness is the ease with which
+natural in the sense of normal is confused with the physical.
+The constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and
+contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out of the way
+and allow nature to do the work.  Since no one has stated in the
+doctrine both its truth and falsity better than Rousseau, we
+shall turn to him.
+
+"Education," he says, "we receive from three sources--Nature,
+men, and things.  The spontaneous development of our organs and
+capacities constitutes the education of Nature.  The use to which
+we are taught to put this development constitutes that education
+given us by Men.  The acquirement of personal experience from
+surrounding objects constitutes that of things.  Only when these
+three kinds of education are consonant and make for the same end,
+does a man tend towards his true goal.  If we are asked what is
+this end, the answer is that of Nature.  For since the
+concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their
+completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our
+control must necessarily regulate us in determining the other
+two." Then he defines Nature to mean the capacities and
+dispositions which are inborn, "as they exist prior to the
+modification due to constraining habits and the influence of the
+opinion of others."
+
+The wording of Rousseau will repay careful study.  It contains as
+fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in
+conjunction with a curious twist.  It would be impossible to say
+better what is said in the first sentences.  The three factors of
+educative development are (a) the native structure of our bodily
+organs and their functional activities; (b) the uses to which the
+activities of these organs are put under the influence of other
+persons; (c) their direct interaction with the environment.  This
+statement certainly covers the ground.  His other two
+propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the
+three factors of education are consonant and cooperative does
+adequate development of the individual occur, and (b) that the
+native activities of the organs, being original, are basic in
+conceiving consonance.  But it requires but little reading
+between the lines, supplemented by other statements of Rousseau,
+to perceive that instead of regarding these three things as
+factors which must work together to some extent in order that any
+one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as separate
+and independent operations.  Especially does he believe that
+there is an independent and, as he says, "spontaneous"
+development of the native organs and faculties.  He thinks that
+this development can go on irrespective of the use to which they
+are put.  And it is to this separate development that education
+coming from social contact is to be subordinated.  Now there is
+an immense difference between a use of native activities in
+accord with those activities themselves -- as distinct from
+forcing them and perverting them -- and supposing that they have
+a normal development apart from any use, which development
+furnishes the standard and norm of all learning by use.  To recur
+to our previous illustration, the process of acquiring language
+is a practically perfect model of proper educative growth.  The
+start is from native activities of the vocal apparatus, organs of
+hearing, etc.  But it is absurd to suppose that these have an
+independent growth of their own, which left to itself would
+evolve a perfect speech.  Taken literally, Rousseau's principle
+would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and
+noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the
+development of articulate speech -- which they are -- but as
+furnishing language itself -- the standard for all teaching of
+language.
+
+The point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right,
+introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that
+the structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions
+of all teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in
+intimating that they supply not only the conditions but also the
+ends of their development.  As matter of fact, the native
+activities develop, in contrast with random and capricious
+exercise, through the uses to which they are put.  And the office
+of the social medium is, as we have seen, to direct growth
+through putting powers to the best possible use.  The instinctive
+activities may be called, metaphorically, spontaneous, in the
+sense that the organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of
+operation, -- a bias so strong that we cannot go contrary to it,
+though by trying to go contrary we may pervert, stunt, and
+corrupt them.  But the notion of a spontaneous normal development
+of these activities is pure mythology.  The natural, or native,
+powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces in all
+education; they do not furnish its ends or aims.  There is no
+learning except from a beginning in unlearned powers, but
+learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the
+unlearned powers.  Rousseau's contrary opinion is doubtless due
+to the fact that he identified God with Nature; to him the
+original powers are wholly good, coming directly from a wise and
+good creator.  To paraphrase the old saying about the country and
+the town, God made the original human organs and faculties, man
+makes the uses to which they are put.  Consequently the
+development of the former furnishes the standard to which the
+latter must be subordinated.  When men attempt to determine the
+uses to which the original activities shall be put, they
+interfere with a divine plan.  The interference by social
+arrangements with Nature, God's work, is the primary source of
+corruption in individuals.
+
+Rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all
+natural tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of
+the total depravity of innate human nature, and has had a
+powerful influence in modifying the attitude towards children's
+interests.  But it is hardly necessary to say that primitive
+impulses are of themselves neither good nor evil, but become one
+or the other according to the objects for which they are
+employed.  That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing of
+some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many
+avoidable ills, there can be no doubt.  But the moral is not to
+leave them alone to follow their own "spontaneous development,"
+but to provide an environment which shall organize them.
+
+Returning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's
+statements, we find that natural development, as an aim, enables
+him to point the means of correcting many evils in current
+practices, and to indicate a number of desirable specific aims.
+(1) Natural development as an aim fixes attention upon the bodily
+organs and the need of health and vigor.  The aim of natural
+development says to parents and teachers: Make health an aim;
+normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of
+the body--an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due
+recognition in practice would almost automatically revolutionize
+many of our educational practices.  "Nature" is indeed a vague
+and metaphorical term, but one thing that "Nature" may be said to
+utter is that there are conditions of educational efficiency, and
+that till we have learned what these conditions are and have
+learned to make our practices accord with them, the noblest and
+most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer -- are verbal and
+sentimental rather than efficacious.
+
+(2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of
+respect for physical mobility.  In Rousseau's words: "Children
+are always in motion; a sedentary life is injurious." When he
+says that "Nature's intention is to strengthen the body before
+exercising the mind" he hardly states the fact fairly.  But if he
+had said that nature's "intention" (to adopt his poetical form of
+speech) is to develop the mind especially by exercise of the
+muscles of the body he would have stated a positive fact.  In
+other words, the aim of following nature means, in the concrete,
+regard for the actual part played by use of the bodily organs in
+explorations, in handling of materials, in plays and games.
+(3) The general aim translates into the aim of regard for
+individual differences among children.  Nobody can take the
+principle of consideration of native powers into account without
+being struck by the fact that these powers differ in different
+individuals.  The difference applies not merely to their
+intensity, but even more to their quality and arrangement.  As
+Rouseau said: "Each individual is born with a distinctive
+temperament.  We indiscriminately employ children of different
+bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the special
+bent and leaves a dull uniformity.  Therefore after we have
+wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see
+the short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die
+away, while the natural abilities we have crushed do not
+revive."
+
+Lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the
+waxing, and waning, of preferences and interests.  Capacities bud
+and bloom irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development.
+We must strike while the iron is hot.  Especially precious are
+the first dawnings of power.  More than we imagine, the ways in
+which the tendencies of early childhood are treated fix
+fundamental dispositions and condition the turn taken by powers
+that show themselves later.  Educational concern with the early
+years of life -- as distinct from inculcation of useful arts --
+dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi
+and Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth.
+The irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in
+the following passage of a student of the growth of the nervous
+system.  "While growth continues, things bodily and mental are
+lopsided, for growth is never general, but is accentuated now at
+one spot, now at another.  The methods which shall recognize in
+the presence of these enormous differences of endowment the
+dynamic values of natural inequalities of growth, and utilize
+them, preferring irregularity to the rounding out gained by
+pruning will most closely follow that which takes place in the
+body and thus prove most effective."  1 Observation of natural
+tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint.  They show
+themselves most readily in a child's spontaneous sayings and
+doings, -- that is, in those he engages in when not put at set
+tasks and when not aware of being under observation.  It does not
+follow that these tendencies are all desirable because they are
+natural; but it does follow that since they are there, they are
+operative and must be taken account of.  We must see to it that
+the desirable ones have an environment which keeps them active,
+and that their activity shall control the direction the others
+take and thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they
+lead to nothing.  Many tendencies that trouble parents when they
+appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much direct
+attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them.  At
+all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes
+as standards, and regard all deviations of children's impulses as
+evils to be eliminated.  That artificiality against which the
+conception of following nature is so largely a protest, is the
+outcome of attempts to force children directly into the mold of
+grown-up standards.
+
+In conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of
+following nature combined two factors which had no inherent
+connection with one another.  Before the time of Rousseau
+educational reformers had been inclined to urge the importance of
+education by ascribing practically unlimited power to it.  All
+the differences between peoples and between classes and persons
+among the same people were said to be due to differences of
+training, of exercise, and practice.  Originally, mind, reason,
+understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all.
+This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of
+all and the possibility of bringing them all to the same level.
+As a protest against this view, the doctrine of accord with
+nature meant a much less formal and abstract view of mind and its
+powers.  It substituted specific instincts and impulses and
+physiological capacities, differing from individual to individual
+(just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out, even in dogs of
+the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment, memory,
+and generalization.  Upon this side, the doctrine of educative
+accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of
+modern biology, physiology, and psychology.  It means, in effect,
+that great as is the significance of nurture, of modification,
+and transformation through direct educational effort, nature, or
+unlearned capacities, affords the foundation and ultimate
+resources for such nurture.  On the other hand, the doctrine of
+following nature was a political dogma.  It meant a rebellion
+against existing social institutions, customs, and ideals (See
+ante, p.  91).  Rousseau's statement that everything is good as
+it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification only
+in its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence:
+"Everything degenerates in the hands of man." And again he says:
+"Natural man has an absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a
+complete integer and has no relation save to himself and to his
+fellow man.  Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator
+of a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its
+relation to the integral body of society.  Good political
+institutions are those which make a man unnatural." It is upon
+this conception of the artificial and harmful character of
+organized social life as it now exists 2 that he rested the
+notion that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which
+initiate growth but also its plan and goal.  That evil
+institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a
+wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is
+true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart from
+the environment, but to provide an environment in which native
+powers will be put to better uses.
+
+2.  Social Efficiency as Aim.  A conception which made nature
+supply the end of a true education and society the end of an evil
+one, could hardly fail to call out a protest.  The opposing
+emphasis took the form of a doctrine that the business of
+education is to supply precisely what nature fails to secure;
+namely, habituation of an individual to social control;
+subordination of natural powers to social rules.  It is not
+surprising to find that the value in the idea of social
+efficiency resides largely in its protest against the points at
+which the doctrine of natural development went astray; while its
+misuse comes when it is employed to slur over the truth in that
+conception.  It is a fact that we must look to the activities and
+achievements of associated life to find what the development of
+power -- that is to say, efficiency -- means.  The error is in
+implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather than
+of utilization to secure efficiency.  The doctrine is rendered
+adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not
+by negative constraint but by positive use of native
+individual capacities in occupations having a social meaning.
+(1) Translated into specific aims, social efficiency indicates
+the importance of industrial competency.  Persons cannot live
+without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are
+employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the
+relationships of persons to one another.  If an individual is not
+able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent
+upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others.
+He misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of
+life.  If he is not trained in the right use of the products of
+industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave himself and
+injure others in his possession of wealth.  No scheme of
+education can afford to neglect such basic considerations.  Yet
+in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements
+for higher education have often not only neglected them, but
+looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative
+concern.  With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic
+society, it is natural that the significance of an education
+which should have as a result ability to make one's way
+economically in the world, and to manage economic resources
+usefully instead of for mere display and luxury, should receive
+emphasis.
+
+There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end,
+existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as
+final.  A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to
+the point of competency to choose and make its own career.  This
+principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals
+in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the
+basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth
+or social status of parents.  As a matter of fact, industry at
+the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the
+evolution of new inventions.  New industries spring up, and old
+ones are revolutionized.  Consequently an attempt to train for
+too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose.  When
+the occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left
+behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they
+had a less definite training.  But, most of all, the present
+industrial constitution of society is, like every society which
+has ever existed, full of inequities.  It is the aim of
+progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege
+and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them.  Wherever social
+control means subordination of individual activities to class
+authority, there is danger that industrial education will be
+dominated by acceptance of the status quo.  Differences of
+economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of
+individuals are to be.  We have an unconscious revival of the
+defects of the Platonic scheme (ante, p.  89) without its
+enlightened method of selection.
+
+(2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship.  It is, of course,
+arbitrary to separate industrial competency from capacity in good
+citizenship.  But the latter term may be used to indicate a
+number of qualifications which are vaguer than vocational
+ability.  These traits run from whatever make an individual a
+more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political sense:
+it denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take a
+determining part in making as well as obeying laws.  The aim of
+civic efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the
+notion of a training of mental power at large.  It calls
+attention to the fact that power must be relative to doing
+something, and to the fact that the things which most need to be
+done are things which involve one's relationships with others.
+
+Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim
+too narrowly.  An over-definite interpretation would at certain
+periods have excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the
+fact that in the last analysis security of social progress
+depends upon them.  For scientific men would have been thought to
+be mere theoretical dreamers, totally lacking in social
+efficiency.  It must be borne in mind that ultimately social
+efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share in
+a give and take of experience.  It covers all that makes one's
+own experience more worth while to others, and all that enables
+one to participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of
+others.  Ability to produce and to enjoy art, capacity for
+recreation, the significant utilization of leisure, are more
+important elements in it than elements conventionally associated
+oftentimes with citizenship.  In the broadest sense, social
+efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind which
+is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable; in
+breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make
+individuals impervious to the interests of others.  When social
+efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its
+chief constituent (because its only guarantee) is omitted, --
+intelligent sympathy or good will.  For sympathy as a desirable
+quality is something more than mere feeling; it is a cultivated
+imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at
+whatever unnecessarily divides them.  What is sometimes called a
+benevolent interest in others may be but an unwitting mask for an
+attempt to dictate to them what their good shall be, instead of
+an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find the good
+of their own choice.  Social efficiency, even social service, are
+hard and metallic things when severed from an active
+acknowledgment of the diversity of goods which life may afford to
+different persons, and from faith in the social utility of
+encouraging every individual to make his own choice intelligent.
+
+3.  Culture as Aim.  Whether or not social efficiency is an aim
+which is consistent with culture turns upon these considerations.
+Culture means at least something cultivated, something ripened;
+it is opposed to the raw and crude.  When the "natural" is
+identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is
+called natural development.  Culture is also something personal;
+it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art
+and broad human interests.  When efficiency is identified with a
+narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of
+activity, culture is opposed to efficiency.  Whether called
+culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is
+identical with the true meaning of social efficiency whenever
+attention is given to what is unique in an individual--and he
+would not be an individual if there were not something
+incommensurable about him.  Its opposite is the mediocre, the
+average.  Whenever distinctive quality is developed, distinction
+of personality results, and with it greater promise for a social
+service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material
+commodities.  For how can there be a society really worth serving
+unless it is constituted of individuals of significant personal
+qualities?
+
+The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to
+social efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society
+with its rigid division of inferior and superior.  The latter are
+supposed to have time and opportunity to develop themselves as
+human beings; the former are confined to providing external
+products.  When social efficiency as measured by product or
+output is urged as an ideal in a would-be democratic society, it
+means that the depreciatory estimate of the masses characteristic
+of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried over.  But
+if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social
+return be demanded from all and that opportunity for development
+of distinctive capacities be afforded all.  The separation of the
+two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of the
+narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential
+justification.
+
+The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included
+within the process of experience.  When it is measured by
+tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a
+distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic.
+Results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth of
+an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-products
+of education: by-products which are inevitable and important, but
+nevertheless by-products.  To set up an external aim strengthens
+by reaction the false conception of culture which identifies it
+with something purely "inner." And the idea of perfecting an
+"inner" personality is a sure sign of social divisions.  What is
+called inner is simply that which does not connect with
+others -- which is not capable of free and full communication.
+What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with
+something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as
+a thing which a man might have internally -- and therefore
+exclusively.  What one is as a person is what one is as
+associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse.
+This transcends both the efficiency which consists in supplying
+products to others and the culture which is an exclusive
+refinement and polish.
+
+Any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician,
+teacher, student, who does not find that the accomplishments of
+results of value to others is an accompaniment of a process of
+experience inherently worth while.  Why then should it be thought
+that one must take his choice between sacrificing himself to
+doing useful things for others, or sacrificing them to pursuit of
+his own exclusive ends, whether the saving of his own soul or the
+building of an inner spiritual life and personality? What happens
+is that since neither of these things is persistently possible,
+we get a compromise and an alternation.  One tries each course by
+turns.  There is no greater tragedy than that so much of the
+professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world has
+emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual
+self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this
+dualism of life.  The dualism is too deeply established to be
+easily overthrown; for that reason, it is the particular task of
+education at the present time to struggle in behalf of an aim in
+which social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead
+of antagonists.
+
+Summary.  General or comprehensive aims are points of view for
+surveying the specific problems of education.  Consequently it is
+a test of the value of the manner in which any large end is
+stated to see if it will translate readily and consistently into
+the procedures which are suggested by another.  We have applied
+this test to three general aims: Development according to nature,
+social efficiency, and culture or personal mental enrichment.  In
+each case we have seen that the aims when partially stated come
+into conflict with each other.  The partial statement of natural
+development takes the primitive powers in an alleged spontaneous
+development as the end-all.  From this point of view training
+which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint;
+one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is
+corrupting.  But when we recognize that natural activities mean
+native activities which develop only through the uses in which
+they are nurtured, the conflict disappears.  Similarly a social
+efficiency which is defined in terms of rendering external
+service to others is of necessity opposed to the aim of enriching
+the meaning of experience, while a culture which is taken to
+consist in an internal refinement of a mind is opposed to a
+socialized disposition.  But social efficiency as an educational
+purpose should mean cultivation of power to join freely and fully
+in shared or common activities.  This is impossible without
+culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because one cannot
+share in intercourse with others without learning -- without
+getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which
+one would otherwise be ignorant.  And there is perhaps no better
+definition of culture than that it is the capacity for constantly
+expanding the range and accuracy of one's perception of
+meanings.
+
+1 Donaldson, Growth of Brain, p.  356.
+
+2 We must not forget that Rousseau had the idea of a radically
+different sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should
+be identical with the good of all its members, which he thought
+to be as much better than existing states as these are worse than
+the state of nature.
+
+
+Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
+
+1.  The Meaning of the Terms.  We have already noticed the
+difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or
+participant.  The former is indifferent to what is going on; one
+result is just as good as another, since each is just something
+to look at.  The latter is bound up with what is going on; its
+outcome makes a difference to him.  His fortunes are more or less
+at stake in the issue of events.  Consequently he does whatever
+he can to influence the direction present occurrences take.  One
+is like a man in a prison cell watching the rain out of the
+window; it is all the same to him.  The other is like a man who
+has planned an outing for the next day which continuing rain will
+frustrate.  He cannot, to be sure, by his present reactions
+affect to-morrow's weather, but he may take some steps which will
+influence future happenings, if only to postpone the proposed
+picnic.  If a man sees a carriage coming which may run over him,
+if he cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the
+way if he foresees the consequence in time.  In many instances,
+he can intervene even more directly.  The attitude of a
+participant in the course of affairs is thus a double one: there
+is solicitude, anxiety concerning future consequences, and a
+tendency to act to assure better, and avert worse, consequences.
+There are words which denote this attitude: concern, interest.
+These words suggest that a person is bound up with the
+possibilities inhering in objects; that he is accordingly on the
+lookout for what they are likely to do to him; and that, on the
+basis of his expectation or foresight, he is eager to act so as
+to give things one turn rather than another.  Interest and aims,
+concern and purpose, are necessarily connected.  Such words as
+aim, intent, end, emphasize the results which are wanted and
+striven for; they take for granted the personal attitude of
+solicitude and attentive eagerness.  Such words as interest,
+affection, concern, motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is
+foreseen upon the individual's fortunes, and his active desire to
+act to secure a possible result.  They take for granted the
+objective changes.  But the difference is but one of emphasis;
+the meaning that is shaded in one set of words is illuminated in
+the other.  What is anticipated is objective and impersonal;
+to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being run over.  But for an
+active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of
+standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal
+response.  The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present
+difference, which finds expression in solicitude and effort.
+While such words as affection, concern, and motive indicate an
+attitude of personal preference, they are always attitudes toward
+objects -- toward what is foreseen.  We may call the phase of
+objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal
+concern emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in
+the facts of the situation.
+
+Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran
+their course in a world by themselves.  But they are always
+responses to what is going on in the situation of which they are
+a part, and their successful or unsuccessful expression depends
+upon their interaction with other changes.  Life activities
+flourish and fail only in connection with changes of the
+environment.  They are literally bound up with these changes; our
+desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in which
+our doings are tied up with the doings of things and persons
+about us.  Instead of marking a purely personal or subjective
+realm, separated from the objective and impersonal, they indicate
+the non-existence of such a separate world.  They afford
+convincing evidence that changes in things are not alien to the
+activities of a self, and that the career and welfare of the self
+are bound up with the movement of persons and things.  Interest,
+concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in
+a developing situation.
+
+The word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole
+state of active development, (ii) the objective results that are
+foreseen and wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional
+inclination.
+
+(I) An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often
+referred to as an interest.  Thus we say that a man's interest is
+politics, or journalism, or philanthropy, or
+archaeology, or collecting Japanese prints, or banking.
+
+(ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object
+touches or engages a man; the point where it influences him.  In
+some legal transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to
+have a standing at court.  He has to show that some proposed step
+concerns his affairs.  A silent partner has an interest in a
+business, although he takes no active part in its conduct because
+its prosperity or decline affects his profits and liabilities.
+
+(iii) When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the
+emphasis falls directly upon his personal attitude.  To be
+interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by,
+some object.  To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care
+about, to be attentive.  We say of an interested person both that
+he has lost himself in some affair and that he has found himself
+in it.  Both terms express the engrossment of the self in an
+object.
+
+When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a
+depreciatory way, it will be found that the second of the
+meanings mentioned is first exaggerated and then isolated.
+Interest is taken to mean merely the effect of an object upon
+personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure.
+Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are
+reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain.
+Educationally, it then follows that to attach importance to
+interest means to attach some feature of seductiveness to
+material otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and effort by
+offering a bribe of pleasure.  This procedure is properly
+stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of
+education.
+
+But the objection is based upon the fact -- or assumption -- that
+the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be
+appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other
+words, they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal
+activities of the pupils.  The remedy is not in finding fault
+with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to search for
+some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material.  It
+is to discover objects and modes of action, which are connected
+with present powers.  The function of this material in engaging
+activity and carrying it on consistently and continuously is its
+interest.  If the material operates in this way, there is no call
+either to hunt for devices which will make it interesting or to
+appeal to arbitrary, semi-coerced effort.
+
+The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between, --
+that which connects two things otherwise distant.  In education,
+the distance covered may be looked at as temporal.  The fact that
+a process takes time to mature is so obvious a fact that we
+rarely make it explicit.  We overlook the fact that in growth
+there is ground to be covered between an initial stage of process
+and the completing period; that there is something intervening.
+In learning, the present powers of the pupil are the initial
+stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
+Between the two lie means -- that is middle conditions: -- acts
+to be performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be
+used.  Only through them, in the literal time sense, will the
+initial activities reach a satisfactory consummation.
+
+These intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because
+the development of existing activities into the foreseen and
+desired end depends upon them.  To be means for the achieving of
+present tendencies, to be "between" the agent and his end, to be
+of interest, are different names for the same thing.  When
+material has to be made interesting, it signifies that as
+presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present power:
+or that if the connection be there, it is not perceived.  To make
+it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that
+exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous
+and artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which have
+been applied to the doctrine of interest in education.
+
+So much for the meaning of the term interest.  Now for that of
+discipline.  Where an activity takes time, where many means and
+obstacles lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation
+and persistence are required.  It is obvious that a very large
+part of the everyday meaning of will is precisely the deliberate
+or conscious disposition to persist and endure in a planned
+course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary
+solicitations.  A man of strong will, in the popular usage of the
+words, is a man who is neither fickle nor half-hearted in
+achieving chosen ends.  His ability is executive; that is, he
+persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out
+his aims.  A weak will is unstable as water.
+
+Clearly there are two factors in will.  One has to do with the
+foresight of results, the other with the depth of hold the
+foreseen outcome has upon the person.
+
+(I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition.
+Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness.  A man
+keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not
+because of any clearly thought-out purpose.  In fact, the
+obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite
+aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed
+end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to get a
+clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while.
+Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize
+ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and
+energy in use of means to achieve the end.  The really executive
+man is a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the
+results of his actions as clear and full as possible.  The people
+we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always deceive themselves
+as to the consequences of their acts.  They pick out some feature
+which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances.  When
+they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to
+show themselves.  They are discouraged, or complain of being
+thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some
+other line of action.  That the primary difference between strong
+and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of
+persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are
+thought out, cannot be over-emphasized.
+
+(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing
+out of results.  Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep
+hold of a person.  They are something to look at and for
+curiosity to play with rather than something to achieve.  There
+is no such thing as over-intellectuality, but there is such a
+thing as a one-sided intellectuality.  A person "takes it out" as
+we say in considering the consequences of proposed lines of
+action.  A certain flabbiness of fiber prevents the contemplated
+object from gripping him and engaging him in action.  And most
+persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course of action
+by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of
+inducements to an action that is directly more agreeable.
+
+A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake
+them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined.  Add to this
+ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in
+face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the
+essence of discipline.  Discipline means power at command;
+mastery of the resources available for carrying through the
+action undertaken.  To know what one is to do and to move to do
+it promptly and by use of the requisite means is to be
+disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind.
+Discipline is positive.  To cow the spirit, to subdue
+inclination, to compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a
+subordinate perform an uncongenial task -- these things are or
+are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to the
+development of power to recognize what one is about and to
+persistence in accomplishment.
+
+It is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and
+discipline are connected, not opposed.
+
+(i) Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained power --
+apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in consequences --
+is not possible without interest.  Deliberation will be
+perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest.  Parents
+and teachers often complain -- and correctly -- that children "do
+not want to hear, or want to understand." Their minds are not
+upon the subject precisely because it does not touch them; it
+does not enter into their concerns.  This is a state of things
+that needs to be remedied, but the remedy is not in the use of
+methods which increase indifference and aversion.  Even punishing
+a child for inattention is one way of trying to make him realize
+that the matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one
+way of arousing "interest," or bringing about a sense of
+connection.  In the long run, its value is measured by whether it
+supplies a mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by
+the adult or whether it leads the child "to think"--that is, to
+reflect upon his acts and impregnate them with aims.
+
+(ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even
+more obvious.  Employers do not advertise for workmen who are not
+interested in what they are doing.  If one were engaging a lawyer
+or a doctor, it would never occur to one to reason that the
+person engaged would stick to his work more conscientiously if it
+was so uncongenial to him that he did it merely from a sense of
+obligation.  Interest measures -- or rather is -- the depth of
+the grip which the foreseen end has upon one, moving one to act
+for its realization.
+
+2.  The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education.
+Interest represents the moving force of objects -- whether
+perceived or presented in imagination -- in any experience having
+a purpose.  In the concrete, the value of recognizing the dynamic
+place of interest in an educative development is that it leads to
+considering individual children in their specific capabilities,
+needs, and preferences.  One who recognizes the importance of
+interest will not assume that all minds work in the same way
+because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook.
+Attitudes and methods of approach and response vary with the
+specific appeal the same material makes, this appeal itself
+varying with difference of natural aptitude, of past experience,
+of plan of life, and so on.  But the facts of interest also
+supply considerations of general value to the philosophy of
+education.  Rightly understood, they put us on our guard against
+certain conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have had
+great vogue in philosophic thought in the past, and which
+exercise a serious hampering influence upon the conduct of
+instruction and discipline.  Too frequently mind is set over the
+world of things and facts to be known; it is regarded as
+something existing in isolation, with mental states and
+operations that exist independently.  Knowledge is then regarded
+as an external application of purely mental existences to the
+things to be known, or else as a result of the impressions which
+this outside subject matter makes on mind, or as a combination of
+the two.  Subject matter is then regarded as something complete
+in itself; it is just something to be learned or known, either by
+the voluntary application of mind to it or through the
+impressions it makes on mind.
+
+The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical.
+Mind appears in experience as ability to respond to present
+stimuli on the basis of anticipation of future possible
+consequences, and with a view to controlling the kind of
+consequences that are to take place.  The things, the subject
+matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a
+bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether assisting
+or retarding it.  These statements are too formal to be very
+intelligible.  An illustration may clear up their significance.
+You are engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a
+typewriter.  If you are an expert, your formed habits take care
+of the physical movements and leave your thoughts free to
+consider your topic.  Suppose, however, you are not skilled, or
+that, even if you are, the machine does not work well.  You then
+have to use intelligence.  You do not wish to strike the keys at
+random and let the consequences be what they may; you wish to
+record certain words in a given order so as to make sense.  You
+attend to the keys, to what you have written, to your movements,
+to the ribbon or the mechanism of the machine.  Your attention is
+not distributed indifferently and miscellaneously to any and
+every detail.  It is centered upon whatever has a bearing upon
+the effective pursuit of your occupation.  Your look is ahead,
+and you are concerned to note the existing facts because and in
+so far as they are factors in the achievement of the result
+intended.  You have to find out what your resources are, what
+conditions are at command, and what the difficulties and
+obstacles are.  This foresight and this survey with reference to
+what is foreseen constitute mind.  Action that does not involve
+such a forecast of results and such an examination of means and
+hindrances is either a matter of habit or else it is blind.  In
+neither case is it intelligent.  To be vague and uncertain as to
+what is intended and careless in observation of conditions of its
+realization is to be, in that degree, stupid or partially
+intelligent.
+
+If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the
+physical manipulation of the instruments but with what one
+intends to write, the case is the same.  There is an activity in
+process; one is taken up with the development of a theme.  Unless
+one writes as a phonograph talks, this means intelligence;
+namely, alertness in foreseeing the various conclusions to which
+present data and considerations are tending, together with
+continually renewed observation and recollection to get hold of
+the subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be
+reached.  The whole attitude is one of concern with what is to
+be, and with what is so far as the latter enters into the
+movement toward the end.  Leave out the direction which depends
+upon foresight of possible future results, and there is no
+intelligence in present behavior.  Let there be imaginative
+forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its
+attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle
+dreaming -- abortive intelligence.
+
+If this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something
+complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far
+as that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as
+aims, ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the
+attainment of aims.  Intelligence is not a peculiar possession
+which a person owns; but a person is intelligent in so far as the
+activities in which he plays a part have the qualities mentioned.
+Nor are the activities in which a person engages, whether
+intelligently or not, exclusive properties of himself; they are
+something in which he engages and partakes.  Other things, the
+independent changes of other things and persons, cooperate and
+hinder.  The individual's act may be initial in a course of
+events, but the outcome depends upon the interaction of his
+response with energies supplied by other agencies.  Conceive mind
+as anything but one factor partaking along with others in the
+production of consequences, and it becomes meaningless.
+
+The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which
+will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or
+purpose of moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not
+as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for the attainment of
+ends.  The remedy for the evils attending the doctrine of formal
+discipline previously spoken of, is not to be found by
+substituting a doctrine of specialized disciplines, but by
+reforming the notion of mind and its training.  Discovery of
+typical modes of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in
+which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they recognize
+they have something at stake, and which cannot be carried through
+without reflection and use of judgment to select material of
+observation and recollection, is the remedy.  In short, the root
+of the error long prevalent in the conception of training of mind
+consists in leaving out of account movements of things to future
+results in which an individual shares, and in the direction of
+which observation, imagination, and memory are enlisted.  It
+consists in regarding mind as complete in itself, ready to be
+directly applied to a present material.
+
+In historic practice the error has cut two ways.  On one hand, it
+has screened and protected traditional studies and methods of
+teaching from intelligent criticism and needed revisions.  To say
+that they are "disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all
+inquiry.  It has not been enough to show that they were of no use
+in life or that they did not really contribute to the cultivation
+of the self.  That they were "disciplinary" stifled every
+question, subdued every doubt, and removed the subject from the
+realm of rational discussion.  By its nature, the allegation
+could not be checked up.  Even when discipline did not accrue as
+matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application
+and lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with
+him, not with the study or the methods of teaching.  His failure
+was but proof that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a
+reason for retaining the old methods.  The responsibility was
+transferred from the educator to the pupil because the material
+did not have to meet specific tests; it did not have to be shown
+that it fulfilled any particular need or served any specific end.
+It was designed to discipline in general, and if it failed, it
+was because the individual was unwilling to be disciplined.
+In the other direction, the tendency was towards a negative
+conception of discipline, instead of an identification of it with
+growth in constructive power of achievement.  As we have already
+seen, will means an attitude toward the future, toward the
+production of possible consequences, an attitude involving effort
+to foresee clearly and comprehensively the probable results of
+ways of acting, and an active identification with some
+anticipated consequences.  Identification of will, or effort,
+with mere strain, results when a mind is set up, endowed with
+powers that are only to be applied to existing material.  A
+person just either will or will not apply himself to the matter
+in hand.  The more indifferent the subject matter, the less
+concern it has for the habits and preferences of the individual,
+the more demand there is for an effort to bring the mind to bear
+upon it--and hence the more discipline of will.  To attend to
+material because there is something to be done in which the
+person is concerned is not disciplinary in this view; not even if
+it results in a desirable increase of constructive power.
+Application just for the sake of application, for the sake of
+training, is alone disciplinary.  This is more likely to occur if
+the subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no
+motive (so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or
+the value of discipline.  The logical result is expressed with
+literal truth in the words of an American humorist: "It makes no
+difference what you teach a boy so long as he doesn't like it."
+
+The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing
+with objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject
+matter to be learned.  In the traditional schemes of education,
+subject matter means so much material to be studied.  Various
+branches of study represent so many independent branches, each
+having its principles of arrangement complete within itself.
+History is one such group of facts; algebra another; geography
+another, and so on till we have run through the entire
+curriculum.  Having a ready- made existence on their own account,
+their relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to
+acquire.  This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in
+which the program of school work, for the day, month, and
+successive years, consists of "studies" all marked off from one
+another, and each supposed to be complete by itself -- for
+educational purposes at least.
+
+Later on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the
+meaning of the subject matter of instruction.  At this point, we
+need only to say that, in contrast with the traditional theory,
+anything which intelligence studies represents things in the part
+which they play in the carrying forward of active lines of
+interest.  Just as one "studies" his typewriter as part of the
+operation of putting it to use to effect results, so with any
+fact or truth.  It becomes an object of study -- that is, of
+inquiry and reflection -- when it figures as a factor to be
+reckoned with in the completion of a course of events in which
+one is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected.  Numbers are
+not objects of study just because they are numbers already
+constituting a branch of learning called mathematics, but because
+they represent qualities and relations of the world in which our
+action goes on, because they are factors upon which the
+accomplishment of our purposes depends.  Stated thus broadly, the
+formula may appear abstract.  Translated into details, it means
+that the act of learning or studying is artificial and
+ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented
+with a lesson to be learned.  Study is effectual in the degree in
+which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is
+dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in which he is
+concerned.  This connection of an object and a topic with the
+promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the
+last word of a genuine theory of interest in education.
+
+3.  Some Social Aspects of the Question.  While the theoretical
+errors of which we have been speaking have their expressions in
+the conduct of schools, they are themselves the outcome of
+conditions of social life.  A change confined to the theoretical
+conviction of educators will not remove the difficulties, though
+it should render more effective efforts to modify social
+conditions.  Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are
+fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they
+partake.  The ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic
+attitude.  Art is neither merely internal nor merely external;
+merely mental nor merely physical.  Like every mode of action, it
+brings about changes in the world.  The changes made by some
+actions (those which by contrast may be called mechanical) are
+external; they are shifting things about.  No ideal reward, no
+enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them.  Others
+contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external
+adornment and display.  Many of our existing social activities,
+industrial and political, fall in these two classes.  Neither the
+people who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by
+them, are capable of full and free interest in their work.
+Because of the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing
+it, or because of the restricted character of its aim,
+intelligence is not adequately engaged.  The same conditions
+force many people back upon themselves.  They take refuge in an
+inner play of sentiment and fancies.  They are aesthetic but not
+artistic, since their feelings and ideas are turned upon
+themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify
+conditions.  Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an
+inner landscape.  Even the pursuit of science may become an
+asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life -- not a
+temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification
+in future dealings with the world.  The very word art may become
+associated not with specific transformation of things, making
+them more significant for mind, but with stimulations of
+eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences.  The separation
+and mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of theory
+or culture, the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are
+indications of this situation.  Thus interest and mind are either
+narrowed, or else made perverse.  Compare what was said in an
+earlier chapter about the one-sided meanings which have come to
+attach to the ideas of efficiency and of culture.
+
+This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized
+on a basis of division between laboring classes and leisure
+classes.  The intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in
+the unremitting struggle with things; that of those freed from
+the discipline of occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate.
+Moreover, the majority of human beings still lack economic
+freedom.  Their pursuits are fixed by accident and necessity of
+circumstance; they are not the normal expression of their own
+powers interacting with the needs and resources of the
+environment.  Our economic conditions still relegate many men to
+a servile status.  As a consequence, the intelligence of those in
+control of the practical situation is not liberal.  Instead of
+playing freely upon the subjugation of the world for human ends,
+it is devoted to the manipulation of other men for ends that are
+non-human in so far as they are exclusive.
+
+This state of affairs explains many things in our historic
+educational traditions.  It throws light upon the clash of aims
+manifested in different portions of the school system; the
+narrowly utilitarian character of most elementary education, and
+the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character of most higher
+education.  It accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual
+matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and
+professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that
+liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an education
+which shall count in the vocations of life.  But it also helps
+define the peculiar problem of present education.  The school
+cannot immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social
+conditions.  But it should contribute through the type of
+intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the
+improvement of those conditions.  And just here the true
+conceptions of interest and discipline are full of significance.
+Persons whose interests have been enlarged and intelligence
+trained by dealing with things and facts in active occupations
+having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those most
+likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof
+knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice.
+To organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be
+fully enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the
+doing requires observation, the acquisition of information, and
+the use of a constructive imagination, is what most needs to be
+done to improve social conditions.  To oscillate between drill
+exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing
+without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge
+that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that
+education accepts the present social conditions as final, and
+thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating
+them.  A reorganization of education so that learning takes place
+in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful
+activities is a slow work.  It can only be accomplished
+piecemeal, a step at a time.  But this is not a reason for
+nominally accepting one educational philosophy and accommodating
+ourselves in practice to another.  It is a challenge to undertake
+the task of reorganization courageously and to keep at it
+persistently.
+
+Summary.  Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of
+activity having an aim.  Interest means that one is identified
+with the objects which define the activity and which furnish the
+means and obstacles to its realization.  Any activity with an aim
+implies a distinction between an earlier incomplete phase and
+later completing phase; it implies also intermediate steps.  To
+have an interest is to take things as entering into such a
+continuously developing situation, instead of taking them in
+isolation.  The time difference between the given incomplete
+state of affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort in
+transformation, it demands continuity of attention and endurance.
+This attitude is what is practically meant by will.  Discipline
+or development of power of continuous attention is its fruit.
+The significance of this doctrine for the theory of education is
+twofold.  On the one hand it protects us from the notion that
+mind and mental states are something complete in themselves,
+which then happen to be applied to some ready-made objects and
+topics so that knowledge results.  It shows that mind and
+intelligent or purposeful engagement in a course of action into
+which things enter are identical.  Hence to develop and train
+mind is to provide an environment which induces such activity.
+On the other side, it protects us from the notion that subject
+matter on its side is something isolated and independent.  It
+shows that subject matter of learning is identical with all the
+objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or
+obstacles into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of
+action.  The developing course of action, whose end and
+conditions are perceived, is the unity which holds together what
+are often divided into an independent mind on one side and an
+independent world of objects and facts on the other.
+
+
+Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
+
+1.  The Nature of Experience.  The nature of experience can be
+understood only by noting that it includes an active and a
+passive element peculiarly combined.  On the active hand,
+experience is trying -- a meaning which is made explicit in the
+connected term experiment.  On the passive, it is undergoing.
+When we experience something we act upon it, we do something with
+it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences.  We do something
+to the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is
+the peculiar combination.  The connection of these two phases of
+experience measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience.
+Mere activity does not constitute experience.  It is dispersive,
+centrifugal, dissipating.  Experience as trying involves change,
+but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously
+connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from
+it.  When an activity is continued into the undergoing of
+consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back
+into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with
+significance.  We learn something.  It is not experience when a
+child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience
+when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes
+in consequence.  Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame
+means a burn.  Being burned is a mere physical change, like the
+burning of a stick of wood, if it is not perceived as a
+consequence of some other action.  Blind and capricious impulses
+hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another.  So far as this
+happens, everything is writ in water.  There is none of that
+cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of
+that term.  On the other hand, many things happen to us in the
+way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior
+activity of our own.  They are mere accidents so far as we are
+concerned.  There is no before or after to such experience; no
+retrospect nor outlook, and consequently no meaning.  We get
+nothing which may be carried over to foresee what is likely to
+happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves to what
+is coming--no added control.  Only by courtesy can such an
+experience be called experience.  To "learn from experience" is
+to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to
+things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.
+Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with
+the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes
+instruction--discovery of the connection of things.
+
+Two conclusions important for education follow.  (1) Experience
+is primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily
+cognitive.  But (2) the measure of the value of an experience
+lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which
+it leads up.  It includes cognition in the degree in which it is
+cumulative or amounts to something, or has meaning.  In schools,
+those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as
+acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which
+appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect.  The very
+word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in
+having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly.
+Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from
+the physical organs of activity.  The former is then thought to
+be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an
+irrelevant and intruding physical factor.  The intimate union of
+activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to
+recognition of meaning is broken; instead we have two fragments:
+mere bodily action on one side, and meaning directly grasped by
+"spiritual" activity on the other.
+
+It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which
+have flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to
+exaggerate them.  Some of the more striking effects, may,
+however, be enumerated.  (a) In part bodily activity becomes an
+intruder.  Having nothing, so it is thought, to do with mental
+activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil to be contended with.
+For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along with his
+mind.  And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it
+has to do something.  But its activities, not being utilized in
+occupation with things which yield significant results, have to
+be frowned upon.  They lead the pupil away from the lesson with
+which his "mind" ought to be occupied; they are sources of
+mischief.  The chief source of the "problem of discipline" in
+schools is that the teacher has often to spend the larger part of
+the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take the mind
+away from its material.  A premium is put on physical quietude;
+on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a
+machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest.
+The teachers' business is to hold the pupils up to these
+requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.
+
+The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and
+pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the
+situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the
+perception of meaning.  Callous indifference and explosions from
+strain alternate.  The neglected body, having no organized
+fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why
+or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into equally
+meaningless fooling -- both very different from the normal play
+of children.  Physically active children become restless and
+unruly; the more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend
+what energy they have in the negative task of keeping their
+instincts and active tendencies suppressed, instead of in a
+positive one of constructive planning and execution; they are
+thus educated not into responsibility for the significant and
+graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty not to
+give them free play.  It may be seriously asserted that a chief
+cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that
+it was never misled by false notions into an attempted separation
+of mind and body.
+
+(b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be
+learned by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have
+to be used.  The senses -- especially the eye and ear -- have to
+be employed to take in what the book, the map, the blackboard,
+and the teacher say.  The lips and vocal organs, and the hands,
+have to be used to reproduce in speech and writing what has been
+stowed away.  The senses are then regarded as a kind of
+mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from
+the external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways
+and avenues of knowledge.  To keep the eyes on the book and the
+ears open to the teacher's words is a mysterious source of
+intellectual grace.  Moreover, reading, writing, and
+figuring -- important school arts -- demand muscular or motor
+training.  The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs accordingly
+have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back
+out of the mind into external action.  For it happens that using
+the muscles repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an
+automatic tendency to repeat.
+
+The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities
+which (in spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering
+character of the body in mental action) have to be employed more
+or less.  For the senses and muscles are used not as organic
+participants in having an instructive experience, but as external
+inlets and outlets of mind.  Before the child goes to school, he
+learns with his hand, eye, and ear, because they are organs of
+the process of doing something from which meaning results.  The
+boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite, and has to
+note the various pressures of the string on his hand.  His senses
+are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow
+"conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing
+something with a purpose.  The qualities of seen and touched
+things have a bearing on what is done, and are alertly perceived;
+they have a meaning.  But when pupils are expected to use their
+eyes to note the form of words, irrespective of their meaning, in
+order to reproduce them in spelling or reading, the resulting
+training is simply of isolated sense organs and muscles.  It is
+such isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it
+mechanical.  It is customary for teachers to urge children to
+read with expression, so as to bring out the meaning.  But if
+they originally learned the sensory- motor technique of reading
+-- the ability to identify forms and to reproduce the sounds they
+stand for -- by methods which did not call for attention to
+meaning, a mechanical habit was established which makes it
+difficult to read subsequently with intelligence.  The vocal
+organs have been trained to go their own way automatically in
+isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will.  Drawing,
+singing, and writing may be taught in the same mechanical way;
+for, we repeat, any way is mechanical which narrows down the
+bodily activity so that a separation of body from mind -- that
+is, from recognition of meaning -- is set up.  Mathematics, even
+in its higher branches, when undue emphasis is put upon the
+technique of calculation, and science, when laboratory exercises
+are given for their own sake, suffer from the same evil.
+
+(c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from
+direct occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the
+expense of relations or connections.  It is altogether too common
+to separate perceptions and even ideas from judgments.  The
+latter are thought to come after the former in order to compare
+them.  It is alleged that the mind perceives things apart from
+relations; that it forms ideas of them in isolation from their
+connections -- with what goes before and comes after.  Then
+judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated items
+of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection
+shall be brought out.  As matter of fact, every perception and
+every idea is a sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a
+thing.  We do not really know a chair or have an idea of it by
+inventorying and enumerating its various isolated qualities, but
+only by bringing these qualities into connection with something
+else -- the purpose which makes it a chair and not a table; or
+its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or
+the "period" which it represents, and so on.  A wagon is not
+perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the
+characteristic connection of the parts which makes it a wagon.
+And these connections are not those of mere physical
+juxtaposition; they involve connection with the animals that draw
+it, the things that are carried on it, and so on.  Judgment is
+employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is mere
+sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior
+judgment, as in the case of familiar objects.
+
+Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for
+ideas.  And in just the degree in which mental activity is
+separated from active concern with the world, from doing
+something and connecting the doing with what is undergone, words,
+symbols, come to take the place of ideas.  The substitution is
+the more subtle because some meaning is recognized.  But we are
+very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning, and
+to fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations
+which confer significance.  We get so thoroughly used to a kind
+of pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not aware how
+half-dead our mental action is, and how much keener and more
+extensive our observations and ideas would be if we formed them
+under conditions of a vital experience which required us to use
+judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with.
+There is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter.
+All authorities agree that that discernment of relationships is
+the genuinely intellectual matter; hence, the educative matter.
+The failure arises in supposing that relationships can become
+perceptible without experience -- without that conjoint trying
+and undergoing of which we have spoken.  It is assumed that
+"mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that
+this attention may be given at will irrespective of the
+situation.  Hence the deluge of half-observations, of verbal
+ideas, and unassimilated "knowledge" which afflicts the world.
+An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply
+because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and
+verifiable significance.  An experience, a very humble
+experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of
+theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an
+experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory.  It tends
+to become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to
+render thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary and
+impossible.  Because of our education we use words, thinking they
+are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality
+simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us from seeing
+any longer the difficulty.
+
+2.  Reflection in Experience.  Thought or reflection, as we have
+already seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of
+the relation between what we try to do and what happens in
+consequence.  No experience having a meaning is possible without
+some element of thought.  But we may contrast two types of
+experience according to the proportion of reflection found in
+them.  All our experiences have a phase of "cut and try" in them
+-- what psychologists call the method of trial and error.  We
+simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and
+keep on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then
+we adopt that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent
+procedure.  Some experiences have very little else in them than
+this hit and miss or succeed process.  We see that a certain way
+of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not
+see how they are.  We do not see the details of the connection;
+the links are missing.  Our discernment is very gross.  In other
+cases we push our observation farther.  We analyze to see just
+what lies between so as to bind together cause and effect,
+activity and consequence.  This extension of our insight makes
+foresight more accurate and comprehensive.  The action which
+rests simply upon the trial and error method is at the mercy of
+circumstances; they may change so that the act performed does not
+operate in the way it was expected to.  But if we know in detail
+upon what the result depends, we can look to see whether the
+required conditions are there.  The method extends our practical
+control.  For if some of the conditions are missing, we may, if
+we know what the needed antecedents for an effect are, set to
+work to supply them; or, if they are such as to produce
+undesirable effects as well, we may eliminate some of the
+superfluous causes and economize effort.
+
+In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and
+what happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try
+experience is made explicit.  Its quantity increases so that its
+proportionate value is very different.  Hence the quality of the
+experience changes; the change is so significant that we may call
+this type of experience reflective -- that is, reflective par
+excellence.  The deliberate cultivation of this phase of thought
+constitutes thinking as a distinctive experience.  Thinking, in
+other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific
+connections between something which we do and the consequences
+which result, so that the two become continuous.  Their
+isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary going
+together, is canceled; a unified developing situation takes its
+place.  The occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is
+reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does.
+
+Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the
+intelligent element in our experience.  It makes it possible to
+act with an end in view.  It is the condition of our having aims.
+As soon as an infant begins to expect he begins to use something
+which is now going on as a sign of something to follow; he is, in
+however simple a fashion, judging.  For he takes one thing as
+evidence of something else, and so recognizes a relationship.
+Any future development, however elaborate it may be, is only an
+extending and a refining of this simple act of inference.  All
+that the wisest man can do is to observe what is going on more
+widely and more minutely and then select more carefully from what
+is noted just those factors which point to something to happen.
+The opposites, once more, to thoughtful action are routine and
+capricious behavior.  The former accepts what has been customary
+as a full measure of possibility and omits to take into account
+the connections of the particular things done.  The latter makes
+the momentary act a measure of value, and ignores the connections
+of our personal action with the energies of the environment.  It
+says, virtually, "things are to be just as I happen to like them
+at this instant," as routine says in effect "let things continue
+just as I have found them in the past." Both refuse to
+acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which flow
+from present action.  Reflection is the acceptance of such
+responsibility.
+
+The starting point of any process of thinking is something going
+on, something which just as it stands is incomplete or
+unfulfilled.  Its point, its meaning lies literally in what it is
+going to be, in how it is going to turn out.  As this is written,
+the world is filled with the clang of contending armies.  For an
+active participant in the war, it is clear that the momentous
+thing is the issue, the future consequences, of this and that
+happening.  He is identified, for the time at least, with the
+issue; his fate hangs upon the course things are taking.  But
+even for an onlooker in a neutral country, the significance of
+every move made, of every advance here and retreat there, lies in
+what it portends.  To think upon the news as it comes to us is to
+attempt to see what is indicated as probable or possible
+regarding an outcome.  To fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with
+this and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is not to
+think.  It is to turn ourselves into a piece of registering
+apparatus.  To consider the bearing of the occurrence upon what
+may be, but is not yet, is to think.  Nor will the reflective
+experience be different in kind if we substitute distance in time
+for separation in space.  Imagine the war done with, and a future
+historian giving an account of it.  The episode is, by
+assumption, past.  But he cannot give a thoughtful account of the
+war save as he preserves the time sequence; the meaning of each
+occurrence, as he deals with it, lies in what was future for it,
+though not for the historian.  To take it by itself as a complete
+existence is to take it unreflectively.  Reflection also implies
+concern with the issue -- a certain sympathetic identification of
+our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of the course
+of events.  For the general in the war, or a common soldier, or a
+citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to
+thinking is direct and urgent.  For neutrals, it is indirect and
+dependent upon imagination.  But the flagrant partisanship of
+human nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to
+identify ourselves with one possible course of events, and to
+reject the other as foreign.  If we cannot take sides in overt
+action, and throw in our little weight to help determine the
+final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively.  We
+desire this or that outcome.  One wholly indifferent to the
+outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all.
+From this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of
+sharing in the consequences of what goes on, flows one of the
+chief paradoxes of thought.  Born in partiality, in order to
+accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached
+impartiality.  The general who allows his hopes and desires to
+affect his observations and interpretations of the existing
+situation will surely make a mistake in calculation.  While hopes
+and fears may be the chief motive for a thoughtful following of
+the war on the part of an onlooker in a neutral country, he too
+will think ineffectively in the degree in which his preferences
+modify the stuff of his observations and reasonings.  There is,
+however, no incompatibility between the fact that the occasion of
+reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is going on and the
+fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping one's
+self out of the data.  The almost insurmountable difficulty of
+achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in
+situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the
+course of events and is designed to influence the result.  Only
+gradually and with a widening of the area of vision through a
+growth of social sympathies does thinking develop to include what
+lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of great significance
+for education.
+
+To say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which
+are still going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking
+occurs when things are uncertain or doubtful or problematic.
+Only what is finished, completed, is wholly assured.  Where there
+is reflection there is suspense.  The object of thinking is to
+help reach a conclusion, to project a possible termination on the
+basis of what is already given.  Certain other facts about
+thinking accompany this feature.  Since the situation in which
+thinking occurs is a doubtful one, thinking is a process of
+inquiry, of looking into things, of investigating.  Acquiring is
+always secondary, and instrumental to the act of inquiring.  It
+is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand.  We
+sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar
+prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students.  But
+all thinking is research, and all research is native, original,
+with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world
+already is sure of what he is still looking for.
+
+It also follows that all thinking involves a risk.  Certainty
+cannot be guaranteed in advance.  The invasion of the unknown is
+of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance.  The
+conclusions of thinking, till confirmed by the event, are,
+accordingly, more or less tentative or hypothetical.  Their
+dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of the issue,
+in fact.  The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we
+learn?  For either we know already what we are after, or else we
+do not know.  In neither case is learning possible; on the first
+alternative because we know already; on the second, because we do
+not know what to look for, nor if, by chance, we find it can we
+tell that it is what we were after.  The dilemma makes no
+provision for coming to know, for learning; it assumes either
+complete knowledge or complete ignorance.  Nevertheless the
+twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists.  The possibility
+of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact
+which the Greek dilemma overlooked.  The perplexities of the
+situation suggest certain ways out.  We try these ways, and
+either push our way out, in which case we know we have found what
+we were looking for, or the situation gets darker and more
+confused--in which case, we know we are still ignorant.
+Tentative means trying out, feeling one's way along
+provisionally.  Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice
+piece of formal logic.  But it is also true that as long as men
+kept a sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science
+made only slow and accidental advance.  Systematic advance in
+invention and discovery began when men recognized that they could
+utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to
+guide action in tentative explorations, whose development would
+confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture.  While the
+Greeks made knowledge more than learning, modern science makes
+conserved knowledge only a means to learning, to discovery.  To
+recur to our illustration.  A commanding general cannot base his
+actions upon either absolute certainty or absolute ignorance.  He
+has a certain amount of information at hand which is, we will
+assume, reasonably trustworthy.  He then infers certain
+prospective movements, thus assigning meaning to the bare facts
+of the given situation.  His inference is more or less dubious
+and hypothetical.  But he acts upon it.  He develops a plan of
+procedure, a method of dealing with the situation.  The
+consequences which directly follow from his acting this way
+rather than that test and reveal the worth of his reflections.
+What he already knows functions and has value in what he learns.
+But will this account apply in the case of the one in a neutral
+country who is thoughtfully following as best he can the progress
+of events? In form, yes, though not of course in content.  It is
+self-evident that his guesses about the future indicated by
+present facts, guesses by which he attempts to supply meaning to
+a multitude of disconnected data, cannot be the basis of a method
+which shall take effect in the campaign.  That is not his
+problem.  But in the degree in which he is actively thinking, and
+not merely passively following the course of events, his
+tentative inferences will take effect in a method of procedure
+appropriate to his situation.  He will anticipate certain future
+moves, and will be on the alert to see whether they happen or
+not.  In the degree in which he is intellectually concerned, or
+thoughtful, he will be actively on the lookout; he will take
+steps which although they do not affect the campaign, modify in
+some degree his subsequent actions.  Otherwise his later "I told
+you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does not mark any
+testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a coincidence
+that yields emotional satisfaction -- and includes a large factor
+of self-deception.  The case is comparable to that of an
+astronomer who from given data has been led to foresee (infer) a
+future eclipse.  No matter how great the mathematical
+probability, the inference is hypothetical -- a matter of
+probability.  1 The hypothesis as to the date and position of the
+anticipated eclipse becomes the material of forming a method of
+future conduct.  Apparatus is arranged; possibly an expedition is
+made to some far part of the globe.  In any case, some active
+steps are taken which actually change some physical conditions.
+And apart from such steps and the consequent modification of the
+situation, there is no completion of the act of thinking.  It
+remains suspended.  Knowledge, already attained knowledge,
+controls thinking and makes it fruitful.
+
+So much for the general features of a reflective experience.
+They are (i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that
+one is implicated in an incomplete situation whose full character
+is not yet determined; (ii) a conjectural anticipation -- a
+tentative interpretation of the given elements, attributing to
+them a tendency to effect certain consequences; (iii) a careful
+survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of all
+attainable consideration which will define and clarify the
+problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative
+hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent, because
+squaring with a wider range of facts; (v) taking one stand upon
+the projected hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to
+the existing state of affairs: doing something overtly to bring
+about the anticipated result, and thereby testing the hypothesis.
+It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which mark
+off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and
+error plane.  They make thinking itself into an experience.
+Nevertheless, we never get wholly beyond the trial and error
+situation.  Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought
+has to be tried in the world and thereby tried out.  And since it
+can never take into account all the connections, it can never
+cover with perfect accuracy all the consequences.  Yet a
+thoughtful survey of conditions is so careful, and the guessing
+at results so controlled, that we have a right to mark off the
+reflective experience from the grosser trial and error forms of
+action.
+
+Summary.  In determining the place of thinking in experience we
+first noted that experience involves a connection of doing or
+trying with something which is undergone in consequence.  A
+separation of the active doing phase from the passive undergoing
+phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience.  Thinking is
+the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between
+what is done and its consequences.  It notes not only that they
+are connected, but the details of the connection.  It makes
+connecting links explicit in the form of relationships.  The
+stimulus to thinking is found when we wish to determine the
+significance of some act, performed or to be performed.  Then we
+anticipate consequences.  This implies that the situation as it
+stands is, either in fact or to us, incomplete and hence
+indeterminate.  The projection of consequences means a proposed
+or tentative solution.  To perfect this hypothesis, existing
+conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications
+of the hypothesis developed -- an operation called reasoning.
+Then the suggested solution -- the idea or theory -- has to be
+tested by acting upon it.  If it brings about certain
+consequences, certain determinate changes, in the world, it is
+accepted as valid.  Otherwise it is modified, and another trial
+made.  Thinking includes all of these steps, -- the sense of a
+problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and
+rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active
+experimental testing.  While all thinking results in knowledge,
+ultimately the value of knowledge is subordinate to its use in
+thinking.  For we live not in a settled and finished world, but
+in one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective,
+and where retrospect -- and all knowledge as distinct from
+thought is retrospect -- is of value in the solidity, security,
+and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.
+
+1 It is most important for the practice of science that men in
+many cases can calculate the degree of probability and the amount
+of probable error involved, but that does alter the features of
+the situation as described.  It refines them.
+
+
+Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
+
+1.  The Essentials of Method.  No one doubts, theoretically, the
+importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking.  But
+apart from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in
+practice as in theory, there is not adequate theoretical
+recognition that all which the school can or need do for pupils,
+so far as their minds are concerned (that is, leaving out certain
+specialized muscular abilities), is to develop their ability to
+think.  The parceling out of instruction among various ends such
+as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling, writing, drawing,
+reciting); acquiring information (in history and geography), and
+training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way in which
+we accomplish all three.  Thinking which is not connected with
+increase of efficiency in action, and with learning more about
+ourselves and the world in which we live, has something the
+matter with it just as thought (See ante, p.  147).  And skill
+obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of
+the purposes for which it is to be used.  It consequently leaves
+a man at the mercy of his routine habits and of the authoritative
+control of others, who know what they are about and who are not
+especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement.  And
+information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a
+mind-crushing load.  Since it simulates knowledge and thereby
+develops the poison of conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to
+further growth in the grace of intelligence.  The sole direct
+path to enduring improvement in the methods of instruction and
+learning consists in centering upon the conditions which exact,
+promote, and test thinking.  Thinking is the method of
+intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards mind.
+We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but
+the important thing to bear in mind about method is that
+thinking is method, the method of intelligent experience in the
+course which it takes.
+
+I.  The initial stage of that developing experience which is
+called thinking is experience.  This remark may sound like a
+silly truism.  It ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not.
+On the contrary, thinking is often regarded both in philosophic
+theory and in educational practice as something cut off from
+experience, and capable of being cultivated in isolation.  In
+fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often urged as
+the sufficient ground for attention to thinking.  Experience is
+then thought to be confined to the senses and appetites; to a
+mere material world, while thinking proceeds from a higher
+faculty (of reason), and is occupied with spiritual or at least
+literary things.  So, oftentimes, a sharp distinction is made
+between pure mathematics as a peculiarly fit subject matter of
+thought (since it has nothing to do with physical existences) and
+applied mathematics, which has utilitarian but not mental value.
+
+Speaking generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of
+instruction lies in supposing that experience on the part of
+pupils may be assumed.  What is here insisted upon is the
+necessity of an actual empirical situation as the initiating
+phase of thought.  Experience is here taken as previously
+defined: trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly
+do something to one in return.  The fallacy consists in supposing
+that we can begin with ready-made subject matter of arithmetic,
+or geography, or whatever, irrespective of some direct personal
+experience of a situation.  Even the kindergarten and Montessori
+techniques are so anxious to get at intellectual distinctions,
+without "waste of time," that they tend to ignore -- or reduce --
+the immediate crude handling of the familiar material of
+experience, and to introduce pupils at once to material which
+expresses the intellectual distinctions which adults have made.
+But the first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever
+age of maturity, must inevitably be of the trial and error sort.
+An individual must actually try, in play or work, to do something
+with material in carrying out his own impulsive activity, and
+then note the interaction of his energy and that of the material
+employed.  This is what happens when a child at first begins to
+build with blocks, and it is equally what happens when a
+scientific man in his laboratory begins to experiment with
+unfamiliar objects.
+
+Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is
+to be aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic
+as possible.  To realize what an experience, or empirical
+situation, means, we have to call to mind the sort of situation
+that presents itself outside of school; the sort of occupations
+that interest and engage activity in ordinary life.  And careful
+inspection of methods which are permanently successful in formal
+education, whether in arithmetic or learning to read, or studying
+geography, or learning physics or a foreign language, will reveal
+that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go
+back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out of
+school in ordinary life.  They give the pupils something to do,
+not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to
+demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections;
+learning naturally results.
+
+That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse
+thinking means of course that it should suggest something to do
+which is not either routine or capricious--something, in other
+words, presenting what is new (and hence uncertain or
+problematic) and yet sufficiently connected with existing habits
+to call out an effective response.  An effective response means
+one which accomplishes a perceptible result, in distinction from
+a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences cannot be
+mentally connected with what is done.  The most significant
+question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or
+experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem
+it involves.
+
+At first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods
+measured well up to the standard here set.  The giving of
+problems, the putting of questions, the assigning of tasks, the
+magnifying of difficulties, is a large part of school work.  But
+it is indispensable to discriminate between genuine and simulated
+or mock problems.  The following questions may aid in making such
+discrimination.  (a) Is there anything but a problem? Does the
+question naturally suggest itself within some situation or
+personal experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem only for
+the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic? Is it
+the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage
+experimentation outside of school? (b) Is it the pupil's own
+problem, or is it the teacher's or textbook's problem, made a
+problem for the pupil only because he cannot get the required
+mark or be promoted or win the teacher's approval, unless he
+deals with it? Obviously, these two questions overlap.  They are
+two ways of getting at the same point: Is the experience a
+personal thing of such a nature as inherently to stimulate and
+direct observation of the connections involved, and to lead to
+inference and its testing? Or is it imposed from without, and is
+the pupil's problem simply to meet the external requirement?
+Such questions may give us pause in deciding upon the extent to
+which current practices are adapted to develop reflective habits.
+The physical equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom
+are hostile to the existence of real situations of experience.
+What is there similar to the conditions of everyday life which
+will generate difficulties?  Almost everything testifies to the
+great premium put upon listening, reading, and the reproduction
+of what is told and read.  It is hardly possible to overstate the
+contrast between such conditions and the situations of active
+contact with things and persons in the home, on the playground,
+in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life.  Much of it
+is not even comparable with the questions which may arise in the
+mind of a boy or girl in conversing with others or in reading
+books outside of the school.  No one has ever explained why
+children are so full of questions outside of the school (so that
+they pester grown-up persons if they get any encouragement), and
+the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity about the subject
+matter of school lessons.  Reflection on this striking contrast
+will throw light upon the question of how far customary school
+conditions supply a context of experience in which problems
+naturally suggest themselves.  No amount of improvement in the
+personal technique of the instructor will wholly remedy this
+state of things.  There must be more actual material, more stuff,
+more appliances, and more opportunities for doing things, before
+the gap can be overcome.  And where children are engaged in doing
+things and in discussing what arises in the course of their
+doing, it is found, even with comparatively indifferent modes of
+instruction, that children's inquiries are spontaneous and
+numerous, and the proposals of solution advanced, varied, and
+ingenious.
+
+As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations
+which generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his;
+or, rather, they are his only as a pupil, not as a human being.
+Hence the lamentable waste in carrying over such expertness as is
+achieved in dealing with them to the affairs of life beyond the
+schoolroom.  A pupil has a problem, but it is the problem of
+meeting the peculiar requirements set by the teacher.  His
+problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher wants, what
+will satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and
+outward deportment.  Relationship to subject matter is no longer
+direct.  The occasions and material of thought are not found in
+the arithmetic or the history or geography itself, but in
+skillfully adapting that material to the teacher's requirements.
+The pupil studies, but unconsciously to himself the objects of
+his study are the conventions and standards of the school system
+and school authority, not the nominal "studies." The thinking
+thus evoked is artificially one-sided at the best.  At its worst,
+the problem of the pupil is not how to meet the requirements of
+school life, but how to seem to meet them -- or, how to come near
+enough to meeting them to slide along without an undue amount of
+friction.  The type of judgment formed by these devices is not a
+desirable addition to character.  If these statements give too
+highly colored a picture of usual school methods, the
+exaggeration may at least serve to illustrate the point: the need
+of active pursuits, involving the use of material to accomplish
+purposes, if there are to be situations which normally generate
+problems occasioning thoughtful inquiry.
+
+II.  There must be data at command to supply the considerations
+required in dealing with the specific difficulty which has
+presented itself.  Teachers following a "developing" method
+sometimes tell children to think things out for themselves as if
+they could spin them out of their own heads.  The material of
+thinking is not thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the
+relations of things.  In other words, to think effectively one
+must have had, or now have, experiences which will furnish him
+resources for coping with the difficulty at hand.  A difficulty
+is an indispensable stimulus to thinking, but not all
+difficulties call out thinking.  Sometimes they overwhelm and
+submerge and discourage.  The perplexing situation must be
+sufficiently like situations which have already been dealt with
+so that pupils will have some control of the meanings of handling
+it.  A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the
+difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and
+small enough so that, in addition to the confusion naturally
+attending the novel elements, there shall be luminous familiar
+spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.
+
+In one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what
+psychological means the subject matter for reflection is
+provided.  Memory, observation, reading, communication, are all
+avenues for supplying data.  The relative proportion to be
+obtained from each is a matter of the specific features of the
+particular problem in hand.  It is foolish to insist upon
+observation of objects presented to the senses if the student is
+so familiar with the objects that he could just as well recall
+the facts independently.  It is possible to induce undue and
+crippling dependence upon sense-presentations.  No one can carry
+around with him a museum of all the things whose properties will
+assist the conduct of thought.  A well-trained mind is one that
+has a maximum of resources behind it, so to speak, and that is
+accustomed to go over its past experiences to see what they
+yield.  On the other hand, a quality or relation of even a
+familiar object may previously have been passed over, and be just
+the fact that is helpful in dealing with the question.  In this
+case direct observation is called for.  The same principle
+applies to the use to be made of observation on one hand and of
+reading and "telling" on the other.  Direct observation is
+naturally more vivid and vital.  But it has its limitations; and
+in any case it is a necessary part of education that one should
+acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his
+immediately personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of
+others.  Excessive reliance upon others for data (whether got
+from reading or listening) is to be depreciated.  Most
+objectionable of all is the probability that others, the book or
+the teacher, will supply solutions ready-made, instead of giving
+material that the student has to adapt and apply to the question
+in hand for himself.
+
+There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is
+usually both too much and too little information supplied by
+others.  The accumulation and acquisition of information for
+purposes of reproduction in recitation and examination is made
+too much of.  "Knowledge," in the sense of information, means the
+working capital, the indispensable resources, of further inquiry;
+of finding out, or learning, more things.  Frequently it is
+treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up
+and display it when called for.  This static, cold-storage ideal
+of knowledge is inimical to educative development.  It not only
+lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking.
+No one could construct a house on ground cluttered with
+miscellaneous junk.  Pupils who have stored their "minds" with
+all kinds of material which they have never put to intellectual
+uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think.  They have
+no practice in selecting what is appropriate, and no criterion to
+go by; everything is on the same dead static level.  On the other
+hand, it is quite open to question whether, if information
+actually functioned in experience through use in application to
+the student's own purposes, there would not be need of more
+varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually
+at command.
+
+III.  The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already
+acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings,
+suppositions, tentative explanations:--ideas, in short.  Careful
+observation and recollection determine what is given, what is
+already there, and hence assured.  They cannot furnish what is
+lacking.  They define, clarify, and locate the question; they
+cannot supply its answer.  Projection, invention, ingenuity,
+devising come in for that purpose.  The data arouse suggestions,
+and only by reference to the specific data can we pass upon the
+appropriateness of the suggestions.  But the suggestions run
+beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience.  They
+forecast possible results, things to do, not facts (things
+already done).  Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a
+leap from the known.
+
+In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it
+is presented) is creative, -- an incursion into the novel.  It
+involves some inventiveness.  What is suggested must, indeed, be
+familiar in some context; the novelty, the inventive devising,
+clings to the new light in which it is seen, the different use to
+which it is put.  When Newton thought of his theory of
+gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought was not found in
+its materials.  They were familiar; many of them commonplaces --
+sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of numbers.
+These were not original ideas; they were established facts.  His
+originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances
+were put by introduction into an unfamiliar context.  The same is
+true of every striking scientific discovery, every great
+invention, every admirable artistic production.  Only silly folk
+identify creative originality with the extraordinary and
+fanciful; others recognize that its measure lies in putting
+everyday things to uses which had not occurred to others.  The
+operation is novel, not the materials out of which it is
+constructed.
+
+The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is
+original in a projection of considerations which have not been
+previously apprehended.  The child of three who discovers what
+can be done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make
+by putting five cents and five cents together, is really a
+discoverer, even though everybody else in the world knows it.
+There is a genuine increment of experience; not another item
+mechanically added on, but enrichment by a new quality.  The
+charm which the spontaneity of little children has for
+sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual
+originality.  The joy which children themselves experience is the
+joy of intellectual constructiveness -- of creativeness, if the
+word may be used without misunderstanding.  The educational moral
+I am chiefly concerned to draw is not, however, that teachers
+would find their own work less of a grind and strain if school
+conditions favored learning in the sense of discovery and not in
+that of storing away what others pour into them; nor that it
+would be possible to give even children and youth the delights of
+personal intellectual productiveness -- true and important as are
+these things.  It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be
+conveyed as an idea from one person to another.  When it is told,
+it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an
+idea.  The communication may stimulate the other person to
+realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or
+it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning
+effort at thought.  But what he directly gets cannot be an idea.
+Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first
+hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think.  When
+the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which stimulate
+thinking and has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the
+activities of the learner by entering into a common or conjoint
+experience, all has been done which a second party can do to
+instigate learning.  The rest lies with the one directly
+concerned.  If he cannot devise his own solution (not of course
+in isolation, but in correspondence with the teacher and other
+pupils) and find his own way out he will not learn, not even if
+he can recite some correct answer with one hundred per cent
+accuracy.  We can and do supply ready-made "ideas" by the
+thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see that the one
+learning engages in significant situations where his own
+activities generate, support, and clinch ideas -- that is,
+perceived meanings or connections.  This does not mean that the
+teacher is to stand off and look on; the alternative to
+furnishing ready-made subject matter and listening to the
+accuracy with which it is reproduced is not quiescence, but
+participation, sharing, in an activity.  In such shared activity,
+the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing it,
+a teacher -- and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is,
+on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the
+better.  IV.  Ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble
+guesses or dignified theories, are anticipations of possible
+solutions.  They are anticipations of some continuity or
+connection of an activity and a consequence which has not as yet
+shown itself.  They are therefore tested by the operation of
+acting upon them.  They are to guide and organize further
+observations, recollections, and experiments.  They are
+intermediate in learning, not final.  All educational reformers,
+as we have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the
+passivity of traditional education.  They have opposed pouring in
+from without, and absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked
+drilling in material as into hard and resisting rock.  But it is
+not easy to secure conditions which will make the getting of an
+idea identical with having an experience which widens and makes
+more precise our contact with the environment.  Activity, even
+self-activity, is too easily thought of as something merely
+mental, cooped up within the head, or finding expression only
+through the vocal organs.
+
+While the need of application of ideas gained in study is
+acknowledged by all the more successful methods of instruction,
+the exercises in application are sometimes treated as devices for
+fixing what has already been learned and for getting greater
+practical skill in its manipulation.  These results are genuine
+and not to be despised.  But practice in applying what has been
+gained in study ought primarily to have an intellectual quality.
+As we have already seen, thoughts just as thoughts are
+incomplete.  At best they are tentative; they are suggestions,
+indications.  They are standpoints and methods for dealing with
+situations of experience.  Till they are applied in these
+situations they lack full point and reality.  Only application
+tests them, and only testing confers full meaning and a sense of
+their reality.  Short of use made of them, they tend to segregate
+into a peculiar world of their own.  It may be seriously
+questioned whether the philosophies (to which reference has been
+made in section 2 of chapter X) which isolate mind and set it
+over against the world did not have their origin in the fact that
+the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large
+stock of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act
+upon and test.  Consequently men were thrown back into their own
+thoughts as ends in themselves.
+
+However this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar
+artificiality attaches to much of what is learned in schools.  It
+can hardly be said that many students consciously think of the
+subject matter as unreal; but it assuredly does not possess for
+them the kind of reality which the subject matter of their vital
+experiences possesses.  They learn not to expect that sort of
+reality of it; they become habituated to treating it as having
+reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and
+examinations.  That it should remain inert for the experiences of
+daily life is more or less a matter of course.  The bad effects
+are twofold.  Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment
+which it should; it is not fertilized by school learning.  And
+the attitudes which spring from getting used to and accepting
+half-understood and ill-digested material weaken vigor and
+efficiency of thought.
+
+If we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the
+sake of suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual
+development of thought.  Where schools are equipped with
+laboratories, shops, and gardens, where dramatizations, plays,
+and games are freely used, opportunities exist for reproducing
+situations of life, and for acquiring and applying information
+and ideas in the carrying forward of progressive experiences.
+Ideas are not segregated, they do not form an isolated island.
+They animate and enrich the ordinary course of life.  Information
+is vitalized by its function; by the place it occupies in
+direction of action.  The phrase "opportunities exist" is used
+purposely.  They may not be taken advantage of; it is possible to
+employ manual and constructive activities in a physical way, as
+means of getting just bodily skill; or they may be used almost
+exclusively for "utilitarian," i.e., pecuniary, ends.  But the
+disposition on the part of upholders of "cultural" education to
+assume that such activities are merely physical or professional
+in quality, is itself a product of the philosophies which isolate
+mind from direction of the course of experience and hence from
+action upon and with things.  When the "mental" is regarded as a
+self-contained separate realm, a counterpart fate befalls bodily
+activity and movements.  They are regarded as at the best mere
+external annexes to mind.  They may be necessary for the
+satisfaction of bodily needs and the attainment of external
+decency and comfort, but they do not occupy a necessary place in
+mind nor enact an indispensable role in the completion of
+thought.  Hence they have no place in a liberal education--i.e.,
+one which is concerned with the interests of intelligence.  If
+they come in at all, it is as a concession to the material needs
+of the masses.  That they should be allowed to invade the
+education of the elite is unspeakable.  This conclusion follows
+irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind, but by the
+same logic it disappears when we perceive what mind really is --
+namely, the purposive and directive factor in the
+development of experience.  While it is desirable that all
+educational institutions should be equipped so as to give
+students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and
+information in active pursuits typifying important social
+situations, it will, doubtless, be a long time before all of them
+are thus furnished.  But this state of affairs does not afford
+instructors an excuse for folding their hands and persisting in
+methods which segregate school knowledge.  Every recitation in
+every subject gives an opportunity for establishing cross
+connections between the subject matter of the lesson and the
+wider and more direct experiences of everyday life.  Classroom
+instruction falls into three kinds.  The least desirable treats
+each lesson as an independent whole.  It does not put upon the
+student the responsibility of finding points of contact between
+it and other lessons in the same subject, or other subjects of
+study.  Wiser teachers see to it that the student is
+systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons to help
+understand the present one, and also to use the present to throw
+additional light upon what has already been acquired.  Results
+are better, but school subject matter is still isolated.  Save by
+accident, out-of-school experience is left in its crude and
+comparatively irreflective state.  It is not subject to the
+refining and expanding influences of the more accurate and
+comprehensive material of direct instruction.  The latter is not
+motivated and impregnated with a sense of reality by being
+intermingled with the realities of everyday life.  The best type
+of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this
+interconnection.  It puts the student in the habitual attitude of
+finding points of contact and mutual bearings.
+
+Summary.  Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in
+which they center in the production of good habits of thinking.
+While we may speak, without error, of the method of thought, the
+important thing is that thinking is the method of an educative
+experience.  The essentials of method are therefore identical
+with the essentials of reflection.  They are first that the pupil
+have a genuine situation of experience -- that there be a
+continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake;
+secondly, that a genuine problem develop within this situation as
+a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess the information and
+make the observations needed to deal with it; fourth, that
+suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be responsible
+for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have opportunity
+and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their
+meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.
+
+Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
+
+1.  The Unity of Subject Matter and Method.
+
+The trinity of school topics is subject matter, methods, and
+administration or government.  We have been concerned with the
+two former in recent chapters.  It remains to disentangle them
+from the context in which they have been referred to, and discuss
+explicitly their nature.  We shall begin with the topic of
+method, since that lies closest to the considerations of the last
+chapter.  Before taking it up, it may be well, however, to call
+express attention to one implication of our theory; the
+connection of subject matter and method with each other.  The
+idea that mind and the world of things and persons are two
+separate and independent realms -- a theory which philosophically
+is known as dualism -- carries with it the conclusion that method
+and subject matter of instruction are separate affairs.  Subject
+matter then becomes a ready-made systematized classification of
+the facts and principles of the world of nature and man.  Method
+then has for its province a consideration of the ways in which
+this antecedent subject matter may be best presented to and
+impressed upon the mind; or, a consideration of the ways in which
+the mind may be externally brought to bear upon the matter so as
+to facilitate its acquisition and possession.  In theory, at
+least, one might deduce from a science of the mind as something
+existing by itself a complete theory of methods of learning, with
+no knowledge of the subjects to which the methods are to be
+applied.  Since many who are actually most proficient in various
+branches of subject matter are wholly innocent of these methods,
+this state of affairs gives opportunity for the retort that
+pedagogy, as an alleged science of methods of the mind in
+learning, is futile; -- a mere screen for concealing the
+necessity a teacher is under of profound and accurate
+acquaintance with the subject in hand.
+
+But since thinking is a directed movement of subject matter to a
+completing issue, and since mind is the deliberate and
+intentional phase of the process, the notion of any such split is
+radically false.  The fact that the material of a science is
+organized is evidence that it has already been subjected to
+intelligence; it has been methodized, so to say.  Zoology as a
+systematic branch of knowledge represents crude, scattered facts
+of our ordinary acquaintance with animals after they have been
+subjected to careful examination, to deliberate supplementation,
+and to arrangement to bring out connections which assist
+observation, memory, and further inquiry.  Instead of furnishing
+a starting point for learning, they mark out a consummation.
+Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it
+most effective in use.  Never is method something outside of the
+material.
+
+How about method from the standpoint of an individual who is
+dealing with subject matter? Again, it is not something external.
+It is simply an effective treatment of material -- efficiency
+meaning such treatment as utilizes the material (puts it to a
+purpose) with a minimum of waste of time and energy.  We can
+distinguish a way of acting, and discuss it by itself; but the
+way exists only as way-of-dealing-with-material.  Method is not
+antithetical to subject matter; it is the effective direction of
+subject matter to desired results.  It is antithetical to random
+and ill-considered action, -- ill-considered signifying
+ill-adapted.
+
+The statement that method means directed movement of subject
+matter towards ends is formal.  An illustration may give it
+content.  Every artist must have a method, a technique, in doing
+his work.  Piano playing is not hitting the keys at random.  It
+is an orderly way of using them, and the order is not something
+which exists ready- made in the musician's hands or brain prior
+to an activity dealing with the piano.  Order is found in the
+disposition of acts which use the piano and the hands and brain
+so as to achieve the result intended.  It is the action of the
+piano directed to accomplish the purpose of the piano as a
+musical instrument.  It is the same with "pedagogical" method.
+The only difference is that the piano is a mechanism constructed
+in advance for a single end; while the material of study is
+capable of indefinite uses.  But even in this regard the
+illustration may apply if we consider the infinite variety of
+kinds of music which a piano may produce, and the variations in
+technique required in the different musical results secured.
+Method in any case is but an effective way of employing some
+material for some end.
+
+These considerations may be generalized by going back to the
+conception of experience.  Experience as the perception of the
+connection between something tried and something undergone in
+consequence is a process.  Apart from effort to control the
+course which the process takes, there is no distinction of
+subject matter and method.  There is simply an activity which
+includes both what an individual does and what the environment
+does.  A piano player who had perfect mastery of his instrument
+would have no occasion to distinguish between his contribution
+and that of the piano.  In well-formed, smooth-running functions
+of any sort, -- skating, conversing, hearing music, enjoying a
+landscape, -- there is no consciousness of separation of the
+method of the person and of the subject matter.  In whole-hearted
+play and work there is the same phenomenon.
+
+When we reflect upon an experience instead of just having it, we
+inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects
+toward which we sustain the attitude.  When a man is eating, he
+is eating food.  He does not divide his act into eating and food.
+But if he makes a scientific investigation of the act, such a
+discrimination is the first thing he would effect.  He would
+examine on the one hand the properties of the nutritive material,
+and on the other hand the acts of the organism in appropriating
+and digesting.  Such reflection upon experience gives rise to a
+distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and the
+experiencing -- the how.  When we give names to this distinction
+we have subject matter and method as our terms.  There is the
+thing seen, heard, loved, hated, imagined, and there is the act
+of seeing, hearing, loving, hating, imagining, etc.
+
+This distinction is so natural and so important for certain
+purposes, that we are only too apt to regard it as a separation
+in existence and not as a distinction in thought.  Then we make a
+division between a self and the environment or world.  This
+separation is the root of the dualism of method and subject
+matter.  That is, we assume that knowing, feeling, willing, etc.,
+are things which belong to the self or mind in its isolation, and
+which then may be brought to bear upon an independent subject
+matter.  We assume that the things which belong in isolation to
+the self or mind have their own laws of operation irrespective of
+the modes of active energy of the object.  These laws are
+supposed to furnish method.  It would be no less absurd to
+suppose that men can eat without eating something, or that the
+structure and movements of the jaws, throat muscles, the
+digestive activities of stomach, etc., are not what they are
+because of the material with which their activity is engaged.
+Just as the organs of the organism are a continuous part of the
+very world in which food materials exist, so the capacities of
+seeing, hearing, loving, imagining are intrinsically connected
+with the subject matter of the world.  They are more truly ways
+in which the environment enters into experience and functions
+there than they are independent acts brought to bear upon things.
+Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world,
+subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single
+continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless
+in number) of energies.
+
+For the purpose of controlling the course or direction which the
+moving unity of experience takes we draw a mental distinction
+between the how and the what.  While there is no way of walking
+or of eating or of learning over and above the actual walking,
+eating, and studying, there are certain elements in the act which
+give the key to its more effective control.  Special attention to
+these elements makes them more obvious to perception (letting
+other factors recede for the time being from conspicuous
+recognition).  Getting an idea of how the experience proceeds
+indicates to us what factors must be secured or modified in order
+that it may go on more successfully.  This is only a somewhat
+elaborate way of saying that if a man watches carefully the
+growth of several plants, some of which do well and some of which
+amount to little or nothing, he may be able to detect the special
+conditions upon which the prosperous development of a plant
+depends.  These conditions, stated in an orderly sequence, would
+constitute the method or way or manner of its growth.  There is
+no difference between the growth of a plant and the prosperous
+development of an experience.  It is not easy, in either case, to
+seize upon just the factors which make for its best movement.
+But study of cases of success and failure and minute and
+extensive comparison, helps to seize upon causes.  When we have
+arranged these causes in order, we have a method of procedure or
+a technique.
+
+A consideration of some evils in education that flow from the
+isolation of method from subject matter will make the point more
+definite.
+
+(I) In the first place, there is the neglect (of which we have
+spoken) of concrete situations of experience.  There can be no
+discovery of a method without cases to be studied.  The method is
+derived from observation of what actually happens, with a view to
+seeing that it happen better next time.  But in instruction and
+discipline, there is rarely sufficient opportunity for children
+and youth to have the direct normal experiences from which
+educators might derive an idea of method or order of best
+development.  Experiences are had under conditions of such
+constraint that they throw little or no light upon the normal
+course of an experience to its fruition.  "Methods" have then to
+be authoritatively recommended to teachers, instead of being an
+expression of their own intelligent observations.  Under such
+circumstances, they have a mechanical uniformity, assumed to be
+alike for all minds.  Where flexible personal experiences are
+promoted by providing an environment which calls out directed
+occupations in work and play, the methods ascertained will vary
+with individuals -- for it is certain that each individual has
+something characteristic in his way of going at things.
+
+(ii) In the second place, the notion of methods isolated from
+subject matter is responsible for the false conceptions of
+discipline and interest already noted.  When the effective way of
+managing material is treated as something ready-made apart from
+material, there are just three possible ways in which to
+establish a relationship lacking by assumption.  One is to
+utilize excitement, shock of pleasure, tickling the palate.
+Another is to make the consequences of not attending painful; we
+may use the menace of harm to motivate concern with the alien
+subject matter.  Or a direct appeal may be made to the person to
+put forth effort without any reason.  We may rely upon immediate
+strain of "will." In practice, however, the latter method is
+effectual only when instigated by fear of unpleasant results.
+(iii) In the third place, the act of learning is made a direct
+and conscious end in itself.  Under normal conditions, learning
+is a product and reward of occupation with subject matter.
+Children do not set out, consciously, to learn walking or
+talking.  One sets out to give his impulses for communication and
+for fuller intercourse with others a show.  He learns in
+consequence of his direct activities.  The better methods of
+teaching a child, say, to read, follow the same road.  They do
+not fix his attention upon the fact that he has to learn
+something and so make his attitude self-conscious and
+constrained.  They engage his activities, and in the process of
+engagement he learns: the same is true of the more successful
+methods in dealing with number or whatever.  But when the subject
+matter is not used in carrying forward impulses and habits to
+significant results, it is just something to be learned.  The
+pupil's attitude to it is just that of having to learn it.
+Conditions more unfavorable to an alert and concentrated response
+would be hard to devise.  Frontal attacks are even more wasteful
+in learning than in war.  This does not mean, however, that
+students are to be seduced unaware into preoccupation with
+lessons.  It means that they shall be occupied with them for real
+reasons or ends, and not just as something to be learned.  This
+is accomplished whenever the pupil perceives the place occupied
+by the subject matter in the fulfilling of some experience.
+
+(iv) In the fourth place, under the influence of the conception
+of the separation of mind and material, method tends to be
+reduced to a cut and dried routine, to following mechanically
+prescribed steps.  No one can tell in how many schoolrooms
+children reciting in arithmetic or grammar are compelled to go
+through, under the alleged sanction of method, certain
+preordained verbal formulae.  Instead of being encouraged to
+attack their topics directly, experimenting with methods that
+seem promising and learning to discriminate by the consequences
+that accrue, it is assumed that there is one fixed method to be
+followed.  It is also naively assumed that if the pupils make
+their statements and explanations in a certain form of
+"analysis," their mental habits will in time conform.  Nothing
+has brought pedagogical theory into greater disrepute than the
+belief that it is identified with handing out to teachers recipes
+and models to be followed in teaching.  Flexibility and
+initiative in dealing with problems are characteristic of any
+conception to which method is a way of managing material to
+develop a conclusion.  Mechanical rigid woodenness is an
+inevitable corollary of any theory which separates mind from
+activity motivated by a purpose.
+
+2.  Method as General and as Individual.  In brief, the method of
+teaching is the method of an art, of action intelligently
+directed by ends.  But the practice of a fine art is far from
+being a matter of extemporized inspirations.  Study of the
+operations and results of those in the past who have greatly
+succeeded is essential.  There is always a tradition, or schools
+of art, definite enough to impress beginners, and often to take
+them captive.  Methods of artists in every branch depend upon
+thorough acquaintance with materials and tools; the painter must
+know canvas, pigments, brushes, and the technique of
+manipulation of all his appliances.  Attainment of this knowledge
+requires persistent and concentrated attention to objective
+materials.  The artist studies the progress of his own attempts
+to see what succeeds and what fails.  The assumption that there
+are no alternatives between following ready-made rules and
+trusting to native gifts, the inspiration of the moment and
+undirected "hard work," is contradicted by the procedures of
+every art.
+
+Such matters as knowledge of the past, of current technique, of
+materials, of the ways in which one's own best results are
+assured, supply the material for what may be called general
+method.  There exists a cumulative body of fairly stable methods
+for reaching results, a body authorized by past experience and by
+intellectual analysis, which an individual ignores at his peril.
+As was pointed out in the discussion of habit-forming (ante, p.
+49), there is always a danger that these methods will become
+mechanized and rigid, mastering an agent instead of being powers
+at command for his own ends.  But it is also true that the
+innovator who achieves anything enduring, whose work is more than
+a passing sensation, utilizes classic methods more than may
+appear to himself or to his critics.  He devotes them to new
+uses, and in so far transforms them.
+
+
+Education also has its general methods.  And if the application
+of this remark is more obvious in the case of the teacher than of
+the pupil, it is equally real in the case of the latter.  Part of
+his learning, a very important part, consists in becoming master
+of the methods which the experience of others has shown to be
+more efficient in like cases of getting knowledge.  1 These
+general methods are in no way opposed to individual initiative
+and originality -- to personal ways of doing things.  On the
+contrary they are reinforcements of them.  For there is radical
+difference between even the most general method and a prescribed
+rule.  The latter is a direct guide to action; the former
+operates indirectly through the enlightenment it supplies as to
+ends and means.  It operates, that is to say, through
+intelligence, and not through conformity to orders externally
+imposed.  Ability to use even in a masterly way an established
+technique gives no warranty of artistic work, for the latter also
+depends upon an animating idea.
+
+If knowledge of methods used by others does not directly tell us
+what to do, or furnish ready-made models, how does it operate?
+What is meant by calling a method intellectual? Take the case of
+a physician.  No mode of behavior more imperiously demands
+knowledge of established modes of diagnosis and treatment than
+does his.  But after all, cases are like, not identical.  To be
+used intelligently, existing practices, however authorized they
+may be, have to be adapted to the exigencies of particular cases.
+Accordingly, recognized procedures indicate to the physician what
+inquiries to set on foot for himself, what measures to try.  They
+are standpoints from which to carry on investigations; they
+economize a survey of the features of the particular case by
+suggesting the things to be especially looked into.  The
+physician's own personal attitudes, his own ways (individual
+methods) of dealing with the situation in which he is concerned,
+are not subordinated to the general principles of procedure, but
+are facilitated and directed by the latter.  The instance may
+serve to point out the value to the teacher of a knowledge of the
+psychological methods and the empirical devices found useful in
+the past.  When they get in the way of his own common sense, when
+they come between him and the situation in which he has to act,
+they are worse than useless.  But if he has acquired them as
+intellectual aids in sizing up the needs, resources, and
+difficulties of the unique experiences in which he engages, they
+are of constructive value.  In the last resort, just because
+everything depends upon his own methods of response, much depends
+upon how far he can utilize, in making his own response, the
+knowledge which has accrued in the experience of others.  As
+already intimated, every word of this account is directly
+applicable also to the method of the pupil, the way of learning.
+To suppose that students, whether in the primary school or in the
+university, can be supplied with models of method to be followed
+in acquiring and expounding a subject is to fall into a
+self-deception that has lamentable consequences.  (See ante, p.
+169.) One must make his own reaction in any case.  Indications of
+the standardized or general methods used in like cases by
+others--particularly by those who are already experts--are of
+worth or of harm according as they make his personal reaction
+more intelligent or as they induce a person to dispense with
+exercise of his own judgment.  If what was said earlier (See p.
+159) about originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding
+more of education than the capacities of average human nature
+permit, the difficulty is that we lie under the incubus of a
+superstition.  We have set up the notion of mind at large, of
+intellectual method that is the same for all.  Then we regard
+individuals as differing in the quantity of mind with which they
+are charged.  Ordinary persons are then expected to be ordinary.
+Only the exceptional are allowed to have originality.  The
+measure of difference between the average student and the genius
+is a measure of the absence of originality in the former.  But
+this notion of mind in general is a fiction.  How one person's
+abilities compare in quantity with those of another is none of
+the teacher's business.  It is irrelevant to his work.  What is
+required is that every individual shall have opportunities to
+employ his own powers in activities that have meaning.  Mind,
+individual method, originality (these are convertible terms)
+signify the quality of purposive or directed action.  If we act
+upon this conviction, we shall secure more originality even by
+the conventional standard than now develops.  Imposing an alleged
+uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all
+but the very exceptional.  And measuring originality by deviation
+from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.  Thus we stifle the
+distinctive quality of the many, and save in rare instances
+(like, say, that of Darwin) infect the rare geniuses with an
+unwholesome quality.
+
+3.  The Traits of Individual Method.  The most general features
+of the method of knowing have been given in our chapter on
+thinking.  They are the features of the reflective situation:
+Problem, collection and analysis of data, projection and
+elaboration of suggestions or ideas, experimental application and
+testing; the resulting conclusion or judgment.  The specific
+elements of an individual's method or way of attack upon a
+problem are found ultimately in his native tendencies and his
+acquired habits and interests.  The method of one will vary from
+that of another (and properly vary) as his original instinctive
+capacities vary, as his past experiences and his preferences
+vary.  Those who have already studied these matters are in
+possession of information which will help teachers in
+understanding the responses different pupils make, and help them
+in guiding these responses to greater efficiency.  Child-study,
+psychology, and a knowledge of social environment supplement the
+personal acquaintance gained by the teacher.  But methods remain
+the personal concern, approach, and attack of an individual, and
+no catalogue can ever exhaust their diversity of form and tint.
+
+Some attitudes may be named, however,-which are central in
+effective intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter.
+Among the most important are directness, open-mindedness,
+single-mindedness (or whole-heartedness), and responsibility.
+
+1.  It is easier to indicate what is meant by directness through
+negative terms than in positive ones.  Self-consciousness,
+embarrassment, and constraint are its menacing foes.  They
+indicate that a person is not immediately concerned with subject
+matter.  Something has come between which deflects concern to
+side issues.  A self-conscious person is partly thinking about
+his problem and partly about what others think of his
+performances.  Diverted energy means loss of power and confusion
+of ideas.  Taking an attitude is by no means identical with being
+conscious of one's attitude.  The former is spontaneous, naive,
+and simple.  It is a sign of whole-souled relationship between a
+person and what he is dealing with.  The latter is not of
+necessity abnormal.  It is sometimes the easiest way of
+correcting a false method of approach, and of improving the
+effectiveness of the means one is employing, -- as golf players,
+piano players, public speakers, etc., have occasionally to give
+especial attention to their position and movements.  But this
+need is occasional and temporary.  When it is effectual a person
+thinks of himself in terms of what is to be done, as one means
+among others of the realization of an end -- as in the case of a
+tennis player practicing to get the "feel" of a stroke.  In
+abnormal cases, one thinks of himself not as part of the agencies
+of execution, but as a separate object -- as when the player
+strikes an attitude thinking of the impression it will make upon
+spectators, or is worried because of the impression he fears his
+movements give rise to.
+
+Confidence is a good name for what is intended by the term
+directness.  It should not be confused, however, with
+self-confidence which may be a form of self-consciousness--or of
+"cheek." Confidence is not a name for what one thinks or feels
+about his attitude it is not reflex.  It denotes the
+straightforwardness with which one goes at what he has to do.  It
+denotes not conscious trust in the efficacy of one's powers but
+unconscious faith in the possibilities of the situation.  It
+signifies rising to the needs of the situation.  We have already
+pointed out (See p.  169) the objections to making students
+emphatically aware of the fact that they are studying or
+learning.  Just in the degree in which they are induced by the
+conditions to be so aware, they are not studying and learning.
+They are in a divided and complicated attitude.  Whatever methods
+of a teacher call a pupil's attention off from what he has to do
+and transfer it to his own attitude towards what he is doing
+impair directness of concern and action.  Persisted in, the pupil
+acquires a permanent tendency to fumble, to gaze about aimlessly,
+to look for some clew of action beside that which the subject
+matter supplies.  Dependence upon extraneous suggestions and
+directions, a state of foggy confusion, take the place of that
+sureness with which children (and grown-up people who have not
+been sophisticated by "education") confront the situations of
+life.
+
+2.  Open-mindedness.  Partiality is, as we have seen, an
+accompaniment of the existence of interest, since this means
+sharing, partaking, taking sides in some movement.  All the more
+reason, therefore, for an attitude of mind which actively
+welcomes suggestions and relevant information from all sides.  In
+the chapter on Aims it was shown that foreseen ends are factors
+in the development of a changing situation.  They are the means
+by which the direction of action is controlled.  They are
+subordinate to the situation, therefore, not the situation to
+them.  They are not ends in the sense of finalities to which
+everything must be bent and sacrificed.  They are, as foreseen,
+means of guiding the development of a situation.  A target is not
+the future goal of shooting; it is the centering factor in a
+present shooting.  Openness of mind means accessibility of mind
+to any and every consideration that will throw light upon the
+situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help
+determine the consequences of acting this way or that.
+Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as
+unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind.  But
+intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and
+consequent formation of new purposes and new responses.  These
+are impossible without an active disposition to welcome points of
+view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain considerations
+which modify existing purposes.  Retention of capacity to grow is
+the reward of such intellectual hospitality.  The worst thing
+about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest
+development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli.
+Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude;
+closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.
+
+Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt
+external results are the chief foes which the open-minded
+attitude meets in school.  The teacher who does not permit and
+encourage diversity of operation in dealing with questions is
+imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils -- restricting their
+vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens to approve.
+Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is,
+however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable,
+correct results.  The zeal for "answers" is the explanation of
+much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods.  Forcing and
+overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert
+and varied intellectual interest.
+
+Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness.  To hang out
+a sign saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the
+equivalent of hospitality.  But there is a kind of passivity,
+willingness to let experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen,
+which is an essential of development.  Results (external answers
+or solutions) may be hurried; processes may not be forced.  They
+take their own time to mature.  Were all instructors to realize
+that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct
+answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less
+than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
+
+3.  Single-mindedness.  So far as the word is concerned, much
+that was said under the head of "directness" is applicable.  But
+what the word is here intended to convey is completeness of
+interest, unity of purpose; the absence of suppressed but
+effectual ulterior aims for which the professed aim is but a
+mask.  It is equivalent to mental integrity.  Absorption,
+engrossment, full concern with subject matter for its own sake,
+nurture it.  Divided interest and evasion destroy it.
+
+Intellectual integrity, honesty, and sincerity are at bottom not
+matters of conscious purpose but of quality of active response.
+Their acquisition is fostered of course by conscious intent, but
+self-deception is very easy.  Desires are urgent.  When the
+demands and wishes of others forbid their direct expression they
+are easily driven into subterranean and deep channels.  Entire
+surrender, and wholehearted adoption of the course of action
+demanded by others are almost impossible.  Deliberate revolt or
+deliberate attempts to deceive others may result.  But the more
+frequent outcome is a confused and divided state of interest in
+which one is fooled as to one's own real intent.  One tries to
+serve two masters at once.  Social instincts, the strong desire
+to please others and get their approval, social training, the
+general sense of duty and of authority, apprehension of penalty,
+all lead to a half-hearted effort to conform, to "pay attention
+to the lesson," or whatever the requirement is.  Amiable
+individuals want to do what they are expected to do.  Consciously
+the pupil thinks he is doing this.  But his own desires are not
+abolished.  Only their evident exhibition is suppressed.  Strain
+of attention to what is hostile to desire is irksome; in spite of
+one's conscious wish, the underlying desires determine the main
+course of thought, the deeper emotional responses.  The mind
+wanders from the nominal subject and devotes itself to what is
+intrinsically more desirable.  A systematized divided attention
+expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result.
+One has only to recall his own experiences in school or at the
+present time when outwardly employed in actions which do not
+engage one's desires and purposes, to realize how prevalent is
+this attitude of divided attention -- double-mindedness.  We are
+so used to it that we take it for granted that a considerable
+amount of it is necessary.  It may be; if so, it is the more
+important to face its bad intellectual effects.  Obvious is the
+loss of energy of thought immediately available when one is
+consciously trying (or trying to seem to try) to attend to one
+matter, while unconsciously one's imagination is spontaneously
+going out to more congenial affairs.  More subtle and more
+permanently crippling to efficiency of intellectual activity is a
+fostering of habitual self-deception, with the confused sense of
+reality which accompanies it.  A double standard of reality, one
+for our own private and more or less concealed interests, and
+another for public and acknowledged concerns, hampers, in most of
+us, integrity and completeness of mental action.  Equally serious
+is the fact that a split is set up between conscious thought and
+attention and impulsive blind affection and desire.  Reflective
+dealings with the material of instruction is constrained and
+half-hearted; attention wanders.  The topics to which it wanders
+are unavowed and hence intellectually illicit; transactions with
+them are furtive.  The discipline that comes from regulating
+response by deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails; worse than
+that, the deepest concern and most congenial enterprises of the
+imagination (since they center about the things dearest to
+desire) are casual, concealed.  They enter into action in ways
+which are unacknowledged.  Not subject to rectification by
+consideration of consequences, they are demoralizing.
+
+School conditions favorable to this division of mind between
+avowed, public, and socially responsible undertakings, and
+private, ill-regulated, and suppressed indulgences of thought are
+not hard to find.  What is sometimes called "stern discipline,"
+i.e., external coercive pressure, has this tendency.  Motivation
+through rewards extraneous to the thing to be done has a like
+effect.  Everything that makes schooling merely preparatory (See
+ante, p.  55) works in this direction.  Ends being beyond the
+pupil's present grasp, other agencies have to be found to procure
+immediate attention to assigned tasks.  Some responses are
+secured, but desires and affections not enlisted must find other
+outlets.  Not less serious is exaggerated emphasis upon drill
+exercises designed to produce skill in action, independent of any
+engagement of thought -- exercises have no purpose but the
+production of automatic skill.  Nature abhors a mental vacuum.
+What do teachers imagine is happening to thought and emotion when
+the latter get no outlet in the things of immediate activity?
+Were they merely kept in temporary abeyance, or even only
+calloused, it would not be a matter of so much moment.  But they
+are not abolished; they are not suspended; they are not
+suppressed--save with reference to the task in question.  They
+follow their own chaotic and undisciplined course.  What is
+native, spontaneous, and vital in mental reaction goes unused and
+untested, and the habits formed are such that these qualities
+become less and less available for public and avowed ends.
+
+4.  Responsibility.  By responsibility as an element in
+intellectual attitude is meant the disposition to consider in
+advance the probable consequences of any projected step and
+deliberately to accept them: to accept them in the sense of
+taking them into account, acknowledging them in action, not
+yielding a mere verbal assent.  Ideas, as we have seen, are
+intrinsically standpoints and methods for bringing about a
+solution of a perplexing situation; forecasts calculated to
+influence responses.  It is only too easy to think that one
+accepts a statement or believes a suggested truth when one has
+not considered its implications; when one has made but a cursory
+and superficial survey of what further things one is committed to
+by acceptance.  Observation and recognition, belief and assent,
+then become names for lazy acquiescence in what is externally
+presented.
+
+It would be much better to have fewer facts and truths in
+instruction -- that is, fewer things supposedly accepted, -- if a
+smaller number of situations could be intellectually worked out
+to the point where conviction meant something real -- some
+identification of the self with the type of conduct demanded by
+facts and foresight of results.  The most permanent bad results
+of undue complication of school subjects and congestion of school
+studies and lessons are not the worry, nervous strain, and
+superficial acquaintance that follow (serious as these are), but
+the failure to make clear what is involved in really knowing and
+believing a thing.  Intellectual responsibility means severe
+standards in this regard.  These standards can be built up only
+through practice in following up and acting upon the meaning of
+what is acquired.
+
+Intellectual thoroughness is thus another name for the attitude
+we are considering.  There is a kind of thoroughness which is
+almost purely physical: the kind that signifies mechanical and
+exhausting drill upon all the details of a subject.  Intellectual
+thoroughness is seeing a thing through.  It depends upon a unity
+of purpose to which details are subordinated, not upon presenting
+a multitude of disconnected details.  It is manifested in the
+firmness with which the full meaning of the purpose is developed,
+not in attention, however "conscientious" it may be, to the steps
+of action externally imposed and directed.
+
+Summary.  Method is a statement of the way the subject matter of
+an experience develops most effectively and fruitfully.  It is
+derived, accordingly, from observation of the course of
+experiences where there is no conscious distinction of personal
+attitude and manner from material dealt with.  The assumption
+that method is something separate is connected with the notion of
+the isolation of mind and self from the world of things.  It
+makes instruction and learning formal, mechanical, constrained.
+While methods are individualized, certain features of the normal
+course of an experience to its fruition may be discriminated,
+because of the fund of wisdom derived from prior experiences and
+because of general similarities in the materials dealt with from
+time to time.  Expressed in terms of the attitude of the
+individual the traits of good method are straightforwardness,
+flexible intellectual interest or open-minded will to learn,
+integrity of purpose, and acceptance of responsibility for the
+consequences of one's activity including thought.
+
+
+1 This point is developed below in a discussion of what are
+termed psychological and logical methods respectively.  See p.
+219.
+
+
+Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
+
+1.  Subject Matter of Educator and of Learner.  So far as the
+nature of subject matter in principle is concerned, there is
+nothing to add to what has been said (See ante, p.  134).  It
+consists of the facts observed, recalled, read, and talked about,
+and the ideas suggested, in course of a development of a
+situation having a purpose.  This statement needs to be rendered
+more specific by connecting it with the materials of school
+instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum.  What is
+the significance of our definition in application to reading,
+writing, mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing,
+physics, chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on?
+Let us recur to two of the points made earlier in our discussion.
+The educator's part in the enterprise of education is to furnish
+the environment which stimulates responses and directs the
+learner's course.  In last analysis, all that the educator can do
+is modify stimuli so that response will as surely as is possible
+result in the formation of desirable intellectual and emotional
+dispositions.  Obviously studies or the subject matter of the
+curriculum have intimately to do with this business of supplying
+an environment.  The other point is the necessity of a social
+environment to give meaning to habits formed.  In what we have
+termed informal education, subject matter is carried directly in
+the matrix of social intercourse.  It is what the persons with
+whom an individual associates do and say.  This fact gives a clew
+to the understanding of the subject matter of formal or
+deliberate instruction.  A connecting link is found in the
+stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which accompany the
+doings and rites of a primitive social group.  They represent the
+stock of meanings which have been precipitated out of previous
+experience, which are so prized by the group as to be identified
+with their conception of their own collective life.  Not being
+obviously a part of the skill exhibited in the daily occupations
+of eating, hunting, making war and peace, constructing rugs,
+pottery, and baskets, etc., they are consciously impressed upon
+the young; often, as in the initiation ceremonies, with intense
+emotional fervor.  Even more pains are consciously taken to
+perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal formulae of the
+group than to transmit the directly useful customs of the group
+just because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in
+the ordinary processes of association.
+
+As the social group grows more complex, involving a greater
+number of acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or
+in the belief of the group, upon standard ideas deposited from
+past experience, the content of social life gets more definitely
+formulated for purposes of instruction.  As we have previously
+noted, probably the chief motive for consciously dwelling upon
+the group life, extracting the meanings which are regarded as
+most important and systematizing them in a coherent arrangement,
+is just the need of instructing the young so as to perpetuate
+group life.  Once started on this road of selection, formulation,
+and organization, no definite limit exists.  The invention of
+writing and of printing gives the operation an immense impetus.
+Finally, the bonds which connect the subject matter of school
+study with the habits and ideals of the social group are
+disguised and covered up.  The ties are so loosened that it often
+appears as if there were none; as if subject matter existed
+simply as knowledge on its own independent behoof, and as if
+study were the mere act of mastering it for its own sake,
+irrespective of any social values.  Since it is highly important
+for practical reasons to counter-act this tendency (See ante, p.
+8) the chief purposes of our theoretical discussion are to make
+clear the connection which is so readily lost from sight, and to
+show in some detail the social content and function of the chief
+constituents of the course of study.
+
+The points need to be considered from the standpoint of
+instructor and of student.  To the former, the significance of a
+knowledge of subject matter, going far beyond the present
+knowledge of pupils, is to supply definite standards and to
+reveal to him the possibilities of the crude activities of the
+immature.  (i) The material of school studies translates into
+concrete and detailed terms the meanings of current social life
+which it is desirable to transmit.  It puts clearly before the
+instructor the essential ingredients of the culture to be
+perpetuated, in such an organized form as to protect him from the
+haphazard efforts he would be likely to indulge in if the
+meanings had not been standardized.  (ii) A knowledge of the
+ideas which have been achieved in the past as the outcome of
+activity places the educator in a position to perceive the
+meaning of the seeming impulsive and aimless reactions of the
+young, and to provide the stimuli needed to direct them so that
+they will amount to something.  The more the educator knows of
+music the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate
+musical impulses of a child.  Organized subject matter represents
+the ripe fruitage of experiences like theirs, experiences
+involving the same world, and powers and needs similar to theirs.
+It does not represent perfection or infallible wisdom; but it is
+the best at command to further new experiences which may, in some
+respects at least, surpass the achievements embodied in existing
+knowledge and works of art.
+
+From the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various
+studies represent working resources, available capital.  Their
+remoteness from the experience of the young is not, however,
+seeming; it is real.  The subject matter of the learner is not,
+therefore, it cannot be, identical with the formulated, the
+crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the adult; the
+material as found in books and in works of art, etc.  The latter
+represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing
+state.  It enters directly into the activities of the expert and
+the educator, not into that of the beginner, the learner.
+Failure to bear in mind the difference in subject matter from the
+respective standpoints of teacher and student is responsible for
+most of the mistakes made in the use of texts and other
+expressions of preexistent knowledge.
+
+The need for a knowledge of the constitution and functions, in
+the concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's
+attitude to subject matter is so different from that of the
+pupil.  The teacher presents in actuality what the pupil
+represents only in posse.  That is, the teacher already knows the
+things which the student is only learning.  Hence the problem of
+the two is radically unlike.  When engaged in the direct act of
+teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter at his
+fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and
+response of the pupil.  To understand the latter in its interplay
+with subject matter is his task, while the pupil's mind,
+naturally, should be not on itself but on the topic in hand.  Or
+to state the same point in a somewhat different manner: the
+teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but
+in its interaction with the pupils' present needs and capacities.
+Hence simple scholarship is not enough.  In fact, there are
+certain features of scholarship or mastered subject matter --
+taken by itself -- which get in the way of effective teaching
+unless the instructor's habitual attitude is one of concern with
+its interplay in the pupil's own experience.  In the first place,
+his knowledge extends indefinitely beyond the range of the
+pupil's acquaintance.  It involves principles which are beyond
+the immature pupil's understanding and interest.  In and of
+itself, it may no more represent the living world of the pupil's
+experience than the astronomer's knowledge of Mars represents a
+baby's acquaintance with the room in which he stays.  In the
+second place, the method of organization of the material of
+achieved scholarship differs from that of the beginner.  It is
+not true that the experience of the young is unorganized -- that
+it consists of isolated scraps.  But it is organized in
+connection with direct practical centers of interest.  The
+child's home is, for example, the organizing center of his
+geographical knowledge.  His own movements about the locality,
+his journeys abroad, the tales of his friends, give the ties
+which hold his items of information together.  But the geography
+of the geographer, of the one who has already developed the
+implications of these smaller experiences, is organized on the
+basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to one
+another -- not the relations which they bear to his house, bodily
+movements, and friends.  To the one who is learned, subject
+matter is extensive, accurately defined, and logically
+interrelated.  To the one who is learning, it is fluid, partial,
+and connected through his personal occupations.  1 The problem of
+teaching is to keep the experience of the student moving in the
+direction of what the expert already knows.  Hence the need that
+the teacher know both subject matter and the characteristic needs
+and capacities of the student.
+
+
+2.  The Development of Subject Matter in the Learner.  It is
+possible, without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three
+fairly typical stages in the growth of subject matter in the
+experience of the learner.  In its first estate, knowledge exists
+as the content of intelligent ability -- power to do.  This kind
+of subject matter, or known material, is expressed in familiarity
+or acquaintance with things.  Then this material gradually is
+surcharged and deepened through communicated knowledge or
+information.  Finally, it is enlarged and worked over into
+rationally or logically organized material -- that of the one
+who, relatively speaking, is expert in the subject.
+
+I.  The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains
+most deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk,
+talk, read, write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine,
+calculate, drive a horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on
+indefinitely.  The popular tendency to regard instinctive acts
+which are adapted to an end as a sort of miraculous knowledge,
+while unjustifiable, is evidence of the strong tendency to
+identify intelligent control of the means of action with
+knowledge.  When education, under the influence of a scholastic
+conception of knowledge which ignores everything but
+scientifically formulated facts and truths, fails to recognize
+that primary or initial subject matter always exists as matter of
+an active doing, involving the use of the body and the handling
+of material, the subject matter of instruction is isolated from
+the needs and purposes of the learner, and so becomes just a
+something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand.
+Recognition of the natural course of development, on the
+contrary, always sets out with situations which involve learning
+by doing.  Arts and occupations form the initial stage of the
+curriculum, corresponding as they do to knowing how to go about
+the accomplishment of ends.  Popular terms denoting knowledge
+have always retained the connection with ability in action lost
+by academic philosophies.  Ken and can are allied words.
+Attention means caring for a thing, in the sense of both
+affection and of looking out for its welfare.  Mind means
+carrying out instructions in action -- as a child minds his
+mother -- and taking care of something -- as a nurse minds the
+baby.  To be thoughtful, considerate, means to heed the claims of
+others.  Apprehension means dread of undesirable consequences, as
+well as intellectual grasp.  To have good sense or judgment is to
+know the conduct a situation calls for; discernment is not making
+distinctions for the sake of making them, an exercise reprobated
+as hair splitting, but is insight into an affair with reference
+to acting.  Wisdom has never lost its association with the proper
+direction of life.  Only in education, never in the life of
+farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter,
+does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from
+doing.  Having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in
+acquaintance or familiarity.  The things we are best acquainted
+with are the things we put to frequent use -- such things as
+chairs, tables, pen, paper, clothes, food, knives and forks on
+the commonplace level, differentiating into more special objects
+according to a person's occupations in life.  Knowledge of things
+in that intimate and emotional sense suggested by the word
+acquaintance is a precipitate from our employing them with a
+purpose.  We have acted with or upon the thing so frequently that
+we can anticipate how it will act and react -- such is the
+meaning of familiar acquaintance.  We are ready for a familiar
+thing; it does not catch us napping, or play unexpected tricks
+with us.  This attitude carries with it a sense of congeniality
+or friendliness, of ease and illumination; while the things with
+which we are not accustomed to deal are strange, foreign, cold,
+remote, "abstract."
+
+II.  But it is likely that elaborate statements regarding this
+primary stage of knowledge will darken understanding.  It
+includes practically all of our knowledge which is not the result
+of deliberate technical study.  Modes of purposeful doing include
+dealings with persons as well as things. Impulses of communication
+and habits of intercourse have to be adapted to maintaining
+successful connections with others; a large fund of social knowledge
+accrues. As a part of this intercommunication one learns much from
+others. They tell of their experiences and of the experiences which,
+in turn, have been told them. In so far as one is interested or
+concerned in these communications, their matter becomes a part of
+one's own experience. Active connections with others are such an
+intimate and vital part of our own concerns that it is impossible to
+draw sharp lines, such as would enable us to say, "Here my
+experience ends; there yours begins." In so far as we are partners
+in common undertakings, the things which others communicate to us as
+the consequences of their particular share in the enterprise blend
+at once into the experience resulting from our own special doings.
+The ear is as much an organ of experience as the eye or hand; the
+eye is available for reading reports of what happens beyond its
+horizon. Things remote in space and time affect the issue of our
+actions quite as much as things which we can smell and handle. They
+really concern us, and, consequently, any account of them which
+assists us in dealing with things at hand falls within personal
+experience.
+
+Information is the name usually given to this kind of subject
+matter.  The place of communication in personal doing supplies us
+with a criterion for estimating the value of informational
+material in school.  Does it grow naturally out of some question
+with which the student is concerned? Does it fit into his more
+direct acquaintance so as to increase its efficacy and deepen its
+meaning? If it meets these two requirements, it is educative.
+The amount heard or read is of no importance--the more the
+better, provided the student has a need for it and can apply it
+in some situation of his own.
+
+But it is not so easy to fulfill these requirements in actual
+practice as it is to lay them down in theory.  The extension in
+modern times of the area of intercommunication; the invention of
+appliances for securing acquaintance with remote parts of the
+heavens and bygone events of history; the cheapening of devices,
+like printing, for recording and distributing information --
+genuine and alleged -- have created an immense bulk of
+communicated subject matter.  It is much easier to swamp a pupil
+with this than to work it into his direct experiences.  All too
+frequently it forms another strange world which just overlies the
+world of personal acquaintance.  The sole problem of the student
+is to learn, for school purposes, for purposes of recitations and
+promotions, the constituent parts of this strange world.
+Probably the most conspicuous connotation of the word knowledge
+for most persons to-day is just the body of facts and truths
+ascertained by others; the material found in the rows and rows of
+atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books of travel,
+scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries.
+
+The imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously
+influenced men's notions of the nature of knowledge itself.  The
+statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of
+active concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be
+themselves knowledge.  The record of knowledge, independent of
+its place as an outcome of inquiry and a resource in further
+inquiry, is taken to be knowledge.  The mind of man is taken
+captive by the spoils of its prior victories; the spoils, not the
+weapons and the acts of waging the battle against the unknown,
+are used to fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact, and truth.
+
+If this identification of knowledge with propositions stating
+information has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers,
+it is not surprising that the same ideal has almost dominated
+instruction.  The "course of study" consists largely of
+information distributed into various branches of study, each
+study being subdivided into lessons presenting in serial cutoff
+portions of the total store.  In the seventeenth century, the
+store was still small enough so that men set up the ideal of a
+complete encyclopedic mastery of it.  It is now so bulky that the
+impossibility of any one man's coming into possession of it all
+is obvious.  But the educational ideal has not been much
+affected.  Acquisition of a modicum of information in each branch
+of learning, or at least in a selected group, remains the
+principle by which the curriculum, from elementary school through
+college, is formed; the easier portions being assigned to the
+earlier years, the more difficult to the later.  The complaints
+of educators that learning does not enter into character and
+affect conduct; the protests against memoriter work, against
+cramming, against gradgrind preoccupation with "facts," against
+devotion to wire-drawn distinctions and ill-understood rules and
+principles, all follow from this state of affairs.  Knowledge
+which is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge, tends to
+become merely verbal.  It is no objection to information that it
+is clothed in words; communication necessarily takes place
+through words.  But in the degree in which what is communicated
+cannot be organized into the existing experience of the learner,
+it becomes mere words: that is, pure sense-stimuli, lacking in
+meaning.  Then it operates to call out mechanical reactions,
+ability to use the vocal organs to repeat statements, or the hand
+to write or to do "sums."
+
+To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the
+subject matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem,
+and for giving added significance to the search for solution and
+to the solution itself.  Informational knowledge is the material
+which can be fallen back upon as given, settled, established,
+assured in a doubtful situation.  It is a kind of bridge for mind
+in its passage from doubt to discovery.  It has the office of an
+intellectual middleman.  It condenses and records in available
+form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as an
+agency of enhancing the meaning of new experiences.  When one is
+told that Brutus assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the
+year is three hundred sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the
+ratio of the diameter of the circle to its circumference is
+3.1415 .  .  .  one receives what is indeed knowledge for others,
+but for him it is a stimulus to knowing.  His acquisition of
+knowledge depends upon his response to what is communicated.
+
+3.  Science or Rationalized Knowledge.  Science is a name for
+knowledge in its most characteristic form.  It represents in its
+degree, the perfected outcome of learning, -- its consummation.
+What is known, in a given case, is what is sure, certain,
+settled, disposed of; that which we think with rather than that
+which we think about.  In its honorable sense, knowledge is
+distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere
+tradition.  In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and
+not dubiously otherwise.  But experience makes us aware that
+there is difference between intellectual certainty of subject
+matter and our certainty.  We are made, so to speak, for belief;
+credulity is natural.  The undisciplined mind is averse to
+suspense and intellectual hesitation; it is prone to assertion.
+It likes things undisturbed, settled, and treats them as such
+without due warrant.  Familiarity, common repute, and
+congeniality to desire are readily made measuring rods of truth.
+Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error, -- a
+greater foe to learning than ignorance itself.  A Socrates is
+thus led to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the
+beginning of effective love of wisdom, and a Descartes to say
+that science is born of doubting.
+
+We have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data,
+and ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in
+themselves they are tentative and provisional.  Our predilection
+for premature acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended
+judgment, are signs that we tend naturally to cut short the
+process of testing.  We are satisfied with superficial and
+immediate short-visioned applications.  If these work out with
+moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose that our
+assumptions have been confirmed.  Even in the case of failure, we
+are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and
+incorrectness of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck
+and the hostility of circumstance.  We charge the evil
+consequence not to the error of our schemes and our incomplete
+inquiry into conditions (thereby getting material for revising
+the former and stimulus for extending the latter) but to untoward
+fate.  We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in clinging to
+our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out.
+
+Science represents the safeguard of the race against these
+natural propensities and the evils which flow from them.  It
+consists of the special appliances and methods which the race has
+slowly worked out in order to conduct reflection under conditions
+whereby its procedures and results are tested.  It is artificial
+(an acquired art), not spontaneous; learned, not native.  To this
+fact is due the unique, the invaluable place of science in
+education, and also the dangers which threaten its right use.
+Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in
+possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised
+for effectively directed reflection.  One in that case not merely
+conducts inquiry and learning without the use of the best
+instruments, but fails to understand the full meaning of
+knowledge.  For he does not become acquainted with the traits
+that mark off opinion and assent from authorized conviction.  On
+the other hand, the fact that science marks the perfecting of
+knowing in highly specialized conditions of technique renders its
+results, taken by themselves, remote from ordinary experience --
+a quality of aloofness that is popularly designated by the term
+abstract.  When this isolation appears in instruction, scientific
+information is even more exposed to the dangers attendant upon
+presenting ready-made subject matter than are other forms of
+information.
+
+Science has been defined in terms of method of inquiry and
+testing.  At first sight, this definition may seem opposed to the
+current conception that science is organized or systematized
+knowledge.  The opposition, however, is only seeming, and
+disappears when the ordinary definition is completed.  Not
+organization but the kind of organization effected by adequate
+methods of tested discovery marks off science.  The knowledge of
+a farmer is systematized in the degree in which he is competent.
+It is organized on the basis of relation of means to ends --
+practically organized.  Its organization as knowledge (that is,
+in the eulogistic sense of adequately tested and confirmed) is
+incidental to its organization with reference to securing crops,
+live-stock, etc.  But scientific subject matter is
+organized with specific reference to the successful conduct of
+the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a specialized
+undertaking.  Reference to the kind of assurance attending
+science will shed light upon this statement.  It is rational
+assurance, -- logical warranty.  The ideal of scientific
+organization is, therefore, that every conception and statement
+shall be of such a kind as to follow from others and to lead to
+others.  Conceptions and propositions mutually imply and support
+one another.  This double relation of 'leading to and confirming"
+is what is meant by the terms logical and rational.  The everyday
+conception of water is more available for ordinary uses of
+drinking, washing, irrigation, etc., than the chemist's notion of
+it.  The latter's description of it as H20 is superior from the
+standpoint of place and use in inquiry.  It states the nature of
+water in a way which connects it with knowledge of other things,
+indicating to one who understands it how the knowledge is arrived
+at and its bearings upon other portions of knowledge of the
+structure of things.  Strictly speaking, it does not indicate the
+objective relations of water any more than does a statement that
+water is transparent, fluid, without taste or odor, satisfying to
+thirst, etc.  It is just as true that water has these relations
+as that it is constituted by two molecules of hydrogen in
+combination with one of oxygen.  But for the particular purpose
+of conducting discovery with a view to ascertainment of fact, the
+latter relations are fundamental.  The more one emphasizes
+organization as a mark of science, then, the more he is committed
+to a recognition of the primacy of method in the definition of
+science.  For method defines the kind of organization in virtue
+of which science is science.
+
+4.  Subject Matter as Social.  Our next chapters will take up
+various school activities and studies and discuss them as
+successive stages in that evolution of knowledge which we have
+just been discussing.  It remains to say a few words upon subject
+matter as social, since our prior remarks have been mainly
+concerned with its intellectual aspect.  A difference in breadth
+and depth exists even in vital knowledge; even in the data and
+ideas which are relevant to real problems and which are motivated
+by purposes.  For there is a difference in the social scope of
+purposes and the social importance of problems.  With the wide
+range of possible material to select from, it is important that
+education (especially in all its phases short of the most
+specialized) should use a criterion of social worth.  All
+information and systematized scientific subject matter have been
+worked out under the conditions of social life and have been
+transmitted by social means.  But this does not prove that all is
+of equal value for the purposes of forming the disposition and
+supplying the equipment of members of present society.  The
+scheme of a curriculum must take account of the adaptation of
+studies to the needs of the existing community life; it must
+select with the intention of improving the life we live in common
+so that the future shall be better than the past.  Moreover, the
+curriculum must be planned with reference to placing essentials
+first, and refinements second.  The things which are socially
+most fundamental, that is, which have to do with the experiences
+in which the widest groups share, are the essentials.  The things
+which represent the needs of specialized groups and technical
+pursuits are secondary.  There is truth in the saying that
+education must first be human and only after that professional.
+But those who utter the saying frequently have in mind in the
+term human only a highly specialized class: the class of learned
+men who preserve the classic traditions of the past.  They forget
+that material is humanized in the degree in which it connects
+with the common interests of men as men.  Democratic society is
+peculiarly dependent for its maintenance upon the use in forming
+a course of study of criteria which are broadly human.  Democracy
+cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject
+matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for
+the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the
+traditions of a specialized cultivated class.  The notion that
+the "essentials" of elementary education are the three R's
+mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials
+needed for realization of democratic ideals.  Unconsciously it
+assumes that these ideals are unrealizable; it assumes that in
+the future, as in the past, getting a livelihood, "making a
+living," must signify for most men and women doing things which
+are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those who do
+them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged
+in them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of
+pecuniary reward.  For preparation of large numbers for a life of
+this sort, and only for this purpose, are mechanical efficiency
+in reading, writing, spelling and figuring, together with
+attainment of a certain amount of muscular dexterity,
+"essentials." Such conditions also infect the education called
+liberal, with illiberality.  They imply a somewhat parasitic
+cultivation bought at the expense of not having the enlightenment
+and discipline which come from concern with the deepest problems
+of common humanity.  A curriculum which acknowledges the social
+responsibilities of education must present situations where
+problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and
+where observation and information are calculated to develop
+social insight and interest.
+
+Summary.  The subject matter of education consists primarily of
+the meanings which supply content to existing social life.  The
+continuity of social life means that many of these meanings are
+contributed to present activity by past collective experience.
+As social life grows more complex, these factors increase in
+number and import.  There is need of special selection,
+formulation, and organization in order that they may be
+adequately transmitted to the new generation.  But this very
+process tends to set up subject matter as something of value just
+by itself, apart from its function in promoting the realization
+of the meanings implied in the present experience of the
+immature.  Especially is the educator exposed to the temptation
+to conceive his task in terms of the pupil's ability to
+appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set statements,
+irrespective of its organization into his activities as a
+developing social member.  The positive principle is maintained
+when the young begin with active occupations having a social
+origin and use, and proceed to a scientific insight in the
+materials and laws involved, through assimilating into their more
+direct experience the ideas and facts communicated by others who
+have had a larger experience.  1 Since the learned man should
+also still be a learner, it will be understood that these
+contrasts are relative, not absolute.  But in the earlier stages
+of learning at least they are practically all-important.
+
+
+Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
+
+1.  The Place of Active Occupations in Education.  In consequence
+partly of the efforts of educational reformers, partly of
+increased interest in child-psychology, and partly of the direct
+experience of the schoolroom, the course of study has in the past
+generation undergone considerable modification.  The desirability
+of starting from and with the experience and capacities of
+learners, a lesson enforced from all three quarters, has led to
+the introduction of forms of activity, in play and work, similar
+to those in which children and youth engage outside of school.
+Modern psychology has substituted for the general, ready-made
+faculties of older theory a complex group of instinctive and
+impulsive tendencies.  Experience has shown that when children
+have a chance at physical activities which bring their natural
+impulses into play, going to school is a joy, management is less
+of a burden, and learning is easier.  Sometimes, perhaps, plays,
+games, and constructive occupations are resorted to only for
+these reasons, with emphasis upon relief from the tedium and
+strain of "regular" school work.  There is no reason, however,
+for using them merely as agreeable diversions.  Study of mental
+life has made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies
+to explore, to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, to
+give expression to joyous emotion, etc.  When exercises which are
+prompted by these instincts are a part of the regular school
+program, the whole pupil is engaged, the artificial gap between
+life in school and out is reduced, motives are afforded for
+attention to a large variety of materials and processes
+distinctly educative in effect, and cooperative associations
+which give information in a social setting are provided.  In
+short, the grounds for assigning to play and active work a
+definite place in the curriculum are intellectual and social, not
+matters of temporary expediency and momentary agreeableness.
+Without something of the kind, it is not possible to secure the
+normal estate of effective learning; namely, that
+knowledge-getting be an outgrowth of activities having their own
+end, instead of a school task.  More specifically, play and work
+correspond, point for point, with the traits of the initial stage
+of knowing, which consists, as we saw in the last chapter, in
+learning how to do things and in acquaintance with things and
+processes gained in the doing.  It is suggestive that among the
+Greeks, till the rise of conscious philosophy, the same word,
+techne, was used for art and science.  Plato gave his account of
+knowledge on the basis of an analysis of the knowledge of
+cobblers, carpenters, players of musical instruments, etc.,
+pointing out that their art (so far as it was not mere routine)
+involved an end, mastery of material or stuff worked upon,
+control of appliances, and a definite order of procedure--all of
+which had to be known in order that there be intelligent skill or
+art.
+
+Doubtless the fact that children normally engage in play and work
+out of school has seemed to many educators a reason why they
+should concern themselves in school with things radically
+different.  School time seemed too precious to spend in doing
+over again what children were sure to do any way.  In some social
+conditions, this reason has weight.  In pioneer times, for
+example, outside occupations gave a definite and valuable
+intellectual and moral training.  Books and everything concerned
+with them were, on the other hand, rare and difficult of access;
+they were the only means of outlet from a narrow and crude
+environment.  Wherever such conditions obtain, much may be said
+in favor of concentrating school activity upon books.  The
+situation is very different, however, in most communities to-day.
+The kinds of work in which the young can engage, especially in
+cities, are largely anti-educational.  That prevention of child
+labor is a social duty is evidence on this point.  On the other
+hand, printed matter has been so cheapened and is in such
+universal circulation, and all the opportunities of intellectual
+culture have been so multiplied, that the older type of book work
+is far from having the force it used to possess.
+
+But it must not be forgotten that an educational result is a by-
+product of play and work in most out-of-school conditions.  It is
+incidental, not primary.  Consequently the educative growth
+secured is more or less accidental.  Much work shares in the
+defects of existing industrial society -- defects next to fatal
+to right development.  Play tends to reproduce and affirm the
+crudities, as well as the excellencies, of surrounding adult
+life.  It is the business of the school to set up an environment
+in which play and work shall be conducted with reference to
+facilitating desirable mental and moral growth.  It is not enough
+just to introduce plays and games, hand work and manual
+exercises.  Everything depends upon the way in which they are
+employed.
+
+2.  Available Occupations.  A bare catalogue of the list of
+activities which have already found their way into schools
+indicates what a rich field is at hand.  There is work with
+paper, cardboard, wood, leather, cloth, yarns, clay and sand, and
+the metals, with and without tools.  Processes employed are
+folding, cutting, pricking, measuring, molding, modeling,
+pattern-making, heating and cooling, and the operations
+characteristic of such tools as the hammer, saw, file, etc.
+Outdoor excursions, gardening, cooking, sewing, printing,
+book-binding, weaving, painting, drawing, singing, dramatization,
+story-telling, reading and writing as active pursuits with social
+aims (not as mere exercises for acquiring skill for future use),
+in addition to a countless variety of plays and games, designate
+some of the modes of occupation.
+
+The problem of the educator is to engage pupils in these
+activities in such ways that while manual skill and technical
+efficiency are gained and immediate satisfaction found in the
+work, together with preparation for later usefulness, these
+things shall be subordinated to education -- that is, to
+intellectual results and the forming of a socialized disposition.
+What does this principle signify? In the first place, the
+principle rules out certain practices.  Activities which follow
+definite prescription and dictation or which reproduce without
+modification ready-made models, may give muscular dexterity, but
+they do not require the perception and elaboration of ends, nor
+(what is the same thing in other words) do they permit the use of
+judgment in selecting and adapting means.  Not merely manual
+training specifically so called but many traditional kindergarten
+exercises have erred here.  Moreover, opportunity for making
+mistakes is an incidental requirement.  Not because mistakes are
+ever desirable, but because overzeal to select material and
+appliances which forbid a chance for mistakes to occur, restricts
+initiative, reduces judgment to a minimum, and compels the use of
+methods which are so remote from the complex situations of life
+that the power gained is of little availability.  It is quite
+true that children tend to exaggerate their powers of execution
+and to select projects that are beyond them.  But limitation of
+capacity is one of the things which has to be learned; like other
+things, it is learned through the experience of consequences.
+The danger that children undertaking too complex projects will
+simply muddle and mess, and produce not merely crude results
+(which is a minor matter) but acquire crude standards (which is
+an important matter) is great.  But it is the fault of the
+teacher if the pupil does not perceive in due season the
+inadequacy of his performances, and thereby receive a stimulus to
+attempt exercises which will perfect his powers.  Meantime it is
+more important to keep alive a creative and constructive attitude
+than to secure an external perfection by engaging the pupil's
+action in too minute and too closely regulated pieces of work.
+Accuracy and finish of detail can be insisted upon in such
+portions of a complex work as are within the pupil's capacity.
+
+Unconscious suspicion of native experience and consequent
+overdoing of external control are shown quite as much in the
+material supplied as in the matter of the teacher's orders.  The
+fear of raw material is shown in laboratory, manual training
+shop, Froebelian kindergarten, and Montessori house of childhood.
+The demand is for materials which have already been subjected to
+the perfecting work of mind: a demand which shows itself in the
+subject matter of active occupations quite as well as in academic
+book learning.  That such material will control the pupil's
+operations so as to prevent errors is true.  The notion that a
+pupil operating with such material will somehow absorb the
+intelligence that went originally to its shaping is fallacious.
+Only by starting with crude material and subjecting it to
+purposeful handling will he gain the intelligence embodied in
+finished material.  In practice, overemphasis upon formed
+material leads to an exaggeration of mathematical qualities,
+since intellect finds its profit in physical things from matters
+of size, form, and proportion and the relations that flow from
+them.  But these are known only when their perception is a fruit
+of acting upon purposes which require attention to them.  The
+more human the purpose, or the more it approximates the ends
+which appeal in daily experience, the more real the knowledge.
+When the purpose of the activity is restricted to ascertaining
+these qualities, the resulting knowledge is only technical.
+
+To say that active occupations should be concerned primarily with
+wholes is another statement of the same principle.  Wholes for
+purposes of education are not, however, physical affairs.
+Intellectually the existence of a whole depends upon a concern or
+interest; it is qualitative, the completeness of appeal made by a
+situation.  Exaggerated devotion to formation of efficient skill
+irrespective of present purpose always shows itself in devising
+exercises isolated from a purpose.  Laboratory work is made to
+consist of tasks of accurate measurement with a view to acquiring
+knowledge of the fundamental units of physics, irrespective of
+contact with the problems which make these units important; or of
+operations designed to afford facility in the manipulation of
+experimental apparatus.  The technique is acquired independently
+of the purposes of discovery and testing which alone give it
+meaning.  Kindergarten employments are calculated to give
+information regarding cubes, spheres, etc., and to form certain
+habits of manipulation of material (for everything must always be
+done "just so"), the absence of more vital purposes being
+supposedly compensated for by the alleged symbolism of the
+material used.  Manual training is reduced to a series of ordered
+assignments calculated to secure the mastery of one tool after
+another and technical ability in the various elements of
+construction -- like the different joints.  It is argued that
+pupils must know how to use tools before they attack actual
+making, -- assuming that pupils cannot learn how in the process
+of making.  Pestalozzi's just insistence upon the active use of
+the senses, as a substitute for memorizing words, left behind it
+in practice schemes for "object lessons" intended to acquaint
+pupils with all the qualities of selected objects.  The error is
+the same: in all these cases it is assumed that before objects
+can be intelligently used, their properties must be known.  In
+fact, the senses are normally used in the course of intelligent
+(that is, purposeful) use of things, since the qualities
+perceived are factors to be reckoned with in accomplishment.
+Witness the different attitude of a boy in making, say, a kite,
+with respect to the grain and other properties of wood, the
+matter of size, angles, and proportion of parts, to the attitude
+of a pupil who has an object-lesson on a piece of wood, where the
+sole function of wood and its properties is to serve as subject
+matter for the lesson.
+
+The failure to realize that the functional development of a
+situation alone constitutes a "whole" for the purpose of mind is
+the cause of the false notions which have prevailed in
+instruction concerning the simple and the complex.  For the
+person approaching a subject, the simple thing is his
+purpose--the use he desires to make of material, tool, or
+technical process, no matter how complicated the process of
+execution may be.  The unity of the purpose, with the
+concentration upon details which it entails, confers simplicity
+upon the elements which have to be reckoned with in the course of
+action.  It furnishes each with a single meaning according to its
+service in carrying on the whole enterprise.  After one has gone
+through the process, the constituent qualities and relations are
+elements, each possessed with a definite meaning of its own.  The
+false notion referred to takes the standpoint of the expert, the
+one for whom elements exist; isolates them from purposeful
+action, and presents them to beginners as the "simple" things.
+But it is time for a positive statement.  Aside from the fact
+that active occupations represent things to do, not studies,
+their educational significance consists in the fact that they may
+typify social situations.  Men's fundamental common concerns
+center about food, shelter, clothing, household furnishings, and
+the appliances connected with production, exchange, and
+consumption.
+
+Representing both the necessities of life and the adornments with
+which the necessities have been clothed, they tap instincts at a
+deep level; they are saturated with facts and principles having a
+social quality.
+
+To charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving,
+construction in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc.,
+which carry over these fundamental human concerns into school
+resources, have a merely bread and butter value is to miss their
+point.  If the mass of mankind has usually found in its
+industrial occupations nothing but evils which had to be endured
+for the sake of maintaining existence, the fault is not in the
+occupations, but in the conditions under which they are carried
+on.  The continually increasing importance of economic factors in
+contemporary life makes it the more needed that education should
+reveal their scientific content and their social value.  For in
+schools, occupations are not carried on for pecuniary gain but
+for their own content.  Freed from extraneous associations and
+from the pressure of wage-earning, they supply modes of
+experience which are intrinsically valuable; they are truly
+liberalizing in quality.
+
+Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of
+preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing
+time.  It affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place
+farming and horticulture have had in the history of the race and
+which they occupy in present social organization.  Carried on in
+an environment educationally controlled, they are means for
+making a study of the facts of growth, the chemistry of soil, the
+role of light, air, and moisture, injurious and helpful animal
+life, etc.  There is nothing in the elementary study of botany
+which cannot be introduced in a vital way in connection with
+caring for the growth of seeds.  Instead of the subject matter
+belonging to a peculiar study called botany, it will then belong
+to life, and will find, moreover, its natural correlations with
+the facts of soil, animal life, and human relations.  As students
+grow mature, they will perceive problems of interest which may be
+pursued for the sake of discovery, independent of the original
+direct interest in gardening -- problems connected with the
+germination and nutrition of plants, the reproduction of fruits,
+etc., thus making a transition to deliberate intellectual
+investigations.
+
+The illustration is intended to apply, of course, to other school
+occupations, -- wood-working, cooking, and on through the list.
+It is pertinent to note that in the history of the race the
+sciences grew gradually out from useful social occupations.
+Physics developed slowly out of the use of tools and machines;
+the important branch of physics known as mechanics testifies in
+its name to its original associations.  The lever, wheel,
+inclined plane, etc., were among the first great intellectual
+discoveries of mankind, and they are none the less intellectual
+because they occurred in the course of seeking for means of
+accomplishing practical ends.  The great advance of electrical
+science in the last generation was closely associated, as effect
+and as cause, with application of electric agencies to means of
+communication, transportation, lighting of cities and houses, and
+more economical production of goods.  These are social ends,
+moreover, and if they are too closely associated with notions of
+private profit, it is not because of anything in them, but
+because they have been deflected to private uses: -- a fact which
+puts upon the school the responsibility of restoring their
+connection, in the mind of the coming generation, with public
+scientific and social interests.  In like ways, chemistry grew
+out of processes of dying, bleaching, metal working, etc., and in
+recent times has found innumerable new uses in industry.
+
+Mathematics is now a highly abstract science; geometry, however,
+means literally earth-measuring: the practical use of number in
+counting to keep track of things and in measuring is even more
+important to-day than in the times when it was invented for these
+purposes.  Such considerations (which could be duplicated in the
+history of any science) are not arguments for a recapitulation of
+the history of the race or for dwelling long in the early rule of
+thumb stage.  But they indicate the possibilities--greater to-day
+than ever before -- of using active occupations as opportunities
+for scientific study.  The opportunities are just as great on the
+social side, whether we look at the life of collective humanity
+in its past or in its future.  The most direct road for
+elementary students into civics and economics is found in
+consideration of the place and office of industrial occupations
+in social life.  Even for older students, the social sciences
+would be less abstract and formal if they were dealt with less as
+sciences (less as formulated bodies of knowledge) and more in
+their direct subject-matter as that is found in the daily life of
+the social groups in which the student shares.
+
+Connection of occupations with the method of science is at least
+as close as with its subject matter.  The ages when scientific
+progress was slow were the ages when learned men had contempt for
+the material and processes of everyday life, especially for those
+concerned with manual pursuits.  Consequently they strove to
+develop knowledge out of general principles -- almost out of
+their heads -- by logical reasons.  It seems as absurd that
+learning should come from action on and with physical things,
+like dropping acid on a stone to see what would happen, as that
+it should come from sticking an awl with waxed thread through a
+piece of leather.  But the rise of experimental methods proved
+that, given control of conditions, the latter operation is more
+typical of the right way of knowledge than isolated logical
+reasonings.  Experiment developed in the seventeenth and
+succeeding centuries and became the authorized way of knowing
+when men's interests were centered in the question of control of
+nature for human uses.  The active occupations in which
+appliances are brought to bear upon physical things with the
+intention of effecting useful changes is the most vital
+introduction to the experimental method.
+
+3.  Work and Play.  What has been termed active occupation
+includes both play and work.  In their intrinsic meaning, play
+and industry are by no means so antithetical to one another as is
+often assumed, any sharp contrast being due to undesirable social
+conditions.  Both involve ends consciously entertained and the
+selection and adaptations of materials and processes designed to
+effect the desired ends.  The difference between them is largely
+one of time-span, influencing the directness of the connection of
+means and ends.  In play, the interest is more direct -- a fact
+frequently indicated by saying that in play the activity is its
+own end, instead of its having an ulterior result.  The statement
+is correct, but it is falsely taken, if supposed to mean that
+play activity is momentary, having no element of looking ahead
+and none of pursuit.  Hunting, for example, is one of the
+commonest forms of adult play, but the existence of foresight and
+the direction of present activity by what one is watching for are
+obvious.  When an activity is its own end in the sense that the
+action of the moment is complete in itself, it is purely
+physical; it has no meaning (See p. 77).  The person is either
+going through motions quite blindly, perhaps purely imitatively,
+or else is in a state of excitement which is exhausting to mind
+and nerves.  Both results may be seen in some types of
+kindergarten games where the idea of play is so highly symbolic
+that only the adult is conscious of it.  Unless the children
+succeed in reading in some quite different idea of their own,
+they move about either as if in a hypnotic daze, or they respond
+to a direct excitation.
+
+The point of these remarks is that play has an end in the sense
+of a directing idea which gives point to the successive acts.
+Persons who play are not just doing something (pure physical
+movement); they are trying to do or effect something, an
+attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts which stimulate
+their present responses.  The anticipated result, however, is
+rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific
+change in things.  Consequently play is free, plastic.  Where
+some definite external outcome is wanted, the end has to be held
+to with some persistence, which increases as the contemplated
+result is complex and requires a fairly long series of
+intermediate adaptations.  When the intended act is another
+activity, it is not necessary to look far ahead and it is
+possible to alter it easily and frequently.  If a child is making
+a toy boat, he must hold on to a single end and direct a
+considerable number of acts by that one idea.  If he is just
+"playing boat" he may change the material that serves as a boat
+almost at will, and introduce new factors as fancy suggests.  The
+imagination makes what it will of chairs, blocks, leaves, chips,
+if they serve the purpose of carrying activity forward.
+
+From a very early age, however, there is no distinction of
+exclusive periods of play activity and work activity, but only
+one of emphasis.  There are definite results which even young
+children desire, and try to bring to pass.  Their eager interest
+in sharing the occupations of others, if nothing else,
+accomplishes this.  Children want to "help"; they are anxious to
+engage in the pursuits of adults which effect external changes:
+setting the table, washing dishes, helping care for animals, etc.
+In their plays, they like to construct their own toys and
+appliances.  With increasing maturity, activity which does not
+give back results of tangible and visible achievement loses its
+interest.  Play then changes to fooling and if habitually
+indulged in is demoralizing.  Observable results are necessary to
+enable persons to get a sense and a measure of their own powers.
+When make-believe is recognized to be make-believe, the device of
+making objects in fancy alone is too easy to stimulate intense
+action.  One has only to observe the countenance of children
+really playing to note that their attitude is one of serious
+absorption; this attitude cannot be maintained when things cease
+to afford adequate stimulation.
+
+When fairly remote results of a definite character are foreseen
+and enlist persistent effort for their accomplishment, play
+passes into work.  Like play, it signifies purposeful activity
+and differs not in that activity is subordinated to an external
+result, but in the fact that a longer course of activity is
+occasioned by the idea of a result.  The demand for continuous
+attention is greater, and more intelligence must be shown in
+selecting and shaping means.  To extend this account would be to
+repeat what has been said under the caption of aim, interest, and
+thinking.  It is pertinent, however, to inquire why the idea is
+so current that work involves subordination of an activity to an
+ulterior material result.  The extreme form of this
+subordination, namely drudgery, offers a clew.  Activity carried
+on under conditions of external pressure or coercion is not
+carried on for any significance attached to the doing.  The
+course of action is not intrinsically satisfying; it is a mere
+means for avoiding some penalty, or for gaining some reward at
+its conclusion.  What is inherently repulsive is endured for the
+sake of averting something still more repulsive or of securing a
+gain hitched on by others.  Under unfree economic conditions,
+this state of affairs is bound to exist.  Work or industry offers
+little to engage the emotions and the imagination; it is a more
+or less mechanical series of strains.  Only the hold which the
+completion of the work has upon a person will keep him going.
+But the end should be intrinsic to the action; it should be its
+end -- a part of its own course.  Then it affords a stimulus to
+effort very different from that arising from the thought of
+results which have nothing to do with the intervening action.  As
+already mentioned, the absence of economic pressure in schools
+supplies an opportunity for reproducing industrial situations of
+mature life under conditions where the occupation can be carried
+on for its own sake.  If in some cases, pecuniary recognition is
+also a result of an action, though not the chief motive for it,
+that fact may well increase the significance of the occupation.
+Where something approaching drudgery or the need of fulfilling
+externally imposed tasks exists, the demand for play persists,
+but tends to be perverted.  The ordinary course of action fails
+to give adequate stimulus to emotion and imagination.  So in
+leisure time, there is an imperious demand for their stimulation
+by any kind of means; gambling, drink, etc., may be resorted to.
+Or, in less extreme cases, there is recourse to idle amusement;
+to anything which passes time with immediate agreeableness.
+Recreation, as the word indicates, is recuperation of energy.  No
+demand of human nature is more urgent or less to be escaped.  The
+idea that the need can be suppressed is absolutely fallacious,
+and the Puritanic tradition which disallows the need has entailed
+an enormous crop of evils.  If education does not afford
+opportunity for wholesome recreation and train capacity for
+seeking and finding it, the suppressed instincts find all sorts
+of illicit outlets, sometimes overt, sometimes confined to
+indulgence of the imagination.  Education has no more serious
+responsibility than making adequate provision for enjoyment of
+recreative leisure; not only for the sake of immediate health,
+but still more if possible for the sake of its lasting effect
+upon habits of mind.  Art is again the answer to this demand.
+
+Summary.  In the previous chapter we found that the primary
+subject matter of knowing is that contained in learning how to do
+things of a fairly direct sort.  The educational equivalent of
+this principle is the consistent use of simple occupations which
+appeal to the powers of youth and which typify general modes of
+social activity.  Skill and information about materials, tools,
+and laws of energy are acquired while activities are carried on
+for their own sake.  The fact that they are socially
+representative gives a quality to the skill and knowledge gained
+which makes them transferable to out-of-school situations.
+It is important not to confuse the psychological distinction
+between play and work with the economic distinction.
+Psychologically, the defining characteristic of play is not
+amusement nor aimlessness.  It is the fact that the aim is
+thought of as more activity in the same line, without defining
+continuity of action in reference to results produced.
+Activities as they grow more complicated gain added meaning by
+greater attention to specific results achieved.  Thus they pass
+gradually into work.  Both are equally free and intrinsically
+motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend to
+make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into
+uncongenial labor for the poor.  Work is psychologically simply
+an activity which consciously includes regard for consequences as
+a part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the
+consequences are outside of the activity as an end to which
+activity is merely a means.  Work which remains permeated with
+the play attitude is art -- in quality if not in conventional
+designation.
+
+
+Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
+
+1.  Extension of Meaning of Primary Activities.  Nothing is more
+striking than the difference between an activity as merely
+physical and the wealth of meanings which the same activity
+may assume.  From the outside, an astronomer gazing through a
+telescope is like a small boy looking through the same tube.  In
+each case, there is an arrangement of glass and metal, an eye,
+and a little speck of light in the distance.  Yet at a critical
+moment, the activity of an astronomer might be concerned with the
+birth of a world, and have whatever is known about the starry
+heavens as its significant content.  Physically speaking, what
+man has effected on this globe in his progress from savagery is a
+mere scratch on its surface, not perceptible at a distance which
+is slight in comparison with the reaches even of the solar
+system.  Yet in meaning what has been accomplished measures just
+the difference of civilization from savagery.  Although the
+activities, physically viewed, have changed somewhat, this change
+is slight in comparison with the development of the meanings
+attaching to the activities.  There is no limit to the meaning
+which an action may come to possess.  It all depends upon the
+context of perceived connections in which it is placed; the reach
+of imagination in realizing connections is inexhaustible.
+The advantage which the activity of man has in appropriating and
+finding meanings makes his education something else than the
+manufacture of a tool or the training of an animal.  The latter
+increase efficiency; they do not develop significance.  The final
+educational importance of such occupations in play and work as
+were considered in the last chapter is that they afford the most
+direct instrumentalities for such extension of meaning.  Set
+going under adequate conditions they are magnets for gathering
+and retaining an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual
+considerations.  They provide vital centers for the reception and
+assimilation of information.  When information is purveyed in
+chunks simply as information to be retained for its own sake, it
+tends to stratify over vital experience.  Entering as a factor
+into an activity pursued for its own sake--whether as a means or
+as a widening of the content of the aim--it is informing.  The
+insight directly gained fuses with what is told.  Individual
+experience is then capable of taking up and holding in solution
+the net results of the experience of the group to which he
+belongs--including the results of sufferings and trials over long
+stretches of time.  And such media have no fixed saturation point
+where further absorption is impossible.  The more that is taken
+in, the greater capacity there is for further assimilation.  New
+receptiveness follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon
+information gained.
+
+The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature
+and man.  This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning
+when translated into educational equivalents.  So translated, it
+signifies that geography and history supply subject matter which
+gives background and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what
+might otherwise be narrow personal actions or mere forms of
+technical skill.  With every increase of ability to place our own
+doings in their time and space connections, our doings gain in
+significant content.  We realize that we are citizens of no mean
+city in discovering the scene in space of which we are denizens,
+and the continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which we
+are heirs and continuers.  Thus our ordinary daily experiences
+cease to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance.
+Of course if geography and history are taught as ready-made
+studies which a person studies simply because he is sent to
+school, it easily happens that a large number of statements about
+things remote and alien to everyday experience are learned.
+Activity is divided, and two separate worlds are built up,
+occupying activity at divided periods.  No transmutation takes
+place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in meaning by getting
+its connections; what is studied is not animated and made real by
+entering into immediate activity.  Ordinary experience is not
+even left as it was, narrow but vital.  Rather, it loses
+something of its mobility and sensitiveness to suggestions.  It
+is weighed down and pushed into a corner by a load of
+unassimilated information.  It parts with its flexible
+responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning.  Mere
+amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life
+makes mind wooden; elasticity disappears.
+
+Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out
+beyond its immediate self.  It does not passively wait for
+information to be bestowed which will increase its meaning; it
+seeks it out.  Curiosity is not an accidental isolated
+possession; it is a necessary consequence of the fact that an
+experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all kinds of
+connections with other things.  Curiosity is but the tendency to
+make these conditions perceptible.  It is the business of
+educators to supply an environment so that this reaching out of
+an experience may be fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously
+active.  Within a certain kind of environment, an activity may be
+checked so that the only meaning which accrues is of its direct
+and tangible isolated outcome.  One may cook, or hammer, or walk,
+and the resulting consequences may not take the mind any farther
+than the consequences of cooking, hammering, and walking in the
+literal -- or physical -- sense.  But nevertheless the
+consequences of the act remain far-reaching.  To walk involves a
+displacement and reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is
+felt wherever there is matter.  It involves the structure of the
+limbs and the nervous system; the principles of mechanics.  To
+cook is to utilize heat and moisture to change the chemical
+relations of food materials; it has a bearing upon the
+assimilation of food and the growth of the body.  The utmost that
+the most learned men of science know in physics, chemistry,
+physiology is not enough to make all these consequences and
+connections perceptible.  The task of education, once more, is to
+see to it that such activities are performed in such ways and
+under such conditions as render these conditions as perceptible
+as possible.  To "learn geography" is to gain in power to
+perceive the spatial, the natural, connections of an ordinary
+act; to "learn history" is essentially to gain in power to
+recognize its human connections.  For what is called geography as
+a formulated study is simply the body of facts and principles
+which have been discovered in other men's experience about the
+natural medium in which we live, and in connection with which the
+particular acts of our life have an explanation.  So history as a
+formulated study is but the body of known facts about the
+activities and sufferings of the social groups with which our own
+lives are continuous, and through reference to which our own
+customs and institutions are illuminated.
+
+2.  The Complementary Nature of History and Geography.  History
+and geography -- including in the latter, for reasons about to be
+mentioned, nature study -- are the information studies par
+excellence of the schools.  Examination of the materials and the
+method of their use will make clear that the difference between
+penetration of this information into living experience and its
+mere piling up in isolated heaps depends upon whether these
+studies are faithful to the interdependence of man and nature
+which affords these studies their justification.  Nowhere,
+however, is there greater danger that subject matter will be
+accepted as appropriate educational material simply because it
+has become customary to teach and learn it.  The idea of a
+philosophic reason for it, because of the function of the
+material in a worthy transformation of experience, is looked upon
+as a vain fancy, or as supplying a high-sounding phraseology in
+support of what is already done.  The words "history" and
+"geography" suggest simply the matter which has been
+traditionally sanctioned in the schools.  The mass and variety of
+this matter discourage an attempt to see what it really stands
+for, and how it can be so taught as to fulfill its mission in the
+experience of pupils.  But unless the idea that there is a
+unifying and social direction in education is a farcical
+pretense, subjects that bulk as large in the curriculum as
+history and geography, must represent a general function in the
+development of a truly socialized and intellectualized
+experience.  The discovery of this function must be employed as a
+criterion for trying and sifting the facts taught and the methods
+used.
+
+The function of historical and geographical subject matter has
+been stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and
+personal contacts of life by furnishing their context, their
+background and outlook.  While geography emphasizes the physical
+side and history the social, these are only emphases in a common
+topic, namely, the associated life of men.  For this associated
+life, with its experiments, its ways and means, its achievements
+and failures, does not go on in the sky nor yet in a vacuum.  It
+takes place on the earth.  This setting of nature does not bear
+to social activities the relation that the scenery of a
+theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation; it
+enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form
+history.  Nature is the medium of social occurrences.  It
+furnishes original stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources.
+Civilization is the progressive mastery of its varied energies.
+When this interdependence of the study of history, representing
+the human emphasis, with the study of geography, representing the
+natural, is ignored, history sinks to a listing of dates with an
+appended inventory of events, labeled "important"; or else it
+becomes a literary phantasy -- for in purely literary history the
+natural environment is but stage scenery.
+
+Geography, of course, has its educative influence in a
+counterpart connection of natural facts with social events and
+their consequences.  The classic definition of geography as an
+account of the earth as the home of man expresses the educational
+reality.  But it is easier to give this definition than it is to
+present specific geographical subject matter in its vital human
+bearings.  The residence, pursuits, successes, and failures of
+men are the things that give the geographic data their reason for
+inclusion in the material of instruction.  But to hold the two
+together requires an informed and cultivated imagination.  When
+the ties are broken, geography presents itself as that
+hodge-podge of unrelated fragments too often found.  It appears
+as a veritable rag-bag of intellectual odds and ends: the height
+of a mountain here, the course of a river there, the quantity of
+shingles produced in this town, the tonnage of the shipping in
+that, the boundary of a county, the capital of a state.  The
+earth as the home of man is humanizing and unified; the earth
+viewed as a miscellany of facts is scattering and imaginatively
+inert.  Geography is a topic that originally appeals to
+imagination -- even to the romantic imagination.  It shares in
+the wonder and glory that attach to adventure, travel, and
+exploration.  The variety of peoples and environments, their
+contrast with familiar scenes, furnishes infinite stimulation.
+The mind is moved from the monotony of the customary.  And while
+local or home geography is the natural starting point in the
+reconstructive development of the natural environment, it is an
+intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown, not
+an end in itself.  When not treated as a basis for getting at the
+large world beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as
+deadly as do object lessons which simply summarize the properties
+of familiar objects.  The reason is the same.  The imagination is
+not fed, but is held down to recapitulating, cataloguing, and
+refining what is already known.  But when the familiar fences
+that mark the limits of the village proprietors are signs that
+introduce an understanding of the boundaries of great nations,
+even fences are lighted with meaning.  Sunlight, air, running
+water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil
+officers and their duties -- all these things are found in the
+local environment.  Treated as if their meaning began and ended
+in those confines, they are curious facts to be laboriously
+learned.  As instruments for extending the limits of experience,
+bringing within its scope peoples and things otherwise strange
+and unknown, they are transfigured by the use to which they are
+put.  Sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political relations come
+from afar and lead the thoughts afar.  To follow their course is
+to enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional
+information, but by remaking the meaning of what was previously a
+matter of course.
+
+The same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of
+geographical study which tend to become specialized and separate.
+Mathematical or astronomical, physiographic, topographic,
+political, commercial, geography, all make their claims.  How are
+they to be adjusted? By an external compromise that crowds in so
+much of each? No other method is to be found unless it be
+constantly borne in mind that the educational center of gravity
+is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject.  From this
+center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is needed
+to help appreciate the significance of human activities and
+relations.  The differences of civilization in cold and tropical
+regions, the special inventions, industrial and political, of
+peoples in the temperate regions, cannot be understood without
+appeal to the earth as a member of the solar system.  Economic
+activities deeply influence social intercourse and political
+organization on one side, and reflect physical conditions on the
+other.  The specializations of these topics are for the
+specialists; their interaction concerns man as a being whose
+experience is social.
+
+To include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced;
+verbally, it is.  But in educational idea there is but one
+reality, and it is pity that in practice we have two names: for
+the diversity of names tends to conceal the identity of meaning.
+Nature and the earth should be equivalent terms, and so should
+earth study and nature study.  Everybody knows that nature study
+has suffered in schools from scrappiness of subject matter, due
+to dealing with a large number of isolated points.  The parts of
+a flower have been studied, for example, apart from the flower as
+an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the plant apart from
+the soil, air, and light in which and through which it lives.
+The result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which attention
+is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed
+imagination.  The lack of interest is so great that it was
+seriously proposed to revive animism, to clothe natural facts and
+events with myths in order that they might attract and hold the
+mind.  In numberless cases, more or less silly personifications
+were resorted to.  The method was silly, but it expressed a real
+need for a human atmosphere.  The facts had been torn to pieces
+by being taken out of their context.  They no longer belonged to
+the earth; they had no abiding place anywhere.  To compensate,
+recourse was had to artificial and sentimental associations.  The
+real remedy is to make nature study a study of nature, not of
+fragments made meaningless through complete removal from the
+situations in which they are produced and in which they operate.
+When nature is treated as a whole, like the earth in its
+relations, its phenomena fall into their natural relations of
+sympathy and association with human life, and artificial
+substitutes are not needed.
+
+3.  History and Present Social Life.  The segregation which kills
+the vitality of history is divorce from present modes and
+concerns of social life.  The past just as past is no longer our
+affair.  If it were wholly gone and done with, there would be
+only one reasonable attitude toward it.  Let the dead bury their
+dead.  But knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the
+present.  History deals with the past, but this past is the
+history of the present.  An intelligent study of the discovery,
+explorations, colonization of America, of the pioneer movement
+westward, of immigration, etc., should be a study of the United
+States as it is to-day: of the country we now live in.  Studying
+it in process of formation makes much that is too complex to be
+directly grasped open to comprehension.  Genetic method was
+perhaps the chief scientific achievement of the latter half of
+the nineteenth century.  Its principle is that the way to get
+insight into any complex product is to trace the process of its
+making, -- to follow it through the successive stages of its
+growth.  To apply this method to history as if it meant only the
+truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its
+past, is one-sided.  It means equally that past events cannot be
+separated from the living present and retain meaning.  The true
+starting point of history is always some present situation with
+its problems.
+
+This general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration
+of its bearing upon a number of points.  The biographical method
+is generally recommended as the natural mode of approach to
+historical study.  The lives of great men, of heroes and leaders,
+make concrete and vital historic episodes otherwise abstract and
+incomprehensible.  They condense into vivid pictures complicated
+and tangled series of events spread over so much space and time
+that only a highly trained mind can follow and unravel them.
+There can be no doubt of the psychological soundness of this
+principle.  But it is misused when employed to throw into
+exaggerated relief the doings of a few individuals without
+reference to the social situations which they represent.  When a
+biography is related just as an account of the doings of a man
+isolated from the conditions that aroused him and to which his
+activities were a response, we do not have a study of history,
+for we have no study of social life, which is an affair of
+individuals in association.  We get only a sugar coating which
+makes it easier to swallow certain fragments of information.
+Much attention has been given of late to primitive life as an
+introduction to learning history.  Here also there is a right and
+a wrong way of conceiving its value.  The seemingly ready-made
+character and the complexity of present conditions, their
+apparently hard and fast character, is an almost insuperable
+obstacle to gaining insight into their nature.  Recourse to the
+primitive may furnish the fundamental elements of the present
+situation in immensely simplified form.  It is like unraveling a
+cloth so complex and so close to the eyes that its scheme cannot
+be seen, until the larger coarser features of the pattern appear.
+We cannot simplify the present situations by deliberate
+experiment, but resort to primitive life presents us with the
+sort of results we should desire from an experiment.  Social
+relationships and modes of organized action are reduced to their
+lowest terms.  When this social aim is overlooked, however, the
+study of primitive life becomes simply a rehearsing of
+sensational and exciting features of savagery.  Primitive history
+suggests industrial history.  For one of the chief reasons for
+going to more primitive conditions to resolve the present into
+more easily perceived factors is that we may realize how the
+fundamental problems of procuring subsistence, shelter, and
+protection have been met; and by seeing how these were solved in
+the earlier days of the human race, form some conception of the
+long road which has had to be traveled, and of the successive
+inventions by which the race has been brought forward in culture.
+We do not need to go into disputes regarding the economic
+interpretation of history to realize that the industrial history
+of mankind gives insight into two important phases of social life
+in a way which no other phase of history can possibly do.  It
+presents us with knowledge of the successive inventions by which
+theoretical science has been applied to the control of nature in
+the interests of security and prosperity of social life.  It thus
+reveals the successive causes of social progress.  Its other
+service is to put before us the things that fundamentally concern
+all men in common -- the occupations and values connected with
+getting a living.  Economic history deals with the activities,
+the career, and fortunes of the common man as does no other
+branch of history.  The one thing every individual must do is to
+live; the one thing that society must do is to secure from each
+individual his fair contribution to the general well being and
+see to it that a just return is made to him.
+
+Economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more
+liberalizing than political history.  It deals not with the rise
+and fall of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the
+effective liberties, through command of nature, of the common man
+for whom powers and principalities exist.
+
+Industrial history also offers a more direct avenue of approach
+to the realization of the intimate connection of man's struggles,
+successes, and failures with nature than does political history
+-- to say nothing of the military history into which political
+history so easily runs when reduced to the level of youthful
+comprehension.  For industrial history is essentially an account
+of the way in which man has learned to utilize natural energy
+from the time when men mostly exploited the muscular energies of
+other men to the time when, in promise if not in actuality, the
+resources of nature are so under command as to enable men to
+extend a common dominion over her.  When the history of work,
+when the conditions of using the soil, forest, mine, of
+domesticating and cultivating grains and animals, of manufacture
+and distribution, are left out of account, history tends to
+become merely literary -- a systematized romance of a mythical
+humanity living upon itself instead of upon the earth.
+
+Perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education
+is intellectual history.  We are only just beginning to realize
+that the great heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its
+politicians, generals, and diplomatists, but the scientific
+discoverers and inventors who have put into man's hands the
+instrumentalities of an expanding and controlled experience, and
+the artists and poets who have celebrated his struggles,
+triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic, or
+written, that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to
+others.  One of the advantages of industrial history as a history
+of man's progressive adaptation of natural forces to social uses
+is the opportunity which it affords for consideration of advance
+in the methods and results of knowledge.  At present men are
+accustomed to eulogize intelligence and reason in general terms;
+their fundamental importance is urged.  But pupils often come
+away from the conventional study of history, and think either
+that the human intellect is a static quantity which has not
+progressed by the invention of better methods, or else that
+intelligence, save as a display of personal shrewdness, is a
+negligible historic factor.  Surely no better way could be
+devised of instilling a genuine sense of the part which mind has
+to play in life than a study of history which makes plain how the
+entire advance of humanity from savagery to civilization has been
+dependent upon intellectual discoveries and inventions, and the
+extent to which the things which ordinarily figure most largely
+in historical writings have been side issues, or even
+obstructions for intelligence to overcome.
+
+Pursued in this fashion, history would most naturally become of
+ethical value in teaching.  Intelligent insight into present
+forms of associated life is necessary for a character whose
+morality is more than colorless innocence.  Historical knowledge
+helps provide such insight.  It is an organ for analysis of the
+warp and woof of the present social fabric, of making known the
+forces which have woven the pattern.  The use of history for
+cultivating a socialized intelligence constitutes its moral
+significance.  It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir
+of anecdotes to be drawn on to inculcate special moral lessons on
+this virtue or that vice.  But such teaching is not so much an
+ethical use of history as it is an effort to create moral
+impressions by means of more or less authentic material.  At
+best, it produces a temporary emotional glow; at worst, callous
+indifference to moralizing.  The assistance which may be given by
+history to a more intelligent sympathetic understanding of the
+social situations of the present in which individuals share is a
+permanent and constructive moral asset.
+
+Summary.  It is the nature of an experience to have implications
+which go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it.
+Bringing these connections or implications to consciousness
+enhances the meaning of the experience.  Any experience, however
+trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an
+indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of
+perceived connections.  Normal communication with others is the
+readiest way of effecting this development, for it links up the
+net results of the experience of the group and even the race with
+the immediate experience of an individual.  By normal
+communication is meant that in which there is a joint interest, a
+common interest, so that one is eager to give and the other to
+take.  It contrasts with telling or stating things simply for the
+sake of impressing them upon another, merely in order to test him
+to see how much he has retained and can literally reproduce.
+
+Geography and history are the two great school resources for
+bringing about the enlargement of the significance of a direct
+personal experience.  The active occupations described in the
+previous chapter reach out in space and time with respect to both
+nature and man.  Unless they are taught for external reasons or
+as mere modes of skill their chief educational value is that they
+provide the most direct and interesting roads out into the larger
+world of meanings stated in history and geography.  While history
+makes human implications explicit and geography natural
+connections, these subjects are two phases of the same living
+whole, since the life of men in association goes on in nature,
+not as an accidental setting, but as the material and medium of
+development.
+
+
+Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
+
+1.  The Logical and the Psychological.  By science is meant, as
+already stated, that knowledge which is the outcome of methods of
+observation, reflection, and testing which are deliberately
+adopted to secure a settled, assured subject matter.  It involves
+an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs
+so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy,
+and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of
+the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.
+It is, like all knowledge, an outcome of activity bringing about
+certain changes in the environment.  But in its case, the quality
+of the resulting knowledge is the controlling factor and not an
+incident of the activity.  Both logically and educationally,
+science is the perfecting of knowing, its last stage.
+
+Science, in short, signifies a realization of the logical
+implications of any knowledge.  Logical order is not a form
+imposed upon what is known; it is the proper form of knowledge as
+perfected.  For it means that the statement of subject matter is
+of a nature to exhibit to one who understands it the premises
+from which it follows and the conclusions to which it points (See
+ante, p.  190).  As from a few bones the competent zoologist
+reconstructs an animal; so from the form of a statement in
+mathematics or physics the specialist in the subject can form an
+idea of the system of truths in which it has its place.
+
+To the non-expert, however, this perfected form is a stumbling
+block.  Just because the material is stated with reference to the
+furtherance of knowledge as an end in itself, its connections
+with the material of everyday life are hidden.  To the layman the
+bones are a mere curiosity.  Until he had mastered the principles
+of zoology, his efforts to make anything out of them would be
+random and blind.  From the standpoint of the learner scientific
+form is an ideal to be achieved, not a starting point from which
+to set out.  It is, nevertheless, a frequent practice to start in
+instruction with the rudiments of science somewhat simplified.
+The necessary consequence is an isolation of science from
+significant experience.  The pupil learns symbols without the key
+to their meaning.  He acquires a technical body of information
+without ability to trace its connections with the objects and
+operations with which he is familiar--often he acquires simply a
+peculiar vocabulary.  There is a strong temptation to assume that
+presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal
+road to learning.  What more natural than to suppose that the
+immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from
+needless error by commencing where competent inquirers have left
+off? The outcome is written large in the history of education.
+Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the
+subject is organized into topics according to the order of the
+specialist.  Technical concepts, with their definitions, are
+introduced at the outset.  Laws are introduced at a very early
+stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they
+were arrived at.  The pupils learn a "science" instead of
+learning the scientific way of treating the familiar material of
+ordinary experience.  The method of the advanced student
+dominates college teaching; the approach of the college is
+transferred into the high school, and so down the line, with such
+omissions as may make the subject easier.
+
+The chronological method which begins with the experience of the
+learner and develops from that the proper modes of scientific
+treatment is often called the "psychological" method in
+distinction from the logical method of the expert or specialist.
+The apparent loss of time involved is more than made up for by
+the superior understanding and vital interest secured.  What the
+pupil learns he at least understands.  Moreover by following, in
+connection with problems selected from the material of ordinary
+acquaintance, the methods by which scientific men have reached
+their perfected knowledge, he gains independent power to deal
+with material within his range, and avoids the mental confusion
+and intellectual distaste attendant upon studying matter whose
+meaning is only symbolic.  Since the mass of pupils are never
+going to become scientific specialists, it is much more important
+that they should get some insight into what scientific method
+means than that they should copy at long range and second hand
+the results which scientific men have reached.  Students will not
+go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered," but they will be
+sure and intelligent as far as they do go.  And it is safe to say
+that the few who go on to be scientific experts will have a
+better preparation than if they had been swamped with a large
+mass of purely technical and symbolically stated information.  In
+fact, those who do become successful men of science are those who
+by their own power manage to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional
+scholastic introduction into it.
+
+The contrast between the expectations of the men who a generation
+or two ago strove, against great odds, to secure a place for
+science in education, and the result generally achieved is
+painful.  Herbert Spencer, inquiring what knowledge is of most
+worth, concluded that from all points of view scientific
+knowledge is most valuable.  But his argument unconsciously
+assumed that scientific knowledge could be communicated in a
+ready-made form.  Passing over the methods by which the subject
+matter of our ordinary activities is transmuted into scientific
+form, it ignored the method by which alone science is science.
+Instruction has too often proceeded upon an analogous plan.  But
+there is no magic attached to material stated in technically
+correct scientific form.  When learned in this condition it
+remains a body of inert information.  Moreover its form of
+statement removes it further from fruitful contact with everyday
+experiences than does the mode of statement proper to literature.
+Nevertheless that the claims made for instruction in science were
+unjustifiable does not follow.  For material so taught is not
+science to the pupil.
+
+Contact with things and laboratory exercises, while a great
+improvement upon textbooks arranged upon the deductive plan, do
+not of themselves suffice to meet the need.  While they are an
+indispensable portion of scientific method, they do not as a
+matter of course constitute scientific method.  Physical
+materials may be manipulated with scientific apparatus, but the
+materials may be disassociated in themselves and in the ways in
+which they are handled, from the materials and processes used out
+of school.  The problems dealt with may be only problems of
+science: problems, that is, which would occur to one already
+initiated in the science of the subject.  Our attention may be
+devoted to getting skill in technical manipulation without
+reference to the connection of laboratory exercises with a
+problem belonging to subject matter.  There is sometimes a ritual
+of laboratory instruction as well as of heathen religion.  1
+It has been mentioned, incidentally, that scientific statements,
+or logical form, implies the use of signs or symbols.  The
+statement applies, of course, to all use of language.  But in the
+vernacular, the mind proceeds directly from the symbol to the
+thing signified.  Association with familiar material is so close
+that the mind does not pause upon the sign.  The signs are
+intended only to stand for things and acts.  But scientific
+terminology has an additional use.  It is designed, as we have
+seen, not to stand for the things directly in their practical use
+in experience, but for the things placed in a cognitive system.
+Ultimately, of course, they denote the things of our common sense
+acquaintance.  But immediately they do not designate them in
+their common context, but translated into terms of scientific
+inquiry.  Atoms, molecules, chemical formulae, the mathematical
+propositions in the study of physics -- all these have primarily
+an intellectual value and only indirectly an empirical value.
+They represent instruments for the carrying on of science.  As in
+the case of other tools, their significance can be learned only
+by use.  We cannot procure understanding of their meaning by
+pointing to things, but only by pointing to their work when they
+are employed as part of the technique of knowledge.  Even the
+circle, square, etc., of geometry exhibit a difference from the
+squares and circles of familiar acquaintance, and the further one
+proceeds in mathematical science the greater the remoteness from
+the everyday empirical thing.  Qualities which do not count for
+the pursuit of knowledge about spatial relations are left out;
+those which are important for this purpose are accentuated.  If
+one carries his study far enough, he will find even the
+properties which are significant for spatial knowledge giving way
+to those which facilitate knowledge of other things -- perhaps a
+knowledge of the general relations of number.  There will be
+nothing in the conceptual definitions even to suggest spatial
+form, size, or direction.  This does not mean that they are
+unreal mental inventions, but it indicates that direct physical
+qualities have been transmuted into tools for a special end--the
+end of intellectual organization.  In every machine the primary
+state of material has been modified by subordinating it to use
+for a purpose.  Not the stuff in its original form but in its
+adaptation to an end is important.  No one would have a knowledge
+of a machine who could enumerate all the materials entering into
+its structure, but only he who knew their uses and could tell why
+they are employed as they are.  In like fashion one has a
+knowledge of mathematical conceptions only when he sees the
+problems in which they function and their specific utility in
+dealing with these problems.  "Knowing" the definitions, rules,
+formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine
+without knowing what they do.  In one case, as in the other, the
+meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element
+accomplishes in the system of which it is a member.
+
+2.  Science and Social Progress.  Assuming that the development
+of the direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest
+is carried to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to
+its place in experience.  In general, the reply is that science
+marks the emancipation of mind from devotion to customary
+purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit of new ends.
+It is the agency of progress in action.  Progress is sometimes
+thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already
+sought.  But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires
+only improvement of the means of action or technical advance.
+More important modes of progress consist in enriching prior
+purposes and in forming new ones.  Desires are not a fixed
+quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of
+satisfaction.  With increased culture and new mastery of nature,
+new desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show
+themselves, for intelligence perceives new possibilities of
+action.  This projection of new possibilities leads to search for
+new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the
+discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new
+ends.
+
+That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of
+action is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which
+followed intellectual command of the secrets of nature.  The
+wonderful transformation of production and distribution known as
+the industrial revolution is the fruit of experimental science.
+Railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph,
+automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are conspicuous evidences
+of the application of science in life.  But none of them would be
+of much importance without the thousands of less sensational
+inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered
+tributary to our daily life.
+
+It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress
+thus procured has been only technical: it has provided more
+efficient means for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than
+modified the quality of human purposes.  There is, for example,
+no modern civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all
+respects.  Science is still too recent to have been absorbed into
+imaginative and emotional disposition.  Men move more swiftly and
+surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too
+largely remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment.
+This fact places upon education the responsibility of using
+science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination
+and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms
+and legs.
+
+The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the
+purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some
+idea of the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting
+it.  Science taking effect in human activity has broken down
+physical barriers which formerly separated men; it has immensely
+widened the area of intercourse.  It has brought about
+interdependence of interests on an enormous scale.  It has
+brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of
+control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led
+men to look to the future, instead of the past.  The coincidence
+of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a
+mere coincidence.  Before this advance men placed the golden age
+in remote antiquity.  Now they face the future with a firm belief
+that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once
+thought inevitable.  To subjugate devastating disease is no
+longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian.
+Science has familiarized men with the idea of development, taking
+effect practically in persistent gradual amelioration of the
+estate of our common humanity.
+
+
+The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an
+intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the
+direction of human affairs by itself.  The method of science
+engrained through education in habit means emancipation from rule
+of thumb and from the routine generated by rule of thumb
+procedure.  The word empirical in its ordinary use does not mean
+"connected with experiment," but rather crude and unrational.
+Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence of
+experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling
+philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational.
+Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a
+multitude of past instances without intelligent insight into the
+principles of any of them.  To say that medicine was empirical
+meant that it was not scientific, but a mode of practice based
+upon accumulated observations of diseases and of remedies used
+more or less at random.  Such a mode of practice is of necessity
+happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance.  It lends itself to
+deception and quackery.  Industry that is "empirically"
+controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it
+depends upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models
+set in the past.  Experimental science means the possibility of
+using past experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind.
+It means that reason operates within experience, not beyond it,
+to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality.  Science is
+experience becoming rational.  The effect of science is thus to
+change men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of
+experience.  By the same token, it changes the idea and the
+operation of reason.  Instead of being something beyond
+experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region that
+has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found
+indigenous in experience: -- the factor by which past experiences
+are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance.
+
+The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech,
+being used to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to
+understand, but also that which is far away from life.  But
+abstraction is an indispensable trait in reflective direction of
+activity.  Situations do not literally repeat themselves.  Habit
+treats new occurrences as if they were identical with old ones;
+it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel element is
+negligible for present purposes.  But when the new element
+requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse
+unless abstraction is brought into play.  For abstraction
+deliberately selects from the subject matter of former
+experiences that which is thought helpful in dealing with the
+new.  It signifies conscious transfer of a meaning embedded in
+past experience for use in a new one.  It is the very artery of
+intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience
+available for guidance of another.
+
+Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a
+large scale.  It aims to free an experience from all which is
+purely personal and strictly immediate; it aims to detach
+whatever it has in common with the subject matter of other
+experiences, and which, being common, may be saved for further
+use.  It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress.
+In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it
+may be of precious import to the individual implicated in the
+experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable.  From the standpoint
+of science, this material is accidental, while the features which
+are widely shared are essential.  Whatever is unique in the
+situation, since dependent upon the peculiarities of the
+individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is not available
+for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and fixed
+by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience
+may perish in its passing.  But abstraction and the use of terms
+to record what is abstracted put the net value of individual
+experience at the permanent disposal of mankind.  No one can
+foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use.  The man
+of science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer
+of tools who does not know who will use them nor when.  But
+intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range
+of adaptation than other mechanical tools.
+
+Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction.  It is the
+functioning of an abstraction in its application to a new
+concrete experience, -- its extension to clarify and direct new
+situations.  Reference to these possible applications is
+necessary in order that the abstraction may be fruitful, instead
+of a barren formalism ending in itself.  Generalization is
+essentially a social device.  When men identified their interests
+exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their
+generalizations were correspondingly restricted.  The viewpoint
+did not permit a wide and free survey.  Men's thoughts were tied
+down to a contracted space and a short time, -- limited to their
+own established customs as a measure of all possible values.
+Scientific abstraction and generalization are equivalent to
+taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location in
+time and space.  While this emancipation from the conditions and
+episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the
+"abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and
+free range of fruitful novel applications in practice.  Terms and
+propositions record, fix, and convey what is abstracted.  A
+meaning detached from a given experience cannot remain hanging in
+the air.  It must acquire a local habitation.  Names give
+abstract meanings a physical locus and body.  Formulation is thus
+not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to the
+completion of the work of thought.  Persons know many things
+which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical,
+direct, and personal.  An individual can use it for himself; he
+may be able to act upon it with efficiency.  Artists and
+executives often have their knowledge in this state.  But it is
+personal, untransferable, and, as it were, instinctive.  To
+formulate the significance of an experience a man must take into
+conscious account the experiences of others.  He must try to find
+a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as
+his own.  Otherwise his communication cannot be understood.  He
+talks a language which no one else knows.  While literary art
+furnishes the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that
+they are vitally significant to others, the vocabulary of science
+is designed, in another fashion, to express the meaning of
+experienced things in symbols which any one will know who studies
+the science.  Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances the
+meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation
+supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with
+transformed meanings.
+
+To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in
+projection and control of new experiences, pursued
+systematically, intentionally, and on a scale due to freedom from
+limitations of habit.  It is the sole instrumentality of
+conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress.  And if its
+generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer
+upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are
+very different from those of merely speculative theorizing.  The
+latter are in permanent dislocation from practice; the former are
+temporarily detached for the sake of wider and freer application
+in later concrete action.  There is a kind of idle theory which
+is antithetical to practice; but genuinely scientific theory
+falls within practice as the agency of its expansion and its
+direction to new possibilities.
+
+3.  Naturalism and Humanism in Education.  There exists an
+educational tradition which opposes science to literature and
+history in the curriculum.  The quarrel between the
+representatives of the two interests is easily explicable
+historically.  Literature and language and a literary philosophy
+were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before
+experimental science came into being.  The latter had naturally
+to win its way.  No fortified and protected interest readily
+surrenders any monopoly it may possess.  But the assumption, from
+whichever side, that language and literary products are
+exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science is purely
+physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the
+educational use of both studies.  Human life does not occur in a
+vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of
+its drama (ante, p.  211).  Man's life is bound up in the
+processes of nature; his career, for success or defeat, depends
+upon the way in which nature enters it.  Man's power of
+deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to
+direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn
+dependent upon insight into nature's processes.  Whatever natural
+science may be for the specialist, for educational purposes it is
+knowledge of the conditions of human action.  To be aware of the
+medium in which social intercourse goes on, and of the means and
+obstacles to its progressive development is to be in command of a
+knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality.  One who is
+ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles
+by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from
+superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it
+magically, to intellectual self-possession.  That science may be
+taught as a set of formal and technical exercises is only too
+true.  This happens whenever information about the world is made
+an end in itself.  The failure of such instruction to procure
+culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural
+knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong
+educational attitude.  Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as
+it functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an
+aristocratic culture.  The notion that "applied" knowledge is
+somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was natural to a
+society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and
+serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by
+custom rather than by intelligence.  Science, or the highest
+knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from all
+application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful
+arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in
+them (See below, Ch.  XIX).  The idea of science thus generated
+persisted after science had itself adopted the appliances of the
+arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and after the
+rise of democracy.  Taking theory just as theory, however, that
+which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that
+which concerns a merely physical world.  In adopting the
+criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture, aloof
+from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational
+advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic
+disadvantage.  So far as they adopt the idea of science
+appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a
+democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in
+showing that natural science is more humanistic than an alleged
+humanism which bases its educational schemes upon the specialized
+interests of a leisure class.  For, as we have already stated,
+humanistic studies when set in opposition to study of nature are
+hampered.  They tend to reduce themselves to exclusively literary
+and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink to "the
+classics," to languages no longer spoken.  For modern languages
+may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban.  It
+would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the
+educational practices which have identified the "humanities"
+exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin.  Greek and Roman
+art and institutions made such important contributions to our
+civilization that there should always be the amplest
+opportunities for making their acquaintance.  But to regard them
+as par excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate
+neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter which is
+accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate a
+narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the
+accidents of exclusive opportunity.  Knowledge is humanistic in
+quality not because it is about human products in the past, but
+because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and
+human sympathy.  Any subject matter which accomplishes this
+result is humane, and any subject matter which does not
+accomplish it is not even educational.
+
+Summary.  Science represents the fruition of the cognitive
+factors in experience.  Instead of contenting itself with a mere
+statement of what commends itself to personal or customary
+experience, it aims at a statement which will reveal the sources,
+grounds, and consequences of a belief.  The achievement of this
+aim gives logical character to the statements.  Educationally, it
+has to be noted that logical characteristics of method, since
+they belong to subject matter which has reached a high degree of
+intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the
+learner--the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a
+more refined intellectual quality of experience.  When this fact
+is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which
+however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary
+information, being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary.
+The function which science has to perform in the curriculum is
+that which it has performed for the race: emancipation from local
+and temporary incidents of experience, and the opening of
+intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal habit
+and predilection.  The logical traits of abstraction,
+generalization, and definite formulation are all associated with
+this function.  In emancipating an idea from the particular
+context in which it originated and giving it a wider reference
+the results of the experience of any individual are put at the
+disposal of all men.  Thus ultimately and philosophically science
+is the organ of general social progress.  1 Upon the positive
+side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden, the
+shop, etc., may be referred to (See p.  200).  The laboratory may
+be treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and
+appliances for the better pursuit of these problems.
+
+
+Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
+
+The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values
+have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and
+interests.
+
+The specific values usually discussed in educational theories
+coincide with aims which are usually urged.  They are such things
+as utility, culture, information, preparation for social
+efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on.  The aspect of
+these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated
+in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no
+difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and
+referring to it as a value.  It happens, however, that discussion
+of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the
+various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum.
+It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by
+pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from
+their study.  An explicit discussion of educational values thus
+affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims
+and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by
+bringing them into connection with one another.
+
+1.  The Nature of Realization or Appreciation.  Much of our
+experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which
+intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for
+or represent the former.  It is one thing to have been engaged in
+war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another
+thing to hear or read about it.  All language, all symbols, are
+implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the
+experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It
+stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience,
+something in which we take part vitally and at first hand,
+instead of through the intervention of representative media.  As
+we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is
+very limited.  If it were not for the intervention of agencies
+for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would
+remain almost on the level of that of the brutes.  Every step
+from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of
+media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and
+give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with
+things which can only be signified or symbolized.  It is
+doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to
+identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so
+dependent are we on letters for effective representative or
+indirect experience.
+
+At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see)
+there is always a danger that symbols will not be truly
+representative; danger that instead of really calling up the
+absent and remote in a way to make it enter a present experience,
+the linguistic media of representation will become an end in
+themselves.  Formal education is peculiarly exposed to this
+danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere
+bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often
+comes with it.  In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing
+sense" is used to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a
+direct experience in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly
+detached quality of a representative experience.  The terms
+"mental realization" and "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation)
+are more elaborate names for the realizing sense of a thing.  It
+is not possible to define these ideas except by synonyms, like
+"coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc., for the only
+way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a thing
+is by having it.  But it is the difference between reading a
+technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between
+just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning
+mathematical equations about light and being carried away by some
+peculiarly glorious illumination of a misty landscape.  We are
+thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other
+purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct
+appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils
+have a foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient
+for the superstructure of representative experience erected by
+formulated school studies.  This is not simply a matter of
+quantity or bulk.  Sufficient direct experience is even more a
+matter of quality; it must be of a sort to connect readily and
+fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruction.  Before
+teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and ideas through
+the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine situations in
+which personal participation brings home the import of the
+material and the problems which it conveys.  From the standpoint
+of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their
+own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also
+means of supplying subject matter required for understanding
+instruction involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of
+open-mindedness and concern as to the material symbolically
+conveyed.
+
+In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter,
+the demand for this background of realization or appreciation is
+met by the provision made for play and active occupations
+embodying typical situations.  Nothing need be added to what has
+already been said except to point out that while the discussion
+dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary education,
+where the demand for the available background of direct
+experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary
+or elementary phase of every subject.  The first and basic
+function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or
+college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first
+hand with a certain range of facts and problems -- to give him a
+"feeling" for them.  Getting command of technique and of methods
+of reaching and testing generalizations is at first secondary to
+getting appreciation.  As regards the primary school activities,
+it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not to
+amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor
+yet to acquire skill, -- though these results may accrue as
+by-products, -- but to enlarge and enrich the scope of
+experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in
+intellectual progress.
+
+The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for
+bringing out three further principles: the nature of effective or
+real (as distinct from nominal) standards of value; the place of
+the imagination in appreciative realizations; and the place of
+the fine arts in the course of study.
+
+1.  The nature of standards of valuation.  Every adult has
+acquired, in the course of his prior experience and education,
+certain measures of the worth of various sorts of experience.  He
+has learned to look upon qualities like honesty, amiability,
+perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods; upon certain classics of
+literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values, and so on.  Not
+only this, but he has learned certain rules for these values --
+the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc., proportionate
+distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system in
+intellectual accomplishments.  These principles are so important
+as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents
+and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the
+young.  They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be
+merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal.  In
+reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend upon
+what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be
+deeply significant in concrete situations.  An individual may
+have learned that certain characteristics are conventionally
+esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some
+correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe
+that these traits constitute his own musical standards.  But if
+in his own past experience, what he has been most accustomed to
+and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures
+of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level.  The appeal actually
+made to him in his own personal realization fixes his attitude
+much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper thing
+to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm"
+of valuation in subsequent musical experiences.
+
+Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste.  But
+it applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual
+worth.  A youth who has had repeated experience of the full
+meaning of the value of kindliness toward others built into his
+disposition has a measure of the worth of generous treatment of
+others.  Without this vital appreciation, the duty and virtue of
+unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard remains
+purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate
+into realities.  His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a
+knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and
+esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it.  Thus there
+grows up a split between a person's professed standards and his
+actual ones.  A person may be aware of the results of this
+struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical opinions;
+he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear to
+him and what he has learned will win the approval of others.  But
+of the split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of
+unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of disposition.  In similar
+fashion, a pupil who has worked through some confused
+intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up
+obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of
+clarity and definition.  He has a standard which can be depended
+upon.  He may be trained externally to go through certain motions
+of analysis and division of subject matter and may acquire
+information about the value of these processes as standard
+logical functions, but unless it somehow comes home to him at
+some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance of the
+logical norms -- so-called -- remains as much an external piece
+of information as, say, the names of rivers in China.  He may be
+able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal.
+
+It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it
+were confined to such things as literature and pictures and
+music.  Its scope is as comprehensive as the work of education
+itself.  The formation of habits is a purely mechanical thing
+unless habits are also tastes -- habitual modes of preference and
+esteem, an effective sense of excellence.  There are adequate
+grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in schools
+upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon
+promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of
+attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts,
+ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.
+
+2.  Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from
+symbolic or representative experiences.  They are not to be
+distinguished from the work of the intellect or understanding.
+Only a personal response involving imagination can possibly
+procure realization even of pure "facts." The imagination is the
+medium of appreciation in every field.  The engagement of the
+imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than
+mechanical.  Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the
+imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and
+intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation.  This leads
+to an exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful
+symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for
+developing imagination and appreciation; and, by neglecting
+imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which
+reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of
+specialized skill and amassing of a load of information.  Theory,
+and -- to some extent -- practice, have advanced far enough to
+recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise.  But
+it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-
+off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the
+difference between play and what is regarded as serious
+employment should be not a difference between the presence and
+absence of imagination, but a difference in the materials with
+which imagination is occupied.  The result is an unwholesome
+exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of childish
+play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine
+efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results.
+Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned
+machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect
+of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops
+by the wayside.  Meantime mind-wandering and wayward fancy are
+nothing but the unsuppressible imagination cut loose from concern
+with what is done.
+
+An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium
+of realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope
+of direct physical response is the sole way of escape from
+mechanical methods in teaching.  The emphasis put in this book,
+in accord with many tendencies in contemporary education, upon
+activity, will be misleading if it is not recognized that the
+imagination is as much a normal and integral part of human
+activity as is muscular movement.  The educative value of manual
+activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play,
+depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a
+sensing of the meaning of what is going on.  In effect, if not in
+name, they are dramatizations.  Their utilitarian value in
+forming habits of skill to be used for tangible results is
+important, but not when isolated from the appreciative side.
+Were it not for the accompanying play of imagination, there would
+be no road from a direct activity to representative knowledge;
+for it is by imagination that symbols are translated over into a
+direct meaning and integrated with a narrower activity so as to
+expand and enrich it.  When the representative creative
+imagination is made merely literary and mythological, symbols are
+rendered mere means of directing physical reactions of the organs
+of speech.
+
+3.  In the account previously given nothing was explicitly said
+about the place of literature and the fine arts in the course of
+study.  The omission at that point was intentional.  At the
+outset, there is no sharp demarcation of useful, or industrial,
+arts and fine arts.  The activities mentioned in Chapter XV
+contain within themselves the factors later discriminated into
+fine and useful arts.  As engaging the emotions and the
+imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts
+their quality.  As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of
+tools to materials with constantly increasing perfection, they
+involve the element of technique indispensable to artistic
+production.  From the standpoint of product, or the work of art,
+they are naturally defective, though even in this respect when
+they comprise genuine appreciation they often have a rudimentary
+charm.  As experiences they have both an artistic and an esthetic
+quality.  When they emerge into activities which are tested by
+their product and when the socially serviceable value of the
+product is emphasized, they pass into useful or industrial arts.
+When they develop in the direction of an enhanced appreciation of
+the immediate qualities which appeal to taste, they grow into
+fine arts.
+
+In one of its meanings, appreciation is opposed to depreciation.
+It denotes an enlarged, an intensified prizing, not merely a
+prizing, much less -- like depreciation -- a lowered and degraded
+prizing.  This enhancement of the qualities which make any
+ordinary experience appealing, appropriable -- capable of full
+assimilation -- and enjoyable, constitutes the prime function of
+literature, music, drawing, painting, etc., in education.  They
+are not the exclusive agencies of appreciation in the most
+general sense of that word; but they are the chief agencies of an
+intensified, enhanced appreciation.  As such, they are not only
+intrinsically and directly enjoyable, but they serve a purpose
+beyond themselves.  They have the office, in increased degree, of
+all appreciation in fixing taste, in forming standards for the
+worth of later experiences.  They arouse discontent with
+conditions which fall below their measure; they create a demand
+for surroundings coming up to their own level.  They reveal a
+depth and range of meaning in experiences which otherwise might
+be mediocre and trivial.  They supply, that is, organs of vision.
+Moreover, in their fullness they represent the concentration and
+consummation of elements of good which are otherwise scattered
+and incomplete.  They select and focus the elements of enjoyable
+worth which make any experience directly enjoyable.  They are not
+luxuries of education, but emphatic expressions of that which
+makes any education worth while.
+
+2.  The Valuation of Studies.  The theory of educational values
+involves not only an account of the nature of appreciation as
+fixing the measure of subsequent valuations, but an account of
+the specific directions in which these valuations occur.  To
+value means primarily to prize, to esteem; but secondarily it
+means to apprise, to estimate.  It means, that is, the act of
+cherishing something, holding it dear, and also the act of
+passing judgment upon the nature and amount of its value as
+compared with something else.  To value in the latter sense is to
+valuate or evaluate.  The distinction coincides with that
+sometimes made between intrinsic and instrumental values.
+Intrinsic values are not objects of judgment, they cannot (as
+intrinsic) be compared, or regarded as greater and less, better
+or worse.  They are invaluable; and if a thing is invaluable, it
+is neither more nor less so than any other invaluable.  But
+occasions present themselves when it is necessary to choose, when
+we must let one thing go in order to take another.  This
+establishes an order of preference, a greater and less, better
+and worse.  Things judged or passed upon have to be estimated in
+relation to some third thing, some further end.  With respect to
+that, they are means, or instrumental values.
+
+We may imagine a man who at one time thoroughly enjoys converse
+with his friends, at another the hearing of a symphony; at
+another the eating of his meals; at another the reading of a
+book; at another the earning of money, and so on.  As an
+appreciative realization, each of these is an intrinsic value.
+It occupies a particular place in life; it serves its own end,
+which cannot be supplied by a substitute.  There is no question
+of comparative value, and hence none of valuation.  Each is the
+specific good which it is, and that is all that can be said.  In
+its own place, none is a means to anything beyond itself.  But
+there may arise a situation in which they compete or conflict, in
+which a choice has to be made.  Now comparison comes in.  Since a
+choice has to be made, we want to know the respective claims of
+each competitor.  What is to be said for it? What does it offer
+in comparison with, as balanced over against, some other
+possibility? Raising these questions means that a particular good
+is no longer an end in itself, an intrinsic good.  For if it
+were, its claims would be incomparable, imperative.  The question
+is now as to its status as a means of realizing something else,
+which is then the invaluable of that situation.  If a man has
+just eaten, or if he is well fed generally and the opportunity to
+hear music is a rarity, he will probably prefer the music to
+eating.  In the given situation that will render the greater
+contribution.  If he is starving, or if he is satiated with music
+for the time being, he will naturally judge food to have the
+greater worth.  In the abstract or at large, apart from the needs
+of a particular situation in which choice has to be made, there
+is no such thing as degrees or order of value.  Certain
+conclusions follow with respect to educational values.  We cannot
+establish a hierarchy of values among studies.  It is futile to
+attempt to arrange them in an order, beginning with one having
+least worth and going on to that of maximum value.  In so far as
+any study has a unique or irreplaceable function in experience,
+in so far as it marks a characteristic enrichment of life, its
+worth is intrinsic or incomparable.  Since education is not a
+means to living, but is identical with the operation of living a
+life which is fruitful and inherently significant, the only
+ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living
+itself.  And this is not an end to which studies and activities
+are subordinate means; it is the whole of which they are
+ingredients.  And what has been said about appreciation means
+that every study in one of its aspects ought to have just such
+ultimate significance.  It is true of arithmetic as it is of
+poetry that in some place and at some time it ought to be a good
+to be appreciated on its own account -- just as an enjoyable
+experience, in short.  If it is not, then when the time and place
+come for it to be used as a means or
+instrumentality, it will be in just that much handicapped.  Never
+having been realized or appreciated for itself, one will miss
+something of its capacity as a resource for other ends.
+
+It equally follows that when we compare studies as to their
+values, that is, treat them as means to something beyond
+themselves, that which controls their proper valuation is found
+in the specific situation in which they are to be used.  The way
+to enable a student to apprehend the instrumental value of
+arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit it will be to
+him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him discover
+that success in something he is interested in doing depends upon
+ability to use number.
+
+It also follows that the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of
+value among different studies is a misguided one, in spite of the
+amount of time recently devoted to the undertaking.  Science for
+example may have any kind of value, depending upon the situation
+into which it enters as a means.  To some the value of science
+may be military; it may be an instrument in strengthening means
+of offense or defense; it may be technological, a tool for
+engineering; or it may be commercial -- an aid in the successful
+conduct of business; under other conditions, its worth may be
+philanthropic -- the service it renders in relieving human
+suffering; or again it may be quite conventional -- of value in
+establishing one's social status as an "educated" person.  As
+matter of fact, science serves all these purposes, and it would
+be an arbitrary task to try to fix upon one of them as its "real"
+end.  All that we can be sure of educationally is that science
+should be taught so as to be an end in itself in the lives of
+students--something worth while on account of its own unique
+intrinsic contribution to the experience of life.  Primarily it
+must have "appreciation value." If we take something which
+seems to be at the opposite pole, like poetry, the same sort of
+statement applies.  It may be that, at the present time, its
+chief value is the contribution it makes to the enjoyment of
+leisure.  But that may represent a degenerate condition rather
+than anything necessary.  Poetry has historically been allied
+with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of
+penetrating the mysterious depths of things.  It has had an
+enormous patriotic value.  Homer to the Greeks was a Bible, a
+textbook of morals, a history, and a national inspiration.  In
+any case, it may be said that an education which does not succeed
+in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in
+its leisure, has something the matter with it -- or else the
+poetry is artificial poetry.
+
+The same considerations apply to the value of a study or a topic
+of a study with reference to its motivating force.  Those
+responsible for planning and teaching the course of study should
+have grounds for thinking that the studies and topics included
+furnish both direct increments to the enriching of lives of the
+pupils and also materials which they can put to use in other
+concerns of direct interest.  Since the curriculum is always
+getting loaded down with purely inherited traditional matter and
+with subjects which represent mainly the energy of some
+influential person or group of persons in behalf of something
+dear to them, it requires constant inspection, criticism, and
+revision to make sure it is accomplishing its purpose.  Then
+there is always the probability that it represents the values of
+adults rather than those of children and youth, or those of
+pupils a generation ago rather than those of the present day.
+Hence a further need for a critical outlook and survey.  But
+these considerations do not mean that for a subject to have
+motivating value to a pupil (whether intrinsic or instrumental)
+is the same thing as for him to be aware of the value, or to be
+able to tell what the study is good for.
+
+In the first place, as long as any topic makes an immediate
+appeal, it is not necessary to ask what it is good for.  This is
+a question which can be asked only about instrumental values.
+Some goods are not good for anything; they are just goods.  Any
+other notion leads to an absurdity.  For we cannot stop asking
+the question about an instrumental good, one whose value lies in
+its being good for something, unless there is at some point
+something intrinsically good, good for itself.  To a hungry,
+healthy child, food is a good of the situation; we do not have to
+bring him to consciousness of the ends subserved by food in order
+to supply a motive to eat.  The food in connection with his
+appetite is a motive.  The same thing holds of mentally eager
+pupils with respect to many topics.  Neither they nor the teacher
+could possibly foretell with any exactness the purposes learning
+is to accomplish in the future; nor as long as the eagerness
+continues is it advisable to try to specify particular goods
+which are to come of it.  The proof of a good is found in the
+fact that the pupil responds; his response is use.  His response
+to the material shows that the subject functions in his life.  It
+is unsound to urge that, say, Latin has a value per se in the
+abstract, just as a study, as a sufficient justification for
+teaching it.  But it is equally absurd to argue that unless
+teacher or pupil can point out some definite assignable future
+use to which it is to be put, it lacks justifying value.  When
+pupils are genuinely concerned in learning Latin, that is of
+itself proof that it possesses value.  The most which one is
+entitled to ask in such cases is whether in view of the shortness
+of time, there are not other things of intrinsic value which in
+addition have greater instrumental value.
+
+This brings us to the matter of instrumental values -- topics
+studied because of some end beyond themselves.  If a child is ill
+and his appetite does not lead him to eat when food is presented,
+or if his appetite is perverted so that he prefers candy to meat
+and vegetables, conscious reference to results is indicated.  He
+needs to be made conscious of consequences as a justification of
+the positive or negative value of certain objects.  Or the state
+of things may be normal enough, and yet an individual not be
+moved by some matter because he does not grasp how his attainment
+of some intrinsic good depends upon active concern with what is
+presented.  In such cases, it is obviously the part of wisdom to
+establish consciousness of connection.  In general what is
+desirable is that a topic be presented in such a way that it
+either have an immediate value, and require no justification, or
+else be perceived to be a means of achieving something of
+intrinsic value.  An instrumental value then has the intrinsic
+value of being a means to an end.  It may be questioned whether
+some of the present pedagogical interest in the matter of values
+of studies is not either excessive or else too narrow.  Sometimes
+it appears to be a labored effort to furnish an apologetic for
+topics which no longer operate to any purpose, direct or
+indirect, in the lives of pupils.  At other times, the reaction
+against useless lumber seems to have gone to the extent of
+supposing that no subject or topic should be taught unless some
+quite definite future utility can be pointed out by those making
+the course of study or by the pupil himself, unmindful of the
+fact that life is its own excuse for being; and that definite
+utilities which can be pointed out are themselves justified only
+because they increase the experienced content of life itself.  3.
+The Segregation and Organization of Values.  It is of course
+possible to classify in a general way the various valuable phases
+of life.  In order to get a survey of aims sufficiently wide (See
+ante, p.  110) to give breadth and flexibility to the enterprise
+of education, there is some advantage in such a classification.
+But it is a great mistake to regard these values as ultimate ends
+to which the concrete satisfactions of experience are
+subordinate.  They are nothing but generalizations, more or less
+adequate, of concrete goods.  Health, wealth, efficiency,
+sociability, utility, culture, happiness itself are only abstract
+terms which sum up a multitude of particulars.  To regard such
+things as standards for the valuation of concrete topics and
+process of education is to subordinate to an abstraction the
+concrete facts from which the abstraction is derived.  They are
+not in any true sense standards of valuation; these are found, as
+we have previously seen, in the specific realizations which form
+tastes and habits of preference.  They are, however, of
+significance as points of view elevated above the details of life
+whence to survey the field and see how its constituent details
+are distributed, and whether they are well proportioned.
+No classification can have other than a provisional validity.
+The following may prove of some help.  We may say that the kind
+of experience to which the work of the schools should contribute
+is one marked by executive competency in the management of
+resources and obstacles encountered (efficiency); by sociability,
+or interest in the direct companionship of others; by aesthetic
+taste or capacity to appreciate artistic excellence in at least
+some of its classic forms; by trained intellectual method, or
+interest in some mode of scientific achievement; and by
+sensitiveness to the rights and claims of others --
+conscientiousness.  And while these considerations are not
+standards of value, they are useful criteria for survey,
+criticism, and better organization of existing methods and
+subject matter of instruction.
+
+The need of such general points of view is the greater because of
+a tendency to segregate educational values due to the isolation
+from one another of the various pursuits of life.  The idea is
+prevalent that different studies represent separate kinds of
+values, and that the curriculum should, therefore, be constituted
+by gathering together various studies till a sufficient variety
+of independent values have been cared for.  The following
+quotation does not use the word value, but it contains the notion
+of a curriculum constructed on the idea that there are a number
+of separate ends to be reached, and that various studies may be
+evaluated by referring each study to its respective end.  "Memory
+is trained by most studies, but best by languages and history;
+taste is trained by the more advanced study of languages, and
+still better by English literature; imagination by all higher
+language teaching, but chiefly by Greek and Latin poetry;
+observation by science work in the laboratory, though some
+training is to be got from the earlier stages of Latin and Greek;
+for expression, Greek and Latin composition comes first and
+English composition next; for abstract reasoning, mathematics
+stands almost alone; for concrete reasoning, science comes first,
+then geometry; for social reasoning, the Greek and Roman
+historians and orators come first, and general history next.
+Hence the narrowest education which can claim to be at all
+complete includes Latin, one modern language, some history, some
+English literature, and one science." There is much in the
+wording of this passage which is irrelevant to our point and
+which must be discounted to make it clear.  The phraseology
+betrays the particular provincial tradition within which the
+author is writing.  There is the unquestioned assumption of
+"faculties" to be trained, and a dominant interest in the ancient
+languages; there is comparative disregard of the earth on which
+men happen to live and the bodies they happen to carry around
+with them.  But with allowances made for these matters (even with
+their complete abandonment) we find much in contemporary
+educational philosophy which parallels the fundamental notion of
+parceling out special values to segregated studies.  Even when
+some one end is set up as a standard of value, like social
+efficiency or culture, it will often be found to be but a verbal
+heading under which a variety of disconnected factors are
+comprised.  And although the general tendency is to allow a
+greater variety of values to a given study than does the passage
+quoted, yet the attempt to inventory a number of values
+attaching to each study and to state the amount of each value
+which the given study possesses emphasizes an implied
+educational disintegration.
+
+As matter of fact, such schemes of values of studies are largely
+but unconscious justifications of the curriculum with which one
+is familiar.  One accepts, for the most part, the studies of the
+existing course and then assigns values to them as a sufficient
+reason for their being taught.  Mathematics is said to have, for
+example, disciplinary value in habituating the pupil to accuracy
+of statement and closeness of reasoning; it has utilitarian value
+in giving command of the arts of calculation involved in trade
+and the arts; culture value in its enlargement of the imagination
+in dealing with the most general relations of things; even
+religious value in its concept of the infinite and allied ideas.
+But clearly mathematics does not accomplish such results, because
+it is endowed with miraculous potencies called values; it has
+these values if and when it accomplishes these results, and not
+otherwise.  The statements may help a teacher to a larger vision
+of the possible results to be effected by instruction in
+mathematical topics.  But unfortunately, the tendency is to treat
+the statement as indicating powers inherently residing in the
+subject, whether they operate or not, and thus to give it a rigid
+justification.  If they do not operate, the blame is put not on
+the subject as taught, but on the indifference and recalcitrancy
+of pupils.
+
+This attitude toward subjects is the obverse side of the
+conception of experience or life as a patchwork of independent
+interests which exist side by side and limit one another.
+Students of politics are familiar with a check and balance theory
+of the powers of government.  There are supposed to be
+independent separate functions, like the legislative, executive,
+judicial, administrative, and all goes well if each of these
+checks all the others and thus creates an ideal balance.  There
+is a philosophy which might well be called the check and balance
+theory of experience.  Life presents a diversity of interests.
+Left to themselves, they tend to encroach on one another.  The
+ideal is to prescribe a special territory for each till the whole
+ground of experience is covered, and then see to it each remains
+within its own boundaries.  Politics, business, recreation, art,
+science, the learned professions, polite intercourse, leisure,
+represent such interests.  Each of these ramifies into many
+branches: business into manual occupations, executive positions,
+bookkeeping, railroading, banking, agriculture, trade and
+commerce, etc., and so with each of the others.  An ideal
+education would then supply the means of meeting these separate
+and pigeon-holed interests.  And when we look at the schools, it
+is easy to get the impression that they accept this view of the
+nature of adult life, and set for themselves the task of meeting
+its demands.  Each interest is acknowledged as a kind of fixed
+institution to which something in the course of study must
+correspond.  The course of study must then have some civics and
+history politically and patriotically viewed: some utilitarian
+studies; some science; some art (mainly literature of course);
+some provision for recreation; some moral education; and so on.
+And it will be found that a large part of current agitation about
+schools is concerned with clamor and controversy about the due
+meed of recognition to be given to each of these interests, and
+with struggles to secure for each its due share in the course of
+study; or, if this does not seem feasible in the existing school
+system, then to secure a new and separate kind of schooling to
+meet the need.  In the multitude of
+educations education is forgotten.
+
+The obvious outcome is congestion of the course of study,
+overpressure and distraction of pupils, and a narrow
+specialization fatal to the very idea of education.  But these
+bad results usually lead to more of the same sort of thing as a
+remedy.  When it is perceived that after all the requirements of
+a full life experience are not met, the deficiency is not laid to
+the isolation and narrowness of the teaching of the existing
+subjects, and this recognition made the basis of reorganization
+of the system.  No, the lack is something to be made up for by
+the introduction of still another study, or, if necessary,
+another kind of school.  And as a rule those who object to the
+resulting overcrowding and consequent superficiality and
+distraction usually also have recourse to a merely quantitative
+criterion: the remedy is to cut off a great many studies as fads
+and frills, and return to the good old curriculum of the three
+R's in elementary education and the equally good and equally
+old-fashioned curriculum of the classics and mathematics in
+higher education.
+
+The situation has, of course, its historic explanation.  Various
+epochs of the past have had their own characteristic struggles
+and interests.  Each of these great epochs has left behind itself
+a kind of cultural deposit, like a geologic stratum.  These
+deposits have found their way into educational institutions in
+the form of studies, distinct courses of study, distinct types of
+schools.  With the rapid change of political, scientific, and
+economic interests in the last century, provision had to be made
+for new values.  Though the older courses resisted, they have had
+at least in this country to retire their pretensions to a
+monopoly.  They have not, however, been reorganized in content
+and aim; they have only been reduced in amount.  The new studies,
+representing the new interests, have not been used to transform
+the method and aim of all instruction; they have been injected
+and added on.  The result is a conglomerate, the cement of which
+consists in the mechanics of the school program or time table.
+Thence arises the scheme of values and standards of value which
+we have mentioned.
+
+This situation in education represents the divisions and
+separations which obtain in social life.  The variety of
+interests which should mark any rich and balanced experience have
+been torn asunder and deposited in separate institutions with
+diverse and independent purposes and methods.  Business is
+business, science is science, art is art, politics is politics,
+social intercourse is social intercourse, morals is morals,
+recreation is recreation, and so on.  Each possesses a separate
+and independent province with its own peculiar aims and ways of
+proceeding.  Each contributes to the others only externally and
+accidentally.  All of them together make up the whole of life by
+just apposition and addition.  What does one expect from business
+save that it should furnish money, to be used in turn for making
+more money and for support of self and family, for buying books
+and pictures, tickets to concerts which may afford culture, and
+for paying taxes, charitable gifts and other things of social and
+ethical value? How unreasonable to expect that the pursuit of
+business should be itself a culture of the imagination, in
+breadth and refinement; that it should directly, and not through
+the money which it supplies, have social service for its
+animating principle and be conducted as an enterprise in behalf
+of social organization! The same thing is to be said, mutatis
+mutandis, of the pursuit of art or science or politics or
+religion.  Each has become specialized not merely in its
+appliances and its demands upon time, but in its aim and
+animating spirit.  Unconsciously, our course of studies and our
+theories of the educational values of studies reflect this
+division of interests.  The point at issue in a theory of
+educational value is then the unity or integrity of experience.
+How shall it be full and varied without losing unity of spirit?
+How shall it be one and yet not narrow and monotonous in its
+unity? Ultimately, the question of values and a standard of
+values is the moral question of the organization of the interests
+of life.  Educationally, the question concerns that organization
+of schools, materials, and methods which will operate to achieve
+breadth and richness of experience.  How shall we secure breadth
+of outlook without sacrificing efficiency of execution? How shall
+we secure the diversity of interests, without paying the price of
+isolation? How shall the individual be rendered executive in his
+intelligence instead of at the cost of his intelligence? How
+shall art, science, and politics reinforce one another in an
+enriched temper of mind instead of constituting ends pursued at
+one another's expense? How can the interests of life and the
+studies which enforce them enrich the common experience of men
+instead of dividing men from one another? With the questions of
+reorganization thus suggested, we shall be concerned in the
+concluding chapters.
+
+Summary. Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of
+value have been covered in the prior discussion of aims and
+interests.  But since educational values are generally discussed
+in connection with the claims of the various studies of the
+curriculum, the consideration of aim and interest is here resumed
+from the point of view of special studies.  The term "value" has
+two quite different meanings.  On the one hand, it denotes the
+attitude of prizing a thing finding it worth while, for its own
+sake, or intrinsically.  This is a name for a full or complete
+experience.  To value in this sense is to appreciate.  But to
+value also means a distinctively intellectual act--an operation
+of comparing and judging--to valuate.  This occurs when direct
+full experience is lacking, and the question arises which of the
+various possibilities of a situation is to be preferred in order
+to reach a full realization, or vital experience.
+
+We must not, however, divide the studies of the curriculum into
+the appreciative, those concerned with intrinsic value, and the
+instrumental, concerned with those which are of value or ends
+beyond themselves.  The formation of proper standards in any
+subject depends upon a realization of the contribution which it
+makes to the immediate significance of experience, upon a direct
+appreciation.  Literature and the fine arts are of peculiar value
+because they represent appreciation at its best--a heightened
+realization of meaning through selection and concentration.  But
+every subject at some phase of its development should possess,
+what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic
+quality.
+
+Contribution to immediate intrinsic values in all their variety
+in experience is the only criterion for determining the worth of
+instrumental and derived values in studies.  The tendency to
+assign separate values to each study and to regard the curriculum
+in its entirety as a kind of composite made by the aggregation of
+segregated values is a result of the isolation of social groups
+and classes.  Hence it is the business of education in a
+democratic social group to struggle against this isolation in
+order that the various interests may reinforce and play into one
+another.
+
+Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
+
+1.  The Origin of the Opposition.
+
+The isolation of aims and values which we have been considering
+leads to opposition between them.  Probably the most deep-seated
+antithesis which has shown itself in educational history is that
+between education in preparation for useful labor and education
+for a life of leisure.  The bare terms "useful labor" and
+"leisure" confirm the statement already made that the segregation
+and conflict of values are not self-inclosed, but reflect a
+division within social life.  Were the two functions of gaining a
+livelihood by work and enjoying in a cultivated way the
+opportunities of leisure, distributed equally among the different
+members of a community, it would not occur to any one that there
+was any conflict of educational agencies and aims involved.  It
+would be self-evident that the question was how education could
+contribute most effectively to both.  And while it might be found
+that some materials of instruction chiefly accomplished one
+result and other subject matter the other, it would be evident
+that care must be taken to secure as much overlapping as
+conditions permit; that is, the education which had leisure more
+directly in view should indirectly reinforce as much as possible
+the efficiency and the enjoyment of work, while that aiming at
+the latter should produce habits of emotion and intellect which
+would procure a worthy cultivation of leisure.  These general
+considerations are amply borne out by the historical development
+of educational philosophy.  The separation of liberal education
+from professional and industrial education goes back to the time
+of the Greeks, and was formulated expressly on the basis of a
+division of classes into those who had to labor for a living and
+those who were relieved from this necessity.  The conception that
+liberal education, adapted to men in the latter class, is
+intrinsically higher than the servile training given to the
+latter class reflected the fact that one class was free and the
+other servile in its social status.  The latter class labored not
+only for its own subsistence, but also for the means which
+enabled the superior class to live without personally engaging in
+occupations taking almost all the time and not of a nature to
+engage or reward intelligence.
+
+That a certain amount of labor must be engaged in goes without
+saying.  Human beings have to live and it requires work to supply
+the resources of life.  Even if we insist that the interests
+connected with getting a living are only material and hence
+intrinsically lower than those connected with enjoyment of time
+released from labor, and even if it were admitted that there is
+something engrossing and insubordinate in material interests
+which leads them to strive to usurp the place belonging to the
+higher ideal interests, this would not--barring the fact of
+socially divided classes -- lead to neglect of the kind of
+education which trains men for the useful pursuits.  It would
+rather lead to scrupulous care for them, so that men were trained
+to be efficient in them and yet to keep them in their place;
+education would see to it that we avoided the evil results which
+flow from their being allowed to flourish in obscure purlieus of
+neglect.  Only when a division of these interests coincides with
+a division of an inferior and a superior social class will
+preparation for useful work be looked down upon with contempt as
+an unworthy thing: a fact which prepares one for the conclusion
+that the rigid identification of work with material interests,
+and leisure with ideal interests is itself a social product.
+The educational formulations of the social situation made over
+two thousand years ago have been so influential and give such a
+clear and logical recognition of the implications of the division
+into laboring and leisure classes, that they deserve especial
+note.  According to them, man occupies the highest place in the
+scheme of animate existence.  In part, he shares the constitution
+and functions of plants and animals -- nutritive, reproductive,
+motor or practical.  The distinctively human function is reason
+existing for the sake of beholding the spectacle of the universe.
+Hence the truly human end is the fullest possible of this
+distinctive human prerogative.  The life of observation,
+meditation, cogitation, and speculation pursued as an end in
+itself is the proper life of man.  From reason moreover proceeds
+the proper control of the lower elements of human nature -- the
+appetites and the active, motor, impulses.  In themselves greedy,
+insubordinate, lovers of excess, aiming only at their own
+satiety, they observe moderation -- the law of the mean--and
+serve desirable ends as they are subjected to the rule of reason.
+
+Such is the situation as an affair of theoretical psychology and
+as most adequately stated by Aristotle.  But this state of things
+is reflected in the constitution of classes of men and hence in
+the organization of society.  Only in a comparatively small
+number is the function of reason capable of operating as a law of
+life.  In the mass of people, vegetative and animal functions
+dominate.  Their energy of intelligence is so feeble and
+inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite
+and passion.  Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for
+only reason constitutes a final end.  Like plants, animals and
+physical tools, they are means, appliances, for the attaining of
+ends beyond themselves, although unlike them they have enough
+intelligence to exercise a certain discretion in the execution of
+the tasks committed to them.  Thus by nature, and not merely by
+social convention, there are those who are slaves--that is, means
+for the ends of others.  1 The great body of artisans are in one
+important respect worse off than even slaves.  Like the latter
+they are given up to the service of ends external to themselves;
+but since they do not enjoy the intimate association with the
+free superior class experienced by domestic slaves they remain on
+a lower plane of excellence.  Moreover, women are classed with
+slaves and craftsmen as factors among the animate
+instrumentalities of production and reproduction of the means for
+a free or rational life.
+
+Individually and collectively there is a gulf between merely
+living and living worthily.  In order that one may live worthily
+he must first live, and so with collective society.  The time and
+energy spent upon mere life, upon the gaining of subsistence,
+detracts from that available for activities that have an inherent
+rational meaning; they also unfit for the latter.  Means are
+menial, the serviceable is servile.  The true life is possible
+only in the degree in which the physical necessities are had
+without effort and without attention.  Hence slaves, artisans,
+and women are employed in furnishing the means of subsistence in
+order that others, those adequately equipped with intelligence,
+may live the life of leisurely concern with things intrinsically
+worth while.
+
+To these two modes of occupation, with their distinction of
+servile and free activities (or "arts") correspond two types of
+education: the base or mechanical and the liberal or
+intellectual.  Some persons are trained by suitable practical
+exercises for capacity in doing things, for ability to use the
+mechanical tools involved in turning out physical commodities and
+rendering personal service.  This training is a mere matter of
+habituation and technical skill; it operates through repetition
+and assiduity in application, not through awakening and nurturing
+thought.  Liberal education aims to train intelligence for its
+proper office: to know.  The less this knowledge has to do with
+practical affairs, with making or producing, the more adequately
+it engages intelligence.  So consistently does Aristotle draw the
+line between menial and liberal education that he puts what are
+now called the "fine" arts, music, painting, sculpture, in the
+same class with menial arts so far as their practice is
+concerned.  They involve physical agencies, assiduity of
+practice, and external results.  In discussing, for example,
+education in music he raises the question how far the young
+should be practiced in the playing of instruments.  His answer is
+that such practice and proficiency may be tolerated as conduce to
+appreciation; that is, to understanding and enjoyment of music
+when played by slaves or professionals.  When professional power
+is aimed at, music sinks from the liberal to the professional
+level.  One might then as well teach cooking, says Aristotle.
+Even a liberal concern with the works of fine art depends upon
+the existence of a hireling class of practitioners who have
+subordinated the development of their own personality to
+attaining skill in mechanical execution.  The higher the activity
+the more purely mental is it; the less does it have to do with
+physical things or with the body.  The more purely mental it is,
+the more independent or self-sufficing is it.
+
+These last words remind us that Aristotle again makes a
+distinction of superior and inferior even within those living the
+life of reason.  For there is a distinction in ends and in free
+action, according as one's life is merely accompanied by reason
+or as it makes reason its own medium.  That is to say, the free
+citizen who devotes himself to the public life of his community,
+sharing in the management of its affairs and winning personal
+honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied by reason.  But
+the thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific inquiry
+and philosophic speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not
+simply by *.  Even the activity of the citizen in his civic
+relations, in other words, retains some of the taint of practice,
+of external or merely instrumental doing.  This infection is
+shown by the fact that civic activity and civic excellence need
+the help of others; one cannot engage in public life all by
+himself.  But all needs, all desires imply, in the philosophy of
+Aristotle, a material factor; they involve lack, privation; they
+are dependent upon something beyond themselves for completion.  A
+purely intellectual life, however, one carries on by himself, in
+himself; such assistance as he may derive from others is
+accidental, rather than intrinsic.  In knowing, in the life of
+theory, reason finds its own full manifestation; knowing for the
+sake of knowing irrespective of any application is alone
+independent, or self-sufficing.  Hence only the education that
+makes for power to know as an end in itself, without reference
+to the practice of even civic duties, is truly liberal or free.
+2.  The Present Situation.  If the Aristotelian conception
+represented just Aristotle's personal view, it would be a more or
+less interesting historical curiosity.  It could be dismissed as
+an illustration of the lack of sympathy or the amount of academic
+pedantry which may coexist with extraordinary intellectual gifts.
+But Aristotle simply described without confusion and without that
+insincerity always attendant upon mental confusion, the life that
+was before him.  That the actual social situation has greatly
+changed since his day there is no need to say.  But in spite of
+these changes, in spite of the abolition of legal serfdom, and
+the spread of democracy, with the extension of science and of
+general education (in books, newspapers, travel, and general
+intercourse as well as in schools), there remains enough of a
+cleavage of society into a learned and an unlearned class, a
+leisure and a laboring class, to make his point of view a most
+enlightening one from which to criticize the separation between
+culture and utility in present education.  Behind the
+intellectual and abstract distinction as it figures in
+pedagogical discussion, there looms a social distinction between
+those whose pursuits involve a minimum of self-directive thought
+and aesthetic appreciation, and those who are concerned more
+directly with things of the intelligence and with the control of
+the activities of others.
+
+Aristotle was certainly permanently right when he said that "any
+occupation or art or study deserves to be called mechanical if it
+renders the body or soul or intellect of free persons unfit for
+the exercise and practice of excellence." The force of the
+statement is almost infinitely increased when we hold, as we
+nominally do at present, that all persons, instead of a
+comparatively few, are free.  For when the mass of men and all
+women were regarded as unfree by the very nature of their bodies
+and minds, there was neither intellectual confusion nor moral
+hypocrisy in giving them only the training which fitted them for
+mechanical skill, irrespective of its ulterior effect upon their
+capacity to share in a worthy life.  He was permanently right
+also when he went on to say that "all mercenary employments as
+well as those which degrade the condition of the body are
+mechanical, since they deprive the intellect of leisure and
+dignity," -- permanently right, that is, if gainful pursuits as
+matter of fact deprive the intellect of the conditions of its
+exercise and so of its dignity.  If his statements are false, it
+is because they identify a phase of social custom with a natural
+necessity.  But a different view of the relations of mind and
+matter, mind and body, intelligence and social service, is better
+than Aristotle's conception only if it helps render the old idea
+obsolete in fact -- in the actual conduct of life and education.
+Aristotle was permanently right in assuming the inferiority and
+subordination of mere skill in performance and mere accumulation
+of external products to understanding, sympathy of appreciation,
+and the free play of ideas.  If there was an error, it lay in
+assuming the necessary separation of the two: in supposing that
+there is a natural divorce between efficiency in producing
+commodities and rendering service, and self-directive thought;
+between significant knowledge and practical achievement.  We
+hardly better matters if we just correct his theoretical
+misapprehension, and tolerate the social state of affairs which
+generated and sanctioned his conception.  We lose rather than
+gain in change from serfdom to free citizenship if the most
+prized result of the change is simply an increase in the
+mechanical efficiency of the human tools of production.  So we
+lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence as an
+organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that
+an unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage
+directly in turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence
+which controls to be the exclusive possession of remote
+scientists and captains of industry.  We are in a position
+honestly to criticize the division of life into separate
+functions and of society into separate classes only so far as we
+are free from responsibility for perpetuating the educational
+practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill
+in production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament
+and a cultural embellishment.  In short, ability to transcend the
+Greek philosophy of life and education is not secured by a mere
+shifting about of the theoretical symbols meaning free, rational,
+and worthy.  It is not secured by a change of sentiment regarding
+the dignity of labor, and the superiority of a life of service to
+that of an aloof self-sufficing independence.  Important as these
+theoretical and emotional changes are, their importance consists
+in their being turned to account in the development of a truly
+democratic society, a society in which all share in useful
+service and all enjoy a worthy leisure.  It is not a mere change
+in the concepts of culture -- or a liberal mind -- and social
+service which requires an educational reorganization; but the
+educational transformation is needed to give full and explicit
+effect to the changes implied in social life.  The increased
+political and economic emancipation of the "masses" has shown
+itself in education; it has effected the development of a common
+school system of education, public and free.  It has destroyed
+the idea that learning is properly a monopoly of the few who are
+predestined by nature to govern social affairs.  But the
+revolution is still incomplete.  The idea still prevails that a
+truly cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in
+common, directly at least, with industrial affairs, and that the
+education which is fit for the masses must be a useful or
+practical education in a sense which opposes useful and practical
+to nurture of appreciation and liberation of thought.  As a
+consequence, our actual system is an inconsistent mixture.
+Certain studies and methods are retained on the supposition that
+they have the sanction of peculiar liberality, the chief content
+of the term liberal being uselessness for practical ends.  This
+aspect is chiefly visible in what is termed the higher education
+-- that of the college and of preparation for it.  But is has
+filtered through into elementary education and largely controls
+its processes and aims.  But, on the other hand, certain
+concessions have been made to the masses who must engage in
+getting a livelihood and to the increased role of economic
+activities in modern life.  These concessions are exhibited in
+special schools and courses for the professions, for engineering,
+for manual training and commerce, in vocational and prevocational
+courses; and in the spirit in which certain elementary subjects,
+like the three R's, are taught.  The result is a system in which
+both "cultural" and "utilitarian" subjects exist in an inorganic
+composite where the former are not by dominant purpose socially
+serviceable and the latter not liberative of imagination or
+thinking power.
+
+In the inherited situation, there is a curious intermingling, in
+even the same study, of concession to usefulness and a survival
+of traits once exclusively attributed to preparation for leisure.
+The "utility" element is found in the motives assigned for the
+study, the "liberal" element in methods of teaching.  The outcome
+of the mixture is perhaps less satisfactory than if either
+principle were adhered to in its purity.  The motive popularly
+assigned for making the studies of the first four or five years
+consist almost entirely of reading, spelling, writing, and
+arithmetic, is, for example, that ability to read, write, and
+figure accurately is indispensable to getting ahead.  These
+studies are treated as mere instruments for entering upon a
+gainful employment or of later progress in the pursuit of
+learning, according as pupils do not or do remain in school.
+This attitude is reflected in the emphasis put upon drill and
+practice for the sake of gaining automatic skill.  If we turn to
+Greek schooling, we find that from the earliest years the
+acquisition of skill was subordinated as much as possible to
+acquisition of literary content possessed of aesthetic and moral
+significance.  Not getting a tool for subsequent use but present
+subject matter was the emphasized thing.  Nevertheless the
+isolation of these studies from practical application, their
+reduction to purely symbolic devices, represents a survival of
+the idea of a liberal training divorced from utility.  A thorough
+adoption of the idea of utility would have led to instruction
+which tied up the studies to situations in which they were
+directly needed and where they were rendered immediately and not
+remotely helpful.  It would be hard to find a subject in the
+curriculum within which there are not found evil results of a
+compromise between the two opposed ideals.  Natural science is
+recommended on the ground of its practical utility, but is taught
+as a special accomplishment in removal from application.  On the
+other hand, music and literature are theoretically justified on
+the ground of their culture value and are then taught with chief
+emphasis upon forming technical modes of skill.
+
+If we had less compromise and resulting confusion, if we analyzed
+more carefully the respective meanings of culture and utility, we
+might find it easier to construct a course of study which should
+be useful and liberal at the same time.  Only superstition makes
+us believe that the two are necessarily hostile so that a subject
+is illiberal because it is useful and cultural because it is
+useless.  It will generally be found that instruction which, in
+aiming at utilitarian results, sacrifices the development of
+imagination, the refining of taste and the deepening of
+intellectual insight -- surely cultural values -- also in the
+same degree renders what is learned limited in its use.  Not that
+it makes it wholly unavailable but that its applicability is
+restricted to routine activities carried on under the supervision
+of others.  Narrow modes of skill cannot be made useful beyond
+themselves; any mode of skill which is achieved with deepening of
+knowledge and perfecting of judgment is readily put to use in new
+situations and is under personal control.  It was not the bare
+fact of social and economic utility which made certain activities
+seem servile to the Greeks but the fact that the activities
+directly connected with getting a livelihood were not, in their
+days, the expression of a trained intelligence nor carried on
+because of a personal appreciation of their meaning.  So far as
+farming and the trades were rule-of-thumb occupations and so far
+as they were engaged in for results external to the minds of
+agricultural laborers and mechanics, they were illiberal--but
+only so far.  The intellectual and social context has now
+changed.  The elements in industry due to mere custom and routine
+have become subordinate in most economic callings to elements
+derived from scientific inquiry.  The most important occupations
+of today represent and depend upon applied mathematics, physics,
+and chemistry.  The area of the human world influenced by
+economic production and influencing consumption has been so
+indefinitely widened that geographical and political
+considerations of an almost infinitely wide scope enter in.  It
+was natural for Plato to deprecate the learning of geometry and
+arithmetic for practical ends, because as matter of fact the
+practical uses to which they were put were few, lacking in
+content and mostly mercenary in quality.  But as their social
+uses have increased and enlarged, their liberalizing or
+"intellectual" value and their practical value approach the same
+limit.
+
+Doubtless the factor which chiefly prevents our full recognition
+and employment of this identification is the conditions under
+which so much work is still carried on.  The invention of
+machines has extended the amount of leisure which is possible
+even while one is at work.  It is a commonplace that the mastery
+of skill in the form of established habits frees the mind for a
+higher order of thinking.  Something of the same kind is true of
+the introduction of mechanically automatic operations in
+industry.  They may release the mind for thought upon other
+topics.  But when we confine the education of those who work with
+their hands to a few years of schooling devoted for the most part
+to acquiring the use of rudimentary symbols at the expense of
+training in science, literature, and history, we fail to prepare
+the minds of workers to take advantage of this opportunity.  More
+fundamental is the fact that the great majority of workers have
+no insight into the social aims of their pursuits and no direct
+personal interest in them.  The results actually achieved are not
+the ends of their actions, but only of their employers.  They do
+what they do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of
+the wage earned.  It is this fact which makes the action
+illiberal, and which will make any education designed simply to
+give skill in such undertakings illiberal and immoral.  The
+activity is not free because not freely participated in.
+
+Nevertheless, there is already an opportunity for an education
+which, keeping in mind the larger features of work, will
+reconcile liberal nurture with training in social
+serviceableness, with ability to share efficiently and happily in
+occupations which are productive.  And such an education will of
+itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing economic
+situation.  In the degree in which men have an active concern in
+the ends that control their activity, their activity becomes free
+or voluntary and loses its externally enforced and servile
+quality, even though the physical aspect of behavior remain the
+same.  In what is termed politics, democratic social organization
+makes provision for this direct participation in control: in the
+economic region, control remains external and autocratic.  Hence
+the split between inner mental action and outer physical action
+of which the traditional distinction between the liberal and the
+utilitarian is the reflex.  An education which should unify the
+disposition of the members of society would do much to unify
+society itself.
+
+Summary.  Of the segregations of educational values discussed in
+the last chapter, that between culture and utility is probably
+the most fundamental.  While the distinction is often thought to
+be intrinsic and absolute, it is really historical and social.
+It originated, so far as conscious formulation is concerned, in
+Greece, and was based upon the fact that the truly human life was
+lived only by a few who subsisted upon the results of the labor
+of others.  This fact affected the psychological doctrine of the
+relation of intelligence and desire, theory and practice.  It was
+embodied in a political theory of a permanent division of human
+beings into those capable of a life of reason and hence having
+their own ends, and those capable only of desire and work, and
+needing to have their ends provided by others.  The two
+distinctions, psychological and political, translated into
+educational terms, effected a division between a liberal
+education, having to do with the self-sufficing life of leisure
+devoted to knowing for its own sake, and a useful, practical
+training for mechanical occupations, devoid of intellectual and
+aesthetic content.  While the present situation is radically
+diverse in theory and much changed in fact, the factors of the
+older historic situation still persist sufficiently to maintain
+the educational distinction, along with compromises which often
+reduce the efficacy of the educational measures.  The problem of
+education in a democratic society is to do away with the dualism
+and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide
+of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of
+accepting responsibility for service, rather than a state of
+exemption from it.
+
+1 Aristotle does not hold that the class of actual slaves and of
+natural slaves necessarily coincide.
+
+
+Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
+
+1.  The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge.  As
+livelihood and leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice,
+intelligence and execution, knowledge and activity.  The latter
+set of oppositions doubtless springs from the same social
+conditions which produce the former conflict; but certain
+definite problems of education connected with them make it
+desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the relationship
+and alleged separation of knowing and doing.
+
+The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
+practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual
+worth, has a long history.  The history so far as conscious
+statement is concerned takes us back to the conceptions of
+experience and of reason formulated by Plato and Aristotle.  Much
+as these thinkers differed in many respects, they agreed in
+identifying experience with purely practical concerns; and hence
+with material interests as to its purpose and with the body as to
+its organ.  Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its own
+sake free from practical reference, and found its source and
+organ in a purely immaterial mind; it had to do with spiritual or
+ideal interests.  Again, experience always involved lack, need,
+desire; it was never self-sufficing.  Rational knowing on the
+other hand, was complete and comprehensive within itself.  Hence
+the practical life was in a condition of perpetual flux, while
+intellectual knowledge concerned eternal truth.
+
+This sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that Athenian
+philosophy began as a criticism of custom and tradition as
+standards of knowledge and conduct.  In a search for something to
+replace them, it hit upon reason as the only adequate guide of
+belief and activity.  Since custom and tradition were identified
+with experience, it followed at once that reason was superior to
+experience.  Moreover, experience, not content with its proper
+position of subordination, was the great foe to the
+acknowledgment of the authority of reason.  Since custom and
+traditionary beliefs held men in bondage, the struggle of reason
+for its legitimate supremacy could be won only by showing the
+inherently unstable and inadequate nature of experience.  The
+statement of Plato that philosophers should be kings may best be
+understood as a statement that rational intelligence and not
+habit, appetite, impulse, and emotion should regulate human
+affairs.  The former secures unity, order, and law; the latter
+signify multiplicity and discord, irrational fluctuations from
+one estate to another.
+
+The grounds for the identification of experience with the
+unsatisfactory condition of things, the state of affairs
+represented by rule of mere custom, are not far to seek.
+Increasing trade and travel, colonizations, migrations and wars,
+had broadened the intellectual horizon.  The customs and beliefs
+of different communities were found to diverge sharply from one
+another.  Civil disturbance had become a custom in Athens; the
+fortunes of the city seemed given over to strife of factions.
+The increase of leisure coinciding with the broadening of the
+horizon had brought into ken many new facts of nature and had
+stimulated curiosity and speculation.  The situation tended to
+raise the question as to the existence of anything constant and
+universal in the realm of nature and society.  Reason was the
+faculty by which the universal principle and essence is
+apprehended; while the senses were the organs of perceiving
+change, -- the unstable and the diverse as against the permanent
+and uniform.  The results of the work of the senses, preserved in
+memory and imagination, and applied in the skill given by habit,
+constituted experience.
+
+Experience at its best is thus represented in the various
+handicrafts -- the arts of peace and war.  The cobbler, the flute
+player, the soldier, have undergone the discipline of experience
+to acquire the skill they have.  This means that the bodily
+organs, particularly the senses, have had repeated contact with
+things and that the result of these contacts has been preserved
+and consolidated till ability in foresight and in practice had
+been secured.  Such was the essential meaning of the term
+"empirical." It suggested a knowledge and an ability not based
+upon insight into principles, but expressing the result of a
+large number of separate trials.  It expressed the idea now
+conveyed by "method of trial and error," with especial emphasis
+upon the more or less accidental character of the trials.  So far
+as ability of control, of management, was concerned, it amounted
+to rule-of-thumb procedure, to routine.  If new circumstances
+resembled the past, it might work well enough; in the degree in
+which they deviated, failure was likely.  Even to-day to speak of
+a physician as an empiricist is to imply that he lacks scientific
+training, and that he is proceeding simply on the basis of what
+he happens to have got out of the chance medley of his past
+practice.  Just because of the lack of science or reason in
+"experience" it is hard to keep it at its poor best.  The empiric
+easily degenerates into the quack.  He does not know where his
+knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond
+routine conditions he begins to pretend -- to make claims for
+which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to
+ability to impose upon others -- to "bluff." Moreover, he assumes
+that because he has learned one thing, he knows others -- as the
+history of Athens showed that the common craftsmen thought they
+could manage household affairs, education, and politics, because
+they had learned to do the specific things of their trades.
+Experience is always hovering, then, on the edge of pretense, of
+sham, of seeming, and appearance, in distinction from the reality
+upon which reason lays hold.
+
+The philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this
+state of affairs.  The senses are connected with the appetites,
+with wants and desires.  They lay hold not on the reality of
+things but on the relation which things have to our pleasures and
+pains, to the satisfaction of wants and the welfare of the body.
+They are important only for the life of the body, which is but a
+fixed substratum for a higher life.  Experience thus has a
+definitely material character; it has to do with physical things
+in relation to the body.  In contrast, reason, or science, lays
+hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual.  There is
+something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as
+sensual, carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure
+reason and spirit connote something morally praiseworthy.
+Moreover, ineradicable connection with the changing, the
+inexplicably shifting, and with the manifold, the diverse, clings
+to experience.  Its material is inherently variable and
+untrustworthy.  It is anarchic, because unstable.  The man who
+trusts to experience does not know what he depends upon, since it
+changes from person to person, from day to day, to say nothing of
+from country to country.  Its connection with the "many," with
+various particulars, has the same effect, and also carries
+conflict in its train.
+
+Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony.  Out
+of experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts
+within the individual and between individuals.  From experience
+no standard of belief can issue, because it is the very nature of
+experience to instigate all kinds of contrary beliefs, as
+varieties of local custom proved.  Its logical outcome is that
+anything is good and true to the particular individual which his
+experience leads him to believe true and good at a particular
+time and place.  Finally practice falls of necessity within
+experience.  Doing proceeds from needs and aims at change.  To
+produce or to make is to alter something; to consume is to alter.
+All the obnoxious characters of change and diversity thus attach
+themselves to doing while knowing is as permanent as its object.
+To know, to grasp a thing intellectually or theoretically, is to
+be out of the region of vicissitude, chance, and diversity.
+Truth has no lack; it is untouched by the perturbations of the
+world of sense.  It deals with the eternal and the universal.
+And the world of experience can be brought under control, can be
+steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law of
+reason.
+
+It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions
+persisted in full technical definiteness.  But they all of them
+profoundly influenced men's subsequent thinking and their ideas
+about education.  The contempt for physical as compared with
+mathematical and logical science, for the senses and sense
+observation; the feeling that knowledge is high and worthy in the
+degree in which it deals with ideal symbols instead of with the
+concrete; the scorn of particulars except as they are deductively
+brought under a universal; the disregard for the body; the
+depreciation of arts and crafts as intellectual
+instrumentalities, all sought shelter and found sanction under
+this estimate of the respective values of experience and
+reason -- or, what came to the same thing, of the practical and
+the intellectual.  Medieval philosophy continued and reinforced
+the tradition.  To know reality meant to be in relation to the
+supreme reality, or God, and to enjoy the eternal bliss of that
+relation.  Contemplation of supreme reality was the ultimate end
+of man to which action is subordinate.  Experience had to do with
+mundane, profane, and secular affairs, practically necessary
+indeed, but of little import in comparison with supernatural
+objects of knowledge.  When we add to this motive the force
+derived from the literary character of the Roman education and
+the Greek philosophic tradition, and conjoin to them the
+preference for studies which obviously demarcated the
+aristocratic class from the lower classes, we can readily
+understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent
+preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply
+in educational philosophies but in the higher schools.  2.  The
+Modern Theory of Experience and Knowledge.  As we shall see
+later, the development of experimentation as a method of
+knowledge makes possible and necessitates a radical
+transformation of the view just set forth.  But before coming to
+that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge
+developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  In
+general, it presents us with an almost complete reversal of the
+classic doctrine of the relations of experience and reason.  To
+Plato experience meant habituation, or the conservation of the
+net product of a lot of past chance trials.  Reason meant the
+principle of reform, of progress, of increase of control.
+Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking through the
+limitations of custom and getting at things as they really were.
+To the modern reformers, the situation was the other way around.
+Reason, universal principles, a priori notions, meant either
+blank forms which had to be filled in by experience, by sense
+observations, in order to get significance and validity; or else
+were mere indurated prejudices, dogmas imposed by authority,
+which masqueraded and found protection under august names.  The
+great need was to break way from captivity to conceptions which,
+as Bacon put it, "anticipated nature" and imposed merely human
+opinions upon her, and to resort to experience to find out what
+nature was like.  Appeal to experience marked the breach with
+authority.  It meant openness to new impressions; eagerness in
+discovery and invention instead of absorption in tabulating and
+systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of the
+relations they sustained to one another.  It was the irruption
+into the mind of the things as they really were, free from the
+veil cast over them by preconceived ideas.
+
+The change was twofold.  Experience lost the practical meaning
+which it had borne from the time of Plato.  It ceased to mean
+ways of doing and being done to, and became a name for something
+intellectual and cognitive.  It meant the apprehension of
+material which should ballast and check the exercise of
+reasoning.  By the modern philosophic empiricist and by his
+opponent, experience has been looked upon just as a way of
+knowing.  The only question was how good a way it is.  The result
+was an even greater "intellectualism" than is found in ancient
+philosophy, if that word be used to designate an emphatic and
+almost exclusive interest in knowledge in its isolation.
+Practice was not so much subordinated to knowledge as treated as
+a kind of tag-end or aftermath of knowledge.  The educational
+result was only to confirm the exclusion of active pursuits from
+the school, save as they might be brought in for purely
+utilitarian ends -- the acquisition by drill of certain habits.
+In the second place, the interest in experience as a means of
+basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the
+mind as purely receptive.  The more passive the mind is, the more
+truly objects will impress themselves upon it.  For the mind to
+take a hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of
+knowing to vitiate true knowledge -- to defeat its own purpose.
+The ideal was a maximum of receptivity.  Since the impressions
+made upon the mind by objects were generally termed sensations,
+empiricism thus became a doctrine of sensationalism -- that is to
+say, a doctrine which identified knowledge with the reception and
+association of sensory impressions.  In John Locke, the most
+influential of the empiricists, we find this sensationalism
+mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties, like
+discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction, and
+generalization which work up the material of sense into definite
+and organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own
+account, such as the fundamental conceptions of morals and
+mathematics.  (See ante, p.  61.) But some of his successors,
+especially in France in the latter part of the eighteenth
+century, carried his doctrine to the limit; they regarded
+discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations made in us by the
+conjoint presence of other sensations.  Locke had held that the
+mind is a blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing
+engraved on it at birth (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of
+ideas were concerned, but had endowed it with activities to be
+exercised upon the material received.  His French successors
+razed away the powers and derived them also from impressions
+received.
+
+As we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new
+interest in education as method of social reform.  (See ante, p.
+93.) The emptier the mind to begin with, the more it may be made
+anything we wish by bringing the right influences to bear upon
+it.  Thus Helvetius, perhaps the most extreme and consistent
+sensationalist, proclaimed that education could do anything--that
+it was omnipotent.  Within the sphere of school instruction,
+empiricism found its directly beneficial office in protesting
+against mere book learning.  If knowledge comes from the
+impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to
+procure knowledge without the use of objects which impress the
+mind.  Words, all kinds of linguistic symbols, in the lack of
+prior presentations of objects with which they may be associated,
+convey nothing but sensations of their own shape and color --
+certainly not a very instructive kind of knowledge.
+Sensationalism was an extremely handy weapon with which to combat
+doctrines and opinions resting wholly upon tradition and
+authority.  With respect to all of them, it set up a test: Where
+are the real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are
+received? If such objects could not be produced, ideas were
+explained as the result of false associations and combinations.
+Empiricism also insisted upon a first-hand element.  The
+impression must be made upon me, upon my mind.  The further we
+get away from this direct, first-hand source of knowledge, the
+more numerous the sources of error, and the vaguer the resulting
+idea.
+
+
+As might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the
+positive side.  Of course, the value of natural objects and
+firsthand acquaintance was not dependent upon the truth of the
+theory.  Introduced into the schools they would do their work,
+even if the sensational theory about the way in which they did it
+was quite wrong.  So far, there is nothing to complain of.  But
+the emphasis upon sensationalism also operated to influence the
+way in which natural objects were employed, and to prevent full
+good being got from them.  "Object lessons" tended to isolate the
+mere sense-activity and make it an end in itself.  The more
+isolated the object, the more isolated the sensory quality, the
+more distinct the sense-impression as a unit of knowledge.  The
+theory worked not only in the direction of this mechanical
+isolation, which tended to reduce instruction to a kind of
+physical gymnastic of the sense-organs (good like any gymnastic
+of bodily organs, but not more so), but also to the neglect of
+thinking.  According to the theory there was no need of thinking
+in connection with sense-observation; in fact, in strict theory
+such thinking would be impossible till afterwards, for thinking
+consisted simply in combining and separating sensory units which
+had been received without any participation of judgment.
+
+As a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of
+education upon a purely sensory basis has ever been
+systematically tried, at least after the early years of infancy.
+Its obvious deficiencies have caused it to be resorted to simply
+for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge (that is to say,
+knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and modes of
+application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for
+lending greater "interest" to barren symbols.  There are at least
+three serious defects of sensationalistic empiricism as an
+educational philosophy of knowledge.  (a) the historical value of
+the theory was critical; it was a dissolvent of current beliefs
+about the world and political institutions.  It was a destructive
+organ of criticism of hard and fast dogmas.  But the work of
+education is constructive, not critical.  It assumes not old
+beliefs to be eliminated and revised, but the need of building up
+new experience into intellectual habitudes as correct as possible
+from the start.  Sensationalism is highly unfitted for this
+constructive task.  Mind, understanding, denotes responsiveness
+to meanings (ante, p.  29), not response to direct physical
+stimuli.  And meaning exists only with reference to a context,
+which is excluded by any scheme which identifies knowledge with a
+combination of sense-impressions.  The theory, so far as
+educationally applied, led either to a magnification of mere
+physical excitations or else to a mere heaping up of isolated
+objects and qualities.
+
+(b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first
+hand, it also has the disadvantage of being limited in range.
+Direct acquaintance with the natural surroundings of the home
+environment so as to give reality to ideas about portions of the
+earth beyond the reach of the senses, and as a means of arousing
+intellectual curiosity, is one thing.  As an end-all and be-all
+of geographical knowledge it is fatally restricted.  In precisely
+analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and counters may be helpful
+aids to a realization of numerical relations, but when employed
+except as aids to thought -- the apprehension of meaning--they
+become an obstacle to the growth of arithmetical understanding.
+They arrest growth on a low plane, the plane of specific physical
+symbols.  Just as the race developed especial symbols as tools of
+calculation and mathematical reasonings, because the use of the
+fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the individual
+must progress from concrete to abstract symbols -- that is,
+symbols whose meaning is realized only through conceptual
+thinking.  And undue absorption at the outset in the physical
+object of sense hampers this growth.  (c) A thoroughly false
+psychology of mental development underlay sensationalistic
+empiricism.  Experience is in truth a matter of activities,
+instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with things.
+What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received
+quality impressed by an object, but the effect which some
+activity of handling, throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon
+an object, and the consequent effect of the object upon the
+direction of activities.  (See ante, p.  140.) Fundamentally (as
+we shall see in more detail), the ancient notion of experience as
+a practical matter is truer to fact that the modern notion of it
+as a mode of knowing by means of sensations.  The neglect of the
+deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a fatal
+defect of the traditional empirical philosophy.  Nothing is more
+uninteresting and mechanical than a scheme of object lessons
+which ignores and as far as may be excludes the natural tendency
+to learn about the qualities of objects by the uses to which they
+are put through trying to do something with them.
+
+It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of
+experience represented by modern empiricism had received more
+general theoretical assent than has been accorded to it, it could
+not have furnished a satisfactory philosophy of the learning
+process.  Its educational influence was confined to injecting a
+new factor into the older curriculum, with incidental
+modifications of the older studies and methods.  It introduced
+greater regard for observation of things directly and through
+pictures and graphic descriptions, and it reduced the importance
+attached to verbal symbolization.  But its own scope was so
+meager that it required supplementation by information concerning
+matters outside of sense-perception and by matters which appealed
+more directly to thought.  Consequently it left unimpaired the
+scope of informational and abstract, or "rationalistic" studies.
+
+3.  Experience as Experimentation.  It has already been intimated
+that sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of
+experience justified by modern psychology nor the idea of
+knowledge suggested by modern scientific procedure.  With respect
+to the former, it omits the primary position of active response
+which puts things to use and which learns about them through
+discovering the consequences that result from use.  It would seem
+as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of the way an infant
+gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the notion that
+he is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated
+ready-made qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc.  For it
+would be seen that the infant reacts to stimuli by activities of
+handling, reaching, etc., in order to see what results follow
+upon motor response to a sensory stimulation; it would be seen
+that what is learned are not isolated qualities, but the behavior
+which may be expected from a thing, and the changes in things and
+persons which an activity may be expected to produce.  In other
+words, what he learns are connections.  Even such qualities as
+red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated and
+identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
+consequences these activities effect.  We learn what things are
+hard and what are soft by finding out through active
+experimentation what they respectively will do and what can be
+done and what cannot be done with them.  In like fashion,
+children learn about persons by finding out what responsive
+activities these persons exact and what these persons will do in
+reply to the children's activities.  And the combination of what
+things do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind)
+in modifying our actions, furthering some of them and resisting
+and checking others, and what we can do to them in producing new
+changes constitutes experience.  The methods of science by which
+the revolution in our knowledge of the world dating from the
+seventeenth century, was brought about, teach the same lesson.
+For these methods are nothing but experimentation carried out
+under conditions of deliberate control.  To the Greek, it seemed
+absurd that such an activity as, say, the cobbler punching holes
+in leather, or using wax and needle and thread, could give an
+adequate knowledge of the world.  It seemed almost axiomatic that
+for true knowledge we must have recourse to concepts coming from
+a reason above experience.  But the introduction of the
+experimental method signified precisely that such operations,
+carried on under conditions of control, are just the ways in
+which fruitful ideas about nature are obtained and tested.  In
+other words, it is only needed to conduct such an operation as
+the pouring of an acid on a metal for the purpose of getting
+knowledge instead of for the purpose of getting a trade result,
+in order to lay hold of the principle upon which the science of
+nature was henceforth to depend.  Sense perceptions were indeed
+indispensable, but there was less reliance upon sense perceptions
+in their natural or customary form than in the older science.
+They were no longer regarded as containing within themselves some
+"form" or "species" of universal kind in a disguised mask of
+sense which could be stripped off by rational thought.  On the
+contrary, the first thing was to alter and extend the data of
+sense perception: to act upon the given objects of sense by the
+lens of the telescope and microscope, and by all sorts of
+experimental devices.  To accomplish this in a way which would
+arouse new ideas (hypotheses, theories) required even more
+general ideas (like those of mathematics) than were at the
+command of ancient science.  But these general conceptions were
+no longer taken to give knowledge in themselves.  They were
+implements for instituting, conducting, interpreting experimental
+inquiries and formulating their results.
+
+The logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and
+knowledge, a philosophy which no longer puts experience in
+opposition to rational knowledge and explanation.  Experience is
+no longer a mere summarizing of what has been done in a more or
+less chance way in the past; it is a deliberate control of what
+is done with reference to making what happens to us and what we
+do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions (of suggested
+meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the
+suggestions.  When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded
+by impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted
+by measure and method, it becomes reasonable -- rational.  When
+what we suffer from things, what we undergo at their hands,
+ceases to be a matter of chance circumstance, when it is
+transformed into a consequence of our own prior purposive
+endeavors, it becomes rationally significant -- enlightening and
+instructive.  The antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses
+the support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and
+relative justification.
+
+The bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely
+practical and purely intellectual studies is self-evident.  The
+distinction is not intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions,
+and upon conditions which can be regulated.  Practical activities
+may be intellectually narrow and trivial; they will be so in so
+far as they are routine, carried on under the dictates of
+authority, and having in view merely some external result.  But
+childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just the time
+when it is possible to carry them on in a different spirit.  It
+is inexpedient to repeat the discussions of our previous chapters
+on thinking and on the evolution of educative subject matter from
+childlike work and play to logically organized subject matter.
+The discussions of this chapter and the prior one should,
+however, give an added meaning to those results.
+
+(i) Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations
+subsisting between a human being and his natural and social
+surroundings.  In some cases, the initiative in activity is on
+the side of the environment; the human being undergoes or suffers
+certain checkings and deflections of endeavors.  In other cases,
+the behavior of surrounding things and persons carries to a
+successful issue the active tendencies of the individual, so that
+in the end what the individual undergoes are consequences which
+he has himself tried to produce.  In just the degree in which
+connections are established between what happens to a person and
+what he does in response, and between what he does to his
+environment and what it does in response to him, his acts and the
+things about him acquire meaning.  He learns to understand both
+himself and the world of men and things.  Purposive education or
+schooling should present such an environment that this
+interaction will effect acquisition of those meanings which are
+so important that they become, in turn, instruments of further
+learnings.  (ante, Ch.  XI.) As has been repeatedly pointed out,
+activity out of school is carried on under conditions which have
+not been deliberately adapted to promoting the function of
+understanding and formation of effective intellectual
+dispositions.  The results are vital and genuine as far as they
+go, but they are limited by all kinds of circumstances.  Some
+powers are left quite undeveloped and undirected; others get only
+occasional and whimsical stimulations; others are formed into
+habits of a routine skill at the expense of aims and resourceful
+initiative and inventiveness.  It is not the business of the
+school to transport youth from an environment of activity into
+one of cramped study of the records of other men's learning; but
+to transport them from an environment of relatively chance
+activities (accidental in the relation they bear to insight and
+thought) into one of activities selected with reference to
+guidance of learning.  A slight inspection of the improved
+methods which have already shown themselves effective in
+education will reveal that they have laid hold, more or less
+consciously, upon the fact that "intellectual" studies instead of
+being opposed to active pursuits represent an intellectualizing
+of practical pursuits.  It remains to grasp the principle with
+greater firmness.
+
+(ii) The changes which are taking place in the content of social
+life tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities
+which will intellectualize the play and work of the school.  When
+one bears in mind the social environment of the Greeks and the
+people of the Middle Ages, where such practical activities as
+could be successfully carried on were mostly of a routine and
+external sort and even servile in nature, one is not surprised
+that educators turned their backs upon them as unfitted to
+cultivate intelligence.  But now that even the occupations of the
+household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as
+transportation and intercourse are instinct with applied science,
+the case stands otherwise.  It is true that many of those who now
+engage in them are not aware of the intellectual content upon
+which their personal actions depend.  But this fact only gives an
+added reason why schooling should use these pursuits so as to
+enable the coming generation to acquire a comprehension now too
+generally lacking, and thus enable persons to carry on their
+pursuits intelligently instead of blindly.  (iii) The most direct
+blow at the traditional separation of doing and knowing and at
+the traditional prestige of purely "intellectual" studies,
+however, has been given by the progress of experimental science.
+If this progress has demonstrated anything, it is that there is
+no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding
+except as the offspring of doing.  The analysis and rearrangement
+of facts which is indispensable to the growth of knowledge and
+power of explanation and right classification cannot be attained
+purely mentally -- just inside the head.  Men have to do
+something to the things when they wish to find out something;
+they have to alter conditions.  This is the lesson of the
+laboratory method, and the lesson which all education has to
+learn.  The laboratory is a discovery of the condition under
+which labor may become intellectually fruitful and not merely
+externally productive.  If, in too many cases at present, it
+results only in the acquisition of an additional mode of
+technical skill, that is because it still remains too largely but
+an isolated resource, not resorted to until pupils are mostly too
+old to get the full advantage of it, and even then is surrounded
+by other studies where traditional methods isolate intellect from
+activity.
+
+Summary.  The Greeks were induced to philosophize by the
+increasing failure of their traditional customs and beliefs to
+regulate life.  Thus they were led to criticize custom adversely
+and to look for some other source of authority in life and
+belief.  Since they desired a rational standard for the latter,
+and had identified with experience the customs which had proved
+unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat opposition of
+reason and experience.  The more the former was exalted, the more
+the latter was depreciated.  Since experience was identified with
+what men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of
+life, doing shared in the philosophic depreciation.  This
+influence fell in with many others to magnify, in higher
+education, all the methods and topics which involved the least
+use of sense-observation and bodily activity.  The modern age
+began with a revolt against this point of view, with an appeal to
+experience, and an attack upon so-called purely rational concepts
+on the ground that they either needed to be ballasted by the
+results of concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions of
+prejudice and institutionalized class interest, calling
+themselves rational for protection.  But various circumstances
+led to considering experience as pure cognition, leaving out of
+account its intrinsic active and emotional phases, and to
+identifying it with a passive reception of isolated "sensations."
+Hence the education reform effected by the new theory was
+confined mainly to doing away with some of the bookishness of
+prior methods; it did not accomplish a consistent
+reorganization.
+
+Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and
+of the experimental method in science makes another conception of
+experience explicitly desirable and possible.  This theory
+reinstates the idea of the ancients that experience is primarily
+practical, not cognitive -- a matter of doing and undergoing the
+consequences of doing.  But the ancient theory is transformed by
+realizing that doing may be directed so as to take up into its
+own content all which thought suggests, and so as to result in
+securely tested knowledge.  "Experience" then ceases to be
+empirical and becomes experimental.  Reason ceases to be a remote
+and ideal faculty, and signifies all the resources by which
+activity is made fruitful in meaning.  Educationally, this change
+denotes such a plan for the studies and method of instruction as
+has been developed in the previous chapters.
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and
+Humanism
+
+ALLUSION has already been made to the conflict of natural science
+with literary studies for a place in the curriculum.  The
+solution thus far reached consists essentially in a somewhat
+mechanical compromise whereby the field is divided between
+studies having nature and studies having man as their theme.  The
+situation thus presents us with another instance of the external
+adjustment of educational values, and focuses attention upon the
+philosophy of the connection of nature with human affairs.  In
+general, it may be said that the educational division finds a
+reflection in the dualistic philosophies.  Mind and the world are
+regarded as two independent realms of existence having certain
+points of contact with each other.  From this point of view it is
+natural that each sphere of existence should have its own
+separate group of studies connected with it; it is even natural
+that the growth of scientific studies should be viewed with
+suspicion as marking a tendency of materialistic philosophy to
+encroach upon the domain of spirit.  Any theory of education
+which contemplates a more unified scheme of education than now
+exists is under the necessity of facing the question of the
+relation of man to nature.
+
+1.  The Historic Background of Humanistic Study.  It is
+noteworthy that classic Greek philosophy does not present the
+problem in its modern form.  Socrates indeed appears to have
+thought that science of nature was not attainable and not very
+important.  The chief thing to know is the nature and end of man.
+Upon that knowledge hangs all that is of deep significance--all
+moral and social achievement.  Plato, however, makes right
+knowledge of man and society depend upon knowledge of the
+essential features of nature.  His chief treatise, entitled the
+Republic, is at once a treatise on morals, on social
+organization, and on the metaphysics and science of nature.
+Since he accepts the Socratic doctrine that right achievement in
+the former depends upon rational knowledge, he is compelled to
+discuss the nature of knowledge.  Since he accepts the idea that
+the ultimate object of knowledge is the discovery of the good or
+end of man, and is discontented with the Socratic conviction that
+all we know is our own ignorance, he connects the discussion of
+the good of man with consideration of the essential good or end
+of nature itself.  To attempt to determine the end of man apart
+from a knowledge of the ruling end which gives law and unity to
+nature is impossible.  It is thus quite consistent with his
+philosophy that he subordinates literary studies (under the name
+of music) to mathematics and to physics as well as to logic and
+metaphysics.  But on the other hand, knowledge of nature is not
+an end in itself; it is a necessary stage in bringing the mind to
+a realization of the supreme purpose of existence as the law of
+human action, corporate and individual.  To use the modern
+phraseology, naturalistic studies are indispensable, but they are
+in the interests of humanistic and ideal ends.
+
+Aristotle goes even farther, if anything, in the direction of
+naturalistic studies.  He subordinates (ante, p.  254) civic
+relations to the purely cognitive life.  The highest end of man
+is not human but divine -- participation in pure knowing which
+constitutes the divine life.  Such knowing deals with what is
+universal and necessary, and finds, therefore, a more adequate
+subject matter in nature at its best than in the transient things
+of man.  If we take what the philosophers stood for in Greek
+life, rather than the details of what they say, we might
+summarize by saying that the Greeks were too much interested in
+free inquiry into natural fact and in the aesthetic enjoyment of
+nature, and were too deeply conscious of the extent in which
+society is rooted in nature and subject to its laws, to think of
+bringing man and nature into conflict.  Two factors conspire in
+the later period of ancient life, however, to exalt literary and
+humanistic studies.  One is the increasingly reminiscent and
+borrowed character of culture; the other is the political and
+rhetorical bent of Roman life.
+
+Greek achievement in civilization was native; the civilization of
+the Alexandrians and Romans was inherited from alien sources.
+Consequently it looked back to the records upon which it drew,
+instead of looking out directly upon nature and society, for
+material and inspiration.  We cannot do better than quote the
+words of Hatch to indicate the consequences for educational
+theory and practice.  "Greece on one hand had lost political
+power, and on the other possessed in her splendid literature an
+inalienable heritage.  It was natural that she should turn to
+letters.  It was natural also that the study of letters should be
+reflected upon speech.  The mass of men in the Greek world tended
+to lay stress on that acquaintance with the literature of bygone
+generations, and that habit of cultivated speech, which has ever
+since been commonly spoken of as education.  Our own comes by
+direct tradition from it.  It set a fashion which until recently
+has uniformly prevailed over the entire civilized world.  We
+study literature rather than nature because the Greeks did so,
+and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials resolved to
+educate their sons, they employed Greek teachers and followed in
+Greek paths." 1
+
+The so-called practical bent of the Romans worked in the same
+direction.  In falling back upon the recorded ideas of the
+Greeks, they not only took the short path to attaining a cultural
+development, but they procured just the kind of material and
+method suited to their administrative talents.  For their
+practical genius was not directed to the conquest and control of
+nature but to the conquest and control of men.
+
+Mr. Hatch, in the passage quoted, takes a good deal of history
+for granted in saying that we have studied literature rather than
+nature because the Greeks, and the Romans whom they taught, did
+so.  What is the link that spans the intervening centuries? The
+question suggests that barbarian Europe but repeated on a larger
+scale and with increased intensity the Roman situation.  It had
+to go to school to Greco-Roman civilization; it also borrowed
+rather than evolved its culture.  Not merely for its general
+ideas and their artistic presentation but for its models of law
+it went to the records of alien peoples.  And its dependence upon
+tradition was increased by the dominant theological interests of
+the period.  For the authorities to which the Church appealed
+were literatures composed in foreign tongues.  Everything
+converged to identify learning with linguistic training and to
+make the language of the learned a literary language instead of
+the mother speech.
+
+The full scope of this fact escapes us, moreover, until we
+recognize that this subject matter compelled recourse to a
+dialectical method.  Scholasticism frequently has been used since
+the time of the revival of learning as a term of reproach.  But
+all that it means is the method of The Schools, or of the School
+Men.  In its essence, it is nothing but a highly effective
+systematization of the methods of teaching and learning which are
+appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths.  Where
+literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes
+material of study, methods must be adapted to defining,
+expounding, and interpreting the received material, rather than
+to inquiry, discovery, and invention.  And at bottom what is
+called Scholasticism is the whole-hearted and consistent
+formulation and application of the methods which are suited to
+instruction when the material of instruction is taken ready-made,
+rather than as something which students are to find out for
+themselves.  So far as schools still teach from textbooks and
+rely upon the principle of authority and acquisition rather than
+upon that of discovery and inquiry, their methods are
+Scholastic -- minus the logical accuracy and system of
+Scholasticism at its best.  Aside from laxity of method and
+statement, the only difference is that geographies and histories
+and botanies and astronomies are now part of the authoritative
+literature which is to be mastered.
+
+As a consequence, the Greek tradition was lost in which a
+humanistic interest was used as a basis of interest in nature,
+and a knowledge of nature used to support the distinctively human
+aims of man.  Life found its support in authority, not in nature.
+The latter was moreover an object of considerable suspicion.
+Contemplation of it was dangerous, for it tended to draw man away
+from reliance upon the documents in which the rules of living
+were already contained.  Moreover nature could be known only
+through observation; it appealed to the senses -- which were
+merely material as opposed to a purely immaterial mind.
+Furthermore, the utilities of a knowledge of nature were purely
+physical and secular; they connected with the bodily and temporal
+welfare of man, while the literary tradition concerned his
+spiritual and eternal well-being.
+
+2.  The Modern Scientific Interest in Nature.  The movement of
+the fifteenth century which is variously termed the revival of
+learning and the renascence was characterized by a new interest
+in man's present life, and accordingly by a new interest in his
+relationships with nature.  It was naturalistic, in the sense
+that it turned against the dominant supernaturalistic interest.
+It is possible that the influence of a return to classic Greek
+pagan literature in bringing about this changed mind has been
+overestimated.  Undoubtedly the change was mainly a product of
+contemporary conditions.  But there can be no doubt that educated
+men, filled with the new point of view, turned eagerly to Greek
+literature for congenial sustenance and reinforcement.  And to a
+considerable extent, this interest in Greek thought was not in
+literature for its own sake, but in the spirit it expressed.  The
+mental freedom, the sense of the order and beauty of nature,
+which animated Greek expression, aroused men to think and observe
+in a similar untrammeled fashion.  The history of science in the
+sixteenth century shows that the dawning sciences of physical
+nature largely borrowed their points of departure from the new
+interest in Greek literature.  As Windelband has said, the new
+science of nature was the daughter of humanism.  The favorite
+notion of the time was that man was in microcosm that which the
+universe was in macrocosm.
+
+This fact raises anew the question of how it was that nature and
+man were later separated and a sharp division made between
+language and literature and the physical sciences.  Four reasons
+may be suggested.  (a) The old tradition was firmly entrenched in
+institutions.  Politics, law, and diplomacy remained of
+necessity branches of authoritative literature, for the social
+sciences did not develop until the methods of the sciences of
+physics and chemistry, to say nothing of biology, were much
+further advanced.  The same is largely true of history.
+Moreover, the methods used for effective teaching of the
+languages were well developed; the inertia of academic custom was
+on their side.  Just as the new interest in literature,
+especially Greek, had not been allowed at first to find lodgment
+in the scholastically organized universities, so when it found
+its way into them it joined hands with the older learning to
+minimize the influence of experimental science.  The men who
+taught were rarely trained in science; the men who were
+scientifically competent worked in private laboratories and
+through the medium of academies which promoted research, but
+which were not organized as teaching bodies.  Finally, the
+aristocratic tradition which looked down upon material things and
+upon the senses and the hands was still mighty.
+
+(b) The Protestant revolt brought with it an immense increase of
+interest in theological discussion and controversies.  The appeal
+on both sides was to literary documents.  Each side had to train
+men in ability to study and expound the records which were relied
+upon.  The demand for training men who could defend the chosen
+faith against the other side, who were able to propagandize and
+to prevent the encroachments of the other side, was such that it
+is not too much to say that by the middle of the seventeenth
+century the linguistic training of gymnasia and universities had
+been captured by the revived theological interest, and used as a
+tool of religious education and ecclesiastical controversy.  Thus
+the educational descent of the languages as they are found in
+education to-day is not direct from the revival of learning, but
+from its adaptation to theological ends.
+
+(c) The natural sciences were themselves conceived in a way which
+sharpened the opposition of man and nature.  Francis Bacon
+presents an almost perfect example of the union of naturalistic
+and humanistic interest.  Science, adopting the methods of
+observation and experimentation, was to give up the attempt to
+"anticipate" nature -- to impose preconceived notions upon her --
+and was to become her humble interpreter.  In obeying nature
+intellectually, man would learn to command her practically.
+"Knowledge is power." This aphorism meant that through science
+man is to control nature and turn her energies to the execution
+of his own ends.  Bacon attacked the old learning and logic as
+purely controversial, having to do with victory in argument, not
+with discovery of the unknown.  Through the new method of thought
+which was set forth in his new logic an era of expansive
+discoveries was to emerge, and these discoveries were to bear
+fruit in inventions for the service of man.  Men were to give up
+their futile, never-finished effort to dominate one another to
+engage in the cooperative task of dominating nature in the
+interests of humanity.
+
+In the main, Bacon prophesied the direction of subsequent
+progress.  But he "anticipated" the advance.  He did not see that
+the new science was for a long time to be worked in the interest
+of old ends of human exploitation.  He thought that it would
+rapidly give man new ends.  Instead, it put at the disposal of a
+class the means to secure their old ends of aggrandizement at the
+expense of another class.  The industrial revolution followed, as
+he foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific method.  But it is
+taking the revolution many centuries to produce a new mind.
+Feudalism was doomed by the applications of the new science, for
+they transferred power from the landed nobility to the
+manufacturing centers.  But capitalism rather than a social
+humanism took its place.  Production and commerce were carried on
+as if the new science had no moral lesson, but only technical
+lessons as to economies in production and utilization of saving
+in self-interest.  Naturally, this application of physical
+science (which was the most conspicuously perceptible one)
+strengthened the claims of professed humanists that science was
+materialistic in its tendencies.  It left a void as to man's
+distinctively human interests which go beyond making, saving, and
+expending money; and languages and literature put in their claim
+to represent the moral and ideal interests of humanity.
+
+(d) Moreover, the philosophy which professed itself based upon
+science, which gave itself out as the accredited representative
+of the net significance of science, was either dualistic in
+character, marked by a sharp division between mind
+(characterizing man) and matter, constituting nature; or else it
+was openly mechanical, reducing the signal features of human life
+to illusion.  In the former case, it allowed the claims of
+certain studies to be peculiar consignees of mental values, and
+indirectly strengthened their claim to superiority, since human
+beings would incline to regard human affairs as of chief
+importance at least to themselves.  In the latter case, it called
+out a reaction which threw doubt and suspicion upon the value of
+physical science, giving occasion for treating it as an enemy to
+man's higher interests.
+
+Greek and medieval knowledge accepted the world in its
+qualitative variety, and regarded nature's processes as having
+ends, or in technical phrase as teleological.  New science was
+expounded so as to deny the reality of all qualities in real, or
+objective, existence.  Sounds, colors, ends, as well as goods and
+bads, were regarded as purely subjective -- as mere impressions
+in the mind.  Objective existence was then treated as having only
+quantitative aspects -- as so much mass in motion, its only
+differences being that at one point in space there was a larger
+aggregate mass than at another, and that in some spots there were
+greater rates of motion than at others.  Lacking qualitative
+distinctions, nature lacked significant variety.  Uniformities
+were emphasized, not diversities; the ideal was supposed to be
+the discovery of a single mathematical formula applying to the
+whole universe at once from which all the seeming variety of
+phenomena could be derived.  This is what a mechanical philosophy
+means.
+
+Such a philosophy does not represent the genuine purport of
+science.  It takes the technique for the thing itself; the
+apparatus and the terminology for reality, the method for its
+subject matter.  Science does confine its statements to
+conditions which enable us to predict and control the happening
+of events, ignoring the qualities of the events.  Hence its
+mechanical and quantitative character.  But in leaving them out
+of account, it does not exclude them from reality, nor relegate
+them to a purely mental region; it only furnishes means
+utilizable for ends.  Thus while in fact the progress of science
+was increasing man's power over nature, enabling him to place his
+cherished ends on a firmer basis than ever before, and also to
+diversify his activities almost at will, the philosophy which
+professed to formulate its accomplishments reduced the world to a
+barren and monotonous redistribution of matter in space.  Thus
+the immediate effect of modern science was to accentuate the
+dualism of matter and mind, and thereby to establish the physical
+and the humanistic studies as two disconnected groups.  Since the
+difference between better and worse is bound up with the
+qualities of experience, any philosophy of science which excludes
+them from the genuine content of reality is bound to leave out
+what is most interesting and most important to mankind.
+
+3.  The Present Educational Problem.  In truth, experience knows
+no division between human concerns and a purely mechanical
+physical world.  Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are
+dependent for execution upon natural conditions.  Separated from
+such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of
+fancy.  From the standpoint of human experience, and hence of
+educational
+endeavor, any distinction which can be justly made between nature
+and man is a distinction between the conditions which have to be
+reckoned with in the formation and execution of our practical
+aims, and the aims themselves.  This philosophy is vouched for by
+the doctrine of biological development which shows that man is
+continuous with nature, not an alien entering her processes from
+without.  It is reinforced by the experimental method of science
+which shows that knowledge accrues in virtue of an attempt to
+direct physical energies in accord with ideas suggested in
+dealing with natural objects in behalf of social uses.  Every
+step forward in the social sciences -- the studies termed
+history, economics, politics, sociology -- shows that social
+questions are capable of being intelligently coped with only in
+the degree in which we employ the method of collected data,
+forming hypotheses, and testing them in action which is
+characteristic of natural science, and in the degree in which we
+utilize in behalf of the promotion of social welfare the
+technical knowledge ascertained by physics and chemistry.
+Advanced methods of dealing with such perplexing problems as
+insanity, intemperance, poverty, public sanitation, city
+planning, the conservation of natural resources, the constructive
+use of governmental agencies for furthering the public good
+without weakening personal initiative, all illustrate the direct
+dependence of our important social concerns upon the methods and
+results of natural science.
+
+With respect then to both humanistic and naturalistic studies,
+education should take its departure from this close
+interdependence.  It should aim not at keeping science as a study
+of nature apart from literature as a record of human interests,
+but at cross-fertilizing both the natural sciences and the
+various human disciplines such as history, literature, economics,
+and politics.  Pedagogically, the problem is simpler than the
+attempt to teach the sciences as mere technical bodies of
+information and technical forms of physical manipulation, on one
+side; and to teach humanistic studies as isolated subjects, on
+the other.  For the latter procedure institutes an artificial
+separation in the pupils' experience.  Outside of school pupils
+meet with natural facts and principles in connection with various
+modes of human action.  (See ante, p.  30.) In all the social
+activities in which they have shared they have had to understand
+the material and processes involved.  To start them in school
+with a rupture of this intimate association breaks the continuity
+of mental development, makes the student feel an indescribable
+unreality in his studies, and deprives him of the normal motive
+for interest in them.
+
+There is no doubt, of course, that the opportunities of education
+should be such that all should have a chance who have the
+disposition to advance to specialized ability in science, and
+thus devote themselves to its pursuit as their particular
+occupation in life.  But at present, the pupil too often has a
+choice only between beginning with a study of the results of
+prior specialization where the material is isolated from his
+daily experiences, or with miscellaneous nature study, where
+material is presented at haphazard and does not lead anywhere in
+particular.  The habit of introducing college pupils into
+segregated scientific subject matter, such as is appropriate to
+the man who wishes to become an expert in a given field, is
+carried back into the high schools.  Pupils in the latter simply
+get a more elementary treatment of the same thing, with
+difficulties smoothed over and topics reduced to the level of
+their supposed ability.  The cause of this procedure lies in
+following tradition, rather than in conscious adherence to a
+dualistic philosophy.  But the effect is the same as if the
+purpose were to inculcate an idea that the sciences which deal
+with nature have nothing to do with man, and vice versa.  A large
+part of the comparative ineffectiveness of the teaching of the
+sciences, for those who never become scientific specialists, is
+the result of a separation which is unavoidable when one begins
+with technically organized subject matter.  Even if all students
+were embryonic scientific specialists, it is questionable whether
+this is the most effective procedure.  Considering that the great
+majority are concerned with the study of sciences only for its
+effect upon their mental habits -- in making them more alert,
+more open-minded, more inclined to tentative acceptance and to
+testing of ideas propounded or suggested, -- and for achieving a
+better understanding of their daily environment, it is certainly
+ill-advised.  Too often the pupil comes out with a smattering
+which is too superficial to be scientific and too technical to be
+applicable to ordinary affairs.
+
+The utilization of ordinary experience to secure an advance into
+scientific material and method, while keeping the latter
+connected with familiar human interests, is easier to-day than it
+ever was before.  The usual experience of all persons in
+civilized communities to-day is intimately associated with
+industrial processes and results.  These in turn are so many
+cases of science in action.  The stationary and traction steam
+engine, gasoline engine, automobile, telegraph and telephone, the
+electric motor enter directly into the lives of most individuals.
+Pupils at an early age are practically acquainted with these
+things.  Not only does the business occupation of their parents
+depend upon scientific applications, but household pursuits, the
+maintenance of health, the sights seen upon the streets, embody
+scientific achievements and stimulate interest in the connected
+scientific principles.  The obvious pedagogical starting point of
+scientific instruction is not to teach things labeled science,
+but to utilize the familiar occupations and appliances to direct
+observation and experiment, until pupils have arrived at a
+knowledge of some fundamental principles by understanding them in
+their familiar practical workings.
+
+The opinion sometimes advanced that it is a derogation from the
+"purity" of science to study it in its active incarnation,
+instead of in theoretical abstraction, rests upon a
+misunderstanding.  AS matter of fact, any subject is cultural in
+the degree in which it is apprehended in its widest possible
+range of meanings.  Perception of meanings depends upon
+perception of connections, of context.  To see a scientific fact
+or law in its human as well as in its physical and technical
+context is to enlarge its significance and give it increased
+cultural value.  Its direct economic application, if by economic
+is meant
+something having money worth, is incidental and secondary, but a
+part of its actual connections.  The important thing is that the
+fact be grasped in its social connections -- its function in
+life.
+
+On the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with
+an intelligent sense of human interests.  The social interest,
+identical in its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is
+necessarily supreme with man.  Knowledge about man, information
+as to his past, familiarity with his documented records of
+literature, may be as technical a possession as the accumulation
+of physical details.  Men may keep busy in a variety of ways,
+making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or
+in amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the
+chronology of literary productions.  Unless such activity reacts
+to enlarge the imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with
+the busy work of children.  It has the letter without the spirit
+of activity.  It readily degenerates itself into a miser's
+accumulation, and a man prides himself on what he has, and not on
+the meaning he finds in the affairs of life.  Any study so
+pursued that it increases concern for the values of life, any
+study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and
+greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study.  The
+humanistic spirit of the Greeks was native and intense but it was
+narrow in scope.  Everybody outside the Hellenic circle was a
+barbarian, and negligible save as a possible enemy.  Acute as
+were the social observations and speculations of Greek thinkers,
+there is not a word in their writings to indicate that Greek
+civilization was not self-inclosed and self-sufficient.  There
+was, apparently, no suspicion that its future was at the mercy of
+the despised outsider.  Within the Greek community, the intense
+social spirit was limited by the fact that higher culture was
+based on a substratum of slavery and economic serfdom--classes
+necessary to the existence of the state, as Aristotle declared,
+and yet not genuine parts of it.  The development of science has
+produced an industrial revolution which has brought different
+peoples in such close contact with one another through
+colonization and commerce that no matter how some nations may
+still look down upon others, no country can harbor the illusion
+that its career is decided wholly within itself.  The same
+revolution has abolished agricultural serfdom, and created a
+class of more or less organized factory laborers with recognized
+political rights, and who make claims for a responsible role in
+the control of industry--claims which receive sympathetic
+attention from many among the well-to- do, since they have been
+brought into closer connections with the less fortunate classes
+through the breaking down of class barriers.
+
+This state of affairs may be formulated by saying that the older
+humanism omitted economic and industrial conditions from its
+purview.  Consequently, it was one sided.  Culture, under such
+circumstances, inevitably represented the intellectual and moral
+outlook of the class which was in direct social control.  Such a
+tradition as to culture is, as we have seen (ante, p.  260),
+aristocratic; it emphasizes what marks off one class from
+another, rather than fundamental common interests.  Its standards
+are in the past; for the aim is to preserve what has been gained
+rather than widely to extend the range of culture.
+
+The modifications which spring from taking greater account of
+industry and of whatever has to do with making a living are
+frequently condemned as attacks upon the culture derived from the
+past.  But a wider educational outlook would conceive industrial
+activities as agencies for making intellectual resources more
+accessible to the masses, and giving greater solidity to the
+culture of those having superior resources.  In short, when we
+consider the close connection between science and industrial
+development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic
+cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other,
+we get light on the opposition between technical scientific
+studies and refining literary studies.  We have before us the
+need of overcoming this separation in education if society is to
+be truly democratic.
+
+Summary.  The philosophic dualism between man and nature is
+reflected in the division of studies between the naturalistic and
+the humanistic with a tendency to reduce the latter to the
+literary records of the past.  This dualism is not characteristic
+(as were the others which we have noted) of Greek thought.  It
+arose partly because of the fact that the culture of Rome and of
+barbarian Europe was not a native product, being borrowed
+directly or indirectly from Greece, and partly because political
+and ecclesiastic conditions emphasized dependence upon the
+authority of past knowledge as that was transmitted in literary
+documents.
+
+At the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a
+restoration of the intimate connection of nature and humanity,
+for it viewed knowledge of nature as the means of securing human
+progress and well-being.  But the more immediate applications of
+science were in the interests of a class rather than of men in
+common; and the received philosophic formulations of scientific
+doctrine tended either to mark it off as merely material from man
+as spiritual and immaterial, or else to reduce mind to a
+subjective illusion.  In education, accordingly, the tendency was
+to treat the sciences as a separate body of studies, consisting
+of technical information regarding the physical world, and to
+reserve the older literary studies as distinctively humanistic.
+The account previously given of the evolution of knowledge, and
+of the educational scheme of studies based upon it, are designed
+to overcome the separation, and to secure recognition of the
+place occupied by the subject matter of the natural sciences in
+human affairs.
+
+1 The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian
+Church.  pp.  43-44.
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
+
+1.  Mind as Purely Individual.  We have been concerned with the
+influences which have effected a division between work and
+leisure, knowing and doing, man and nature.  These influences
+have resulted in splitting up the subject matter of education
+into separate studies.  They have also found formulation in
+various philosophies which have opposed to each other body and
+mind, theoretical knowledge and practice, physical mechanism and
+ideal purpose.  Upon the philosophical side, these various
+dualisms culminate in a sharp demarcation of individual minds
+from the world, and hence from one another.  While the connection
+of this philosophical position with educational procedure is not
+so obvious as is that of the points considered in the last three
+chapters, there are certain educational considerations which
+correspond to it; such as the antithesis supposed to exist
+between subject matter (the counterpart of the world) and method
+(the counterpart of mind); such as the tendency to treat interest
+as something purely private, without intrinsic connection with
+the material studied.  Aside from incidental educational
+bearings, it will be shown in this chapter that the dualistic
+philosophy of mind and the world implies an erroneous conception
+of the
+relationship between knowledge and social interests, and between
+individuality or freedom, and social control and authority.
+The identification of the mind with the individual self and of
+the latter with a private psychic consciousness is comparatively
+modern.  In both the Greek and medieval periods, the rule was to
+regard the individual as a channel through which a universal and
+divine intelligence operated.  The individual was in no true
+sense the knower; the knower was the "Reason" which operated
+through him.  The individual interfered at his peril, and only to
+the detriment of the truth.  In the degree in which the
+individual rather than reason "knew," conceit, error, and opinion
+were substituted for true knowledge.  In Greek life, observation
+was acute and alert; and thinking was free almost to the point of
+irresponsible speculations.  Accordingly the consequences of the
+theory were only such as were consequent upon the lack of an
+experimental method.  Without such a method individuals could not
+engage in knowing, and be checked up by the results of the
+inquiries of others.  Without such liability to test by others,
+the minds of men could not be intellectually responsible; results
+were to be accepted because of their aesthetic consistency,
+agreeable quality, or the prestige of their authors.  In the
+barbarian period, individuals were in a still more humble
+attitude to truth; important knowledge was supposed to be
+divinely revealed, and nothing remained for the minds of
+individuals except to work it over after it had been received on
+authority.  Aside from the more consciously philosophic aspects
+of these movements, it never occurs to any one to identify mind
+and the personal self wherever beliefs are transmitted by custom.
+
+In the medieval period there was a religious individualism.  The
+deepest concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul.
+In the later Middle Ages, this latent individualism found
+conscious formulation in the nominalistic philosophies, which
+treated the structure of knowledge as something built up within
+the individual through his own acts, and mental states.  With the
+rise of economic and political individualism after the sixteenth
+century, and with the development of Protestantism, the times
+were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the
+individual in achieving knowledge for himself.  This led to the
+view that knowledge is won wholly through personal and private
+experiences.  As a consequence, mind, the source and possessor of
+knowledge, was thought of as wholly individual.  Thus upon the
+educational side, we find educational reformers, like Montaigne,
+Bacon, Locke, henceforth vehemently denouncing all learning which
+is acquired on hearsay, and asserting that even if beliefs happen
+to be true, they do not constitute knowledge unless they have
+grown up in and been tested by personal experience.  The reaction
+against authority in all spheres of life, and the intensity of
+the struggle, against great odds, for freedom of action and
+inquiry, led to such an emphasis upon personal observations and
+ideas as in effect to isolate mind, and set it apart from the
+world to be known.
+
+This isolation is reflected in the great development of that
+branch of philosophy known as epistemology--the theory of
+knowledge.  The identification of mind with the self, and the
+setting up of the self as something independent and
+self-sufficient, created such a gulf between the knowing mind and
+the world that it became a question how knowledge was possible at
+all.  Given a subject - - the knower--and an object--the thing to
+be known--wholly separate from one another, it is necessary to
+frame a theory to explain how they get into connection with each
+other so that valid knowledge may result.  This problem, with the
+allied one of the possibility of the world acting upon the mind
+and the mind acting upon the world, became almost the exclusive
+preoccupation of philosophic thought.
+
+The theories that we cannot know the world as it really is but
+only the impressions made upon the mind, or that there is no
+world beyond the individual mind, or that knowledge is only a
+certain association of the mind's own states, were products of
+this preoccupation.  We are not directly concerned with their
+truth; but the fact that such desperate solutions were widely
+accepted is evidence of the extent to which mind had been set
+over the world of realities.  The increasing use of the term
+"consciousness" as an equivalent for mind, in the supposition
+that there is an inner world of conscious states and processes,
+independent of any relationship to nature and society, an inner
+world more truly and immediately known than anything else, is
+evidence of the same fact.  In short, practical individualism, or
+struggle for greater freedom of thought in action, was translated
+into philosophic subjectivism.
+
+2.  Individual Mind as the Agent of Reorganization.  It should be
+obvious that this philosophic movement misconceived the
+significance of the practical movement.  Instead of being its
+transcript, it was a perversion.  Men were not actually engaged
+in the absurdity of striving to be free from connection with
+nature and one another.  They were striving for greater freedom
+in nature and society.  They wanted greater power to initiate
+changes in the world of things and fellow beings; greater scope
+of movement and consequently greater freedom in observations and
+ideas implied in movement.  They wanted not isolation from the
+world, but a more intimate connection with it.  They wanted to
+form their beliefs about it at first hand, instead of through
+tradition.  They wanted closer union with their fellows so that
+they might influence one another more effectively and might
+combine their respective actions for mutual aims.
+
+So far as their beliefs were concerned, they felt that a great
+deal which passed for knowledge was merely the accumulated
+opinions of the past, much of it absurd and its correct portions
+not understood when accepted on authority.  Men must observe for
+themselves, and form their own theories and personally test them.
+Such a method was the only alternative to the imposition of dogma
+as truth, a procedure which reduced mind to the formal act of
+acquiescing in truth.  Such is the meaning of what is sometimes
+called the substitution of inductive experimental methods of
+knowing for deductive.  In some sense, men had always used an
+inductive method in dealing with their immediate practical
+concerns.  Architecture, agriculture, manufacture, etc., had to
+be based upon observation of the activities of natural objects,
+and ideas about such affairs had to be checked, to some extent,
+by results.  But even in such things there was an undue reliance
+upon mere custom, followed blindly rather than understandingly.
+And this observational-experimental method was restricted to
+these "practical" matters, and a sharp distinction maintained
+between practice and theoretical knowledge or truth.  (See Ch.
+XX.) The rise of free cities, the development of travel,
+exploration, and commerce, the evolution of new methods of
+producing commodities and doing business, threw men definitely
+upon their own resources.  The reformers of science like Galileo,
+Descartes, and their successors, carried analogous methods into
+ascertaining the facts about nature.  An interest in discovery
+took the place of an interest in systematizing and "proving"
+received beliefs.
+
+A just philosophic interpretation of these movements would,
+indeed, have emphasized the rights and responsibilities of the
+individual in gaining knowledge and personally testing beliefs,
+no matter by what authorities they were vouched for.  But it
+would not have isolated the individual from the world, and
+consequently isolated individuals--in theory--from one another.
+It would have perceived that such disconnection, such rupture of
+continuity, denied in advance the possibility of success in their
+endeavors.  As matter of fact every individual has grown up, and
+always must grow up, in a social medium.  His responses grow
+intelligent, or gain meaning, simply because he lives and acts in
+a medium of accepted meanings and values.  (See ante, p.  30.)
+Through social intercourse, through sharing in the activities
+embodying beliefs, he gradually acquires a mind of his own.  The
+conception of mind as a purely isolated possession of the self is
+at the very antipodes of the truth.   The self achieves mind in
+the degree in which knowledge of things is incarnate in the life
+about him; the self is not a separate mind building up knowledge
+anew on its own account.
+
+Yet there is a valid distinction between knowledge which is
+objective and impersonal, and thinking which is subjective and
+personal.  In one sense, knowledge is that which we take for
+granted.  It is that which is settled, disposed of, established,
+under control.  What we fully know, we do not need to think
+about.  In common phrase, it is certain, assured.  And this does
+not mean a mere feeling of certainty.  It denotes not a
+sentiment, but a practical attitude, a readiness to act without
+reserve or quibble.  Of course we may be mistaken.  What is taken
+for knowledge--for fact and truth--at a given time may not be
+such.  But everything which is assumed without question, which is
+taken for granted in our intercourse with one another and nature
+is what, at the given time, is called knowledge.  Thinking on the
+contrary, starts, as we have seen, from doubt or uncertainty.  It
+marks an inquiring, hunting, searching attitude, instead of one
+of mastery and possession.  Through its critical process true
+knowledge is revised and extended, and our convictions as to the
+state of things reorganized.  Clearly the last few centuries have
+been typically a period of revision and reorganization of
+beliefs.  Men did not really throw away all transmitted beliefs
+concerning the realities of existence, and start afresh upon the
+basis of their private, exclusive sensations and ideas.  They
+could not have done so if they had wished to, and if it had been
+possible general imbecility would have been the only outcome.
+Men set out from what had passed as knowledge, and critically
+investigated the grounds upon which it rested; they noted
+exceptions; they used new mechanical appliances to bring to light
+data inconsistent with what had been believed; they used their
+imaginations to conceive a world different from that in which
+their forefathers had put their trust.  The work was a piecemeal,
+a retail, business.  One problem was tackled at a time.  The net
+results of all the revisions amounted, however, to a revolution
+of prior conceptions of the world.  What occurred was a
+reorganization of prior intellectual habitudes, infinitely more
+efficient than a cutting loose from all connections would have
+been.
+
+This state of affairs suggests a definition of the role of the
+individual, or the self, in knowledge; namely, the redirection,
+or reconstruction of accepted beliefs.  Every new idea, every
+conception of things differing from that authorized by current
+belief, must have its origin in an individual.  New ideas are
+doubtless always sprouting, but a society governed by custom does
+not encourage their development.  On the contrary, it tends to
+suppress them, just because they are deviations from what is
+current.  The man who looks at things differently from others is
+in such a community a suspect character; for him to persist is
+generally fatal.  Even when social censorship of beliefs is not
+so strict, social conditions may fail to provide the appliances
+which are requisite if new ideas are to be adequately elaborated;
+or they may fail to provide any material support and reward to
+those who entertain them.  Hence they remain mere fancies,
+romantic castles in the air, or aimless speculations.  The
+freedom of observation and imagination involved in the modern
+scientific revolution were not easily secured; they had to be
+fought for; many suffered for their intellectual independence.
+But, upon the whole, modern European society first permitted, and
+then, in some fields at least, deliberately encouraged the
+individual reactions which deviate from what custom prescribes.
+Discovery, research, inquiry in new lines, inventions, finally
+came to be either the social fashion, or in some degree
+tolerable.  However, as we have already noted, philosophic
+theories of knowledge were not content to conceive mind in the
+individual as the pivot upon which reconstruction of beliefs
+turned, thus maintaining the continuity of the individual with
+the world of nature and fellow men.  They regarded the individual
+mind as a separate entity, complete in each person, and isolated
+from nature and hence from other minds.  Thus a legitimate
+intellectual individualism, the attitude of critical revision of
+former beliefs which is indispensable to progress, was explicitly
+formulated as a moral and social individualism.  When the
+activities of mind set out from customary beliefs and strive to
+effect transformations of them which will in turn win general
+conviction, there is no opposition between the individual and the
+social.  The intellectual variations of the individual in
+observation, imagination, judgment, and invention are simply the
+agencies of social progress, just as conformity to habit is the
+agency of social conservation.  But when knowledge is regarded as
+originating and developing within an individual, the ties which
+bind the mental life of one to that of his fellows are ignored
+and denied.
+
+When the social quality of individualized mental operations is
+denied, it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite
+an individual with his fellows.  Moral individualism is set up by
+the conscious separation of different centers of life.  It has
+its roots in the notion that the consciousness of each person is
+wholly private, a self-inclosed continent, intrinsically
+independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody else.
+But when men act, they act in a common and public world.  This is
+the problem to which the theory of isolated and independent
+conscious minds gave rise: Given feelings, ideas, desires, which
+have nothing to do with one another, how can actions proceeding
+from them be controlled in a social or public interest? Given an
+egoistic consciousness, how can action which has regard for
+others take place?
+
+Moral philosophies which have started from such premises have
+developed four typical ways of dealing with the question.  (i)
+One method represents the survival of the older authoritative
+position, with such concessions and compromises as the progress
+of events has made absolutely inevitable.  The deviations and
+departures characterizing an individual are still looked upon
+with suspicion; in principle they are evidences of the
+disturbances, revolts, and corruptions inhering in an individual
+apart from external authoritative guidance.  In fact, as distinct
+from principle, intellectual individualism is tolerated in
+certain technical regions -- in subjects like mathematics and
+physics and astronomy, and in the technical inventions resulting
+therefrom.  But the applicability of a similar method to morals,
+social, legal, and political matters, is denied.  In such
+matters, dogma is still to be supreme; certain eternal truths
+made known by revelation, intuition, or the wisdom of our
+forefathers set unpassable limits to individual observation and
+speculation.  The evils from which society suffers are set down
+to the efforts of misguided individuals to transgress these
+boundaries.  Between the physical and the moral sciences, lie
+intermediate sciences of life, where the territory is only
+grudgingly yielded to freedom of inquiry under the pressure of
+accomplished fact.  Although past history has demonstrated that
+the possibilities of human good are widened and made more secure
+by trusting to a responsibility built up within the very process
+of inquiry, the "authority" theory sets apart a sacred domain of
+truth which must be protected from the inroads of variation of
+beliefs.  Educationally, emphasis may not be put on eternal
+truth, but it is put on the authority of book and teacher, and
+individual variation is discouraged.
+
+(ii) Another method is sometimes termed rationalism or abstract
+intellectualism.  A formal logical faculty is set up in
+distinction from tradition and history and all concrete subject
+matter.  This faculty of reason is endowed with power to
+influence conduct directly.  Since it deals wholly with general
+and impersonal forms, when different persons act in accord with
+logical findings, their activities will be externally consistent.
+There is no doubt of the services rendered by this philosophy.
+It was a powerful factor in the negative and dissolving criticism
+of doctrines having nothing but tradition and class interest
+behind them; it accustomed men to freedom of discussion and to
+the notion that beliefs had to be submitted to criteria of
+reasonableness.  It undermined the power of prejudice,
+superstition, and brute force, by habituating men to reliance
+upon argument, discussion, and persuasion.  It made for clarity
+and order of exposition.  But its influence was greater in
+destruction of old falsities than in the construction of new ties
+and associations among men.  Its formal and empty nature, due to
+conceiving reason as something complete in itself apart from
+subject matter, its hostile attitude toward historical
+institutions, its disregard of the influence of habit, instinct,
+and emotion, as operative factors in life, left it impotent in
+the suggestion of specific aims and methods.  Bare logic, however
+important in arranging and criticizing existing subject matter,
+cannot spin new subject matter out of itself.  In education, the
+correlative is trust in general ready-made rules and principles
+to secure agreement, irrespective of seeing to it that the
+pupil's ideas really agree with one another.
+
+(iii) While this rationalistic philosophy was developing in
+France, English thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest
+of individuals in order to secure outer unity in the acts which
+issued from isolated streams of consciousness.  Legal
+arrangements, especially penal administration, and governmental
+regulations, were to be such as to prevent the acts which
+proceeded from regard for one's own private sensations from
+interfering with the feelings of others.  Education was to
+instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others
+and some degree of positive regard for their welfare were
+necessary for security in the pursuit of one's own happiness.
+Chief emphasis was put, however, upon trade as a means of
+bringing the conduct of one into harmony with that of others.  In
+commerce, each aims at the satisfaction of his own wants, but can
+gain his own profit only by furnishing some commodity or service
+to another.  Thus in aiming at the increase of his own private
+pleasurable states of consciousness, he contributes to the
+consciousness of others.  Again there is no doubt that this view
+expressed and furthered a heightened perception of the values of
+conscious life, and a recognition that institutional arrangements
+are ultimately to be judged by the contributions which they make
+to intensifying and enlarging the scope of conscious experience.
+It also did much to rescue work, industry, and mechanical devices
+from the contempt in which they had been held in communities
+founded upon the control of a leisure class.  In both ways, this
+philosophy promoted a wider and more democratic social concern.
+But it was tainted by the narrowness of its fundamental premise:
+the doctrine that every individual acts only from regard for his
+own pleasures and pains, and that so-called generous and
+sympathetic acts are only indirect ways of procuring and assuring
+one's own comfort.  In other words, it made explicit the
+consequences inhering in any doctrine which makes mental life a
+self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt to redirect and
+readapt common concerns.  It made union among men a matter of
+calculation of externals.  It lent itself to the contemptuous
+assertions of Carlyle that it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a
+constable, and recognized only a "cash nexus" among men.  The
+educational equivalents of this doctrine in the uses made of
+pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only too obvious.
+(iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path.  It started
+from what was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of
+Descartes and his French successors.  But while French thought
+upon the whole developed the idea of reason in opposition to the
+religious conception of a divine mind residing in individuals,
+German thought (as in Hegel) made a synthesis of the two.  Reason
+is absolute.  Nature is incarnate reason.  History is reason in
+its progressive unfolding in man.  An individual becomes rational
+only as he absorbs into himself the content of rationality in
+nature and in social institutions.  For an absolute reason is
+not, like the reason of rationalism, purely formal and empty; as
+absolute it must include all content within itself.  Thus the
+real problem is not that of controlling individual freedom so
+that some measure of social order and concord may result, but of
+achieving individual freedom through developing individual
+convictions in accord with the universal law found in the
+organization of the state as objective Reason.  While this
+philosophy is usually termed absolute or objective idealism, it
+might better be termed, for educational purposes at least,
+institutional idealism.  (See ante, p.  59.) It idealized
+historical institutions by conceiving them as incarnations of an
+immanent absolute mind.  There can be no doubt that this
+philosophy was a powerful influence in rescuing philosophy in the
+beginning of the nineteenth century from the isolated
+individualism into which it had fallen in France and England.  It
+served also to make the organization of the state more
+constructively interested in matters of public concern.  It left
+less to chance, less to mere individual logical conviction, less
+to the workings of private self-interest.  It brought
+intelligence to bear upon the conduct of affairs; it accentuated
+the need of nationally organized education in the interests of
+the corporate state.  It sanctioned and promoted freedom of
+inquiry in all technical details of natural and historical
+phenomena.  But in all ultimate moral matters, it tended to
+reinstate the principle of authority.  It made for efficiency of
+organization more than did any of the types of philosophy
+previously mentioned, but it made no provision for free
+experimental modification of this organization.  Political
+democracy, with its belief in the right of individual desire and
+purpose to take part in readapting even the fundamental
+constitution of society, was foreign to it.
+
+3.  Educational Equivalents.  It is not necessary to consider in
+detail the educational counterparts of the various defects found
+in these various types of philosophy.  It suffices to say that in
+general the school has been the institution which exhibited with
+greatest clearness the assumed antithesis between purely
+individualistic methods of learning and social action, and
+between freedom and social control.  The antithesis is reflected
+in the absence of a social atmosphere and motive for learning,
+and the consequent separation, in the conduct of the school,
+between method of instruction and methods of government; and in
+the slight opportunity afforded individual variations.  When
+learning is a phase of active undertakings which involve mutual
+exchange, social control enters into the very process of
+learning.  When the social factor is absent, learning becomes a
+carrying over of some presented material into a purely individual
+consciousness, and there is no inherent reason why it should give
+a more socialized direction to mental and emotional disposition.
+There is tendency on the part of both the upholders and the
+opponents of freedom in school to identify it with absence of
+social direction, or, sometimes, with merely physical
+unconstraint of movement.  But the essence of the demand for
+freedom is the need of conditions which will enable an individual
+to make his own special contribution to a group interest, and to
+partake of its activities in such ways that social guidance shall
+be a matter of his own mental attitude, and not a mere
+authoritative dictation of his acts.  Because what is often
+called discipline and "government" has to do with the external
+side of conduct alone, a similar meaning is attached, by
+reaction, to freedom.  But when it is perceived that each idea
+signifies the quality of mind expressed in action, the supposed
+opposition between them falls away.  Freedom means essentially
+the part played by thinking -- which is personal -- in learning:
+-- it means intellectual initiative, independence in observation,
+judicious invention, foresight of consequences, and ingenuity of
+adaptation to them.
+
+But because these are the mental phase of behavior, the needed
+play of individuality -- or freedom -- cannot be separated from
+opportunity for free play of physical movements.  Enforced
+physical quietude may be unfavorable to realization of a problem,
+to undertaking the observations needed to define it, and to
+performance of the experiments which test the ideas suggested.
+Much has been said about the importance of "self-activity" in
+education, but the conception has too frequently been restricted
+to something merely internal -- something excluding the free use
+of sensory and motor organs.  Those who are at the stage of
+learning from symbols, or who are engaged in elaborating the
+implications of a problem or idea preliminary to more carefully
+thought-out activity, may need little perceptible overt activity.
+But the whole cycle of self-activity demands an opportunity for
+investigation and experimentation, for trying out one's ideas
+upon things, discovering what can be done with materials and
+appliances.  And this is incompatible with closely restricted
+physical activity.  Individual activity has sometimes been taken
+as meaning leaving a pupil to work by himself or alone.  Relief
+from need of attending to what any one else is doing is truly
+required to secure calm and concentration.  Children, like grown
+persons, require a judicious amount of being let alone.  But the
+time, place, and amount of such separate work is a matter of
+detail, not of principle.  There is no inherent opposition
+between working with others and working as an individual.  On the
+contrary, certain capacities of an individual are not brought out
+except under the stimulus of associating with others.  That a
+child must work alone and not engage in group activities in order
+to be free and let his individuality develop, is a notion which
+measures individuality by spatial distance and makes a physical
+thing of it.
+
+Individuality as a factor to be respected in education has a
+double meaning.  In the first place, one is mentally an
+individual only as he has his own purpose and problem, and does
+his own thinking.  The phrase "think for one's self" is a
+pleonasm.  Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't thinking.
+Only by a pupil's own observations, reflections, framing and
+testing of suggestions can what he already knows be amplified and
+rectified.  Thinking is as much an individual matter as is the
+digestion of food.  In the second place, there are variations of
+point of view, of appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from
+person to person.  When these variations are suppressed in the
+alleged interests of uniformity, and an attempt is made to have a
+single mold of method of study and recitation, mental confusion
+and artificiality inevitably result.  Originality is gradually
+destroyed, confidence in one's own quality of mental operation is
+undermined, and a docile subjection to the opinion of others is
+inculcated, or else ideas run wild.  The harm is greater now than
+when the whole community was governed by customary beliefs,
+because the contrast between methods of learning in school and
+those relied upon outside the school is greater.  That systematic
+advance in scientific discovery began when individuals were
+allowed, and then encouraged, to utilize their own peculiarities
+of response to subject matter, no one will deny.  If it is said
+in objection, that pupils in school are not capable of any such
+originality, and hence must be confined to appropriating and
+reproducing things already known by the better informed, the
+reply is twofold.  (i) We are concerned with originality of
+attitude which is equivalent to the unforced response of one's
+own individuality, not with originality as measured by product.
+No one expects the young to make original discoveries of just the
+same facts and principles as are embodied in the sciences of
+nature and man.  But it is not unreasonable to expect that
+learning may take place under such conditions that from the
+standpoint of the learner there is genuine discovery.  While
+immature students will not make discoveries from the standpoint
+of advanced students, they make them from their own standpoint,
+whenever there is genuine learning.  (ii) In the normal process
+of becoming acquainted with subject matter already known to
+others, even young pupils react in unexpected ways.  There is
+something fresh, something not capable of being fully anticipated
+by even the most experienced teacher, in the ways they go at the
+topic, and in the particular ways in which things strike them.
+Too often all this is brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are
+deliberately held to rehearsing material in the exact form in
+which the older person conceives it.  The result is that what is
+instinctively original in individuality, that which marks off one
+from another, goes unused and undirected.  Teaching then ceases
+to be an educative process for the teacher.  At most he learns
+simply to improve his existing technique; he does not get new
+points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual
+companionship.  Hence both teaching and learning tend to become
+conventional and mechanical with all the nervous strain on both
+sides therein implied.
+
+As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background
+of familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of
+more or less random physical experimentation is reduced.
+Activity is defined or specialized in certain channels.  To the
+eyes of others, the student may be in a position of complete
+physical quietude, because his energies are confined to nerve
+channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes and vocal
+organs.  But because this attitude is evidence of intense mental
+concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not
+follow that it should be set up as a model for students who still
+have to find their intellectual way about.  And even with the
+adult, it does not cover the whole circuit of mental energy.  It
+marks an intermediate period, capable of being lengthened with
+increased mastery of a subject, but always coming between an
+earlier period of more general and conspicuous organic action and
+a later time of putting to use what has been apprehended.
+
+When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind
+and body in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist
+upon the need of obvious, or external, freedom.  It is enough to
+identify the freedom which is involved in teaching and studying
+with the thinking by which what a person already knows and
+believes is enlarged and refined.  If attention is centered upon
+the conditions which have to be met in order to secure a
+situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take care
+of itself.  The individual who has a question which being really
+a question to him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his
+eagerness for information that will help him cope with it, and
+who has at command an equipment which will permit these interests
+to take effect, is intellectually free.  Whatever initiative and
+imaginative vision he possesses will be called into play and
+control his impulses and habits.  His own purposes will direct
+his actions.  Otherwise, his seeming attention, his docility, his
+memorizings and reproductions, will partake of intellectual
+servility.  Such a condition of intellectual subjection is needed
+for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not
+expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders
+from the few set in authority.  It is not adapted to a society
+which intends to be democratic.
+
+Summary.  True individualism is a product of the relaxation of
+the grip of the authority of custom and traditions as standards
+of belief.  Aside from sporadic instances, like the height of
+Greek thought, it is a comparatively modern manifestation.  Not
+but that there have always been individual diversities, but that
+a society dominated by conservative custom represses them or at
+least does not utilize them and promote them.  For various
+reasons, however, the new individualism was interpreted
+philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for
+revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an
+assertion that each individual's mind was complete in isolation
+from everything else.  In the theoretical phase of philosophy,
+this produced the epistemological problem: the question as to the
+possibility of any cognitive relationship of the individual to
+the world.  In its practical phase, it generated the problem of
+the possibility of a purely individual consciousness acting on
+behalf of general or social interests, -- the problem of social
+direction.  While the philosophies which have been elaborated to
+deal with these questions have not affected education directly,
+the assumptions underlying them have found expression in the
+separation frequently made between study and government and
+between freedom of individuality and control by others.
+Regarding freedom, the important thing to bear in mind is that it
+designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of
+movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a
+fair leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation,
+application, etc.  A society based on custom will utilize
+individual variations only up to a limit of conformity with
+usage; uniformity is the chief ideal within each class.  A
+progressive society counts individual variations as precious
+since it finds in them the means of its own growth.  Hence a
+democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for
+intellectual freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests
+in its educational measures.
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
+
+1.  The Meaning of Vocation.  At the present time the conflict of
+philosophic theories focuses in discussion of the proper place
+and function of vocational factors in education.  The
+bald statement that significant differences in fundamental
+philosophical conceptions find their chief issue in connection
+with this point may arouse incredulity: there seems to be too
+great a gap between the remote and general terms in which
+philosophic ideas are formulated and the practical and concrete
+details of vocational education.  But a mental review of the
+intellectual presuppositions underlying the oppositions in
+education of labor and leisure, theory and practice, body and
+mind, mental states and the world, will show that they culminate
+in the antithesis of vocational and cultural education.
+Traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to the notions of
+leisure, purely contemplative knowledge and a spiritual activity
+not involving the active use of bodily organs.  Culture has also
+tended, latterly, to be associated with a purely private
+refinement, a cultivation of certain states and attitudes of
+consciousness, separate from either social direction or service.
+It has been an escape from the former, and a solace for the
+necessity of the latter.
+
+So deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole
+subject of vocational education, that it is necessary to define
+the meaning of vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the
+impression that an education which centers about it is narrowly
+practical, if not merely pecuniary.  A vocation means nothing but
+such a direction of life activities as renders them perceptibly
+significant to a person, because of the consequences they
+accomplish, and also useful to his associates.  The opposite of a
+career is neither leisure nor culture, but aimlessness,
+capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in
+experience, on the personal side, and idle display, parasitic
+dependence upon the others, on the social side.  Occupation is a
+concrete term for continuity.  It includes the development of
+artistic capacity of any kind, of special scientific ability, of
+effective citizenship, as well as professional and business
+occupations, to say nothing of mechanical labor or engagement in
+gainful pursuits.
+
+We must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to
+the occupations where immediately tangible commodities are
+produced, but also the notion that vocations are distributed in
+an exclusive way, one and only one to each person.  Such
+restricted specialism is impossible; nothing could be more absurd
+than to try to educate individuals with an eye to only one line
+of activity.  In the first place, each individual has of
+necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be
+intelligently effective; and in the second place any one
+occupation loses its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy
+at something in the degree in which it is isolated from other
+interests.  (i) No one is just an artist and nothing else, and in
+so far as one approximates that condition, he is so much the less
+developed human being; he is a kind of monstrosity.  He must, at
+some period of his life, be a member of a family; he must have
+friends and companions; he must either support himself or be
+supported by others, and thus he has a business career.  He is a
+member of some organized political unit, and so on.  We naturally
+name his vocation from that one of the callings which
+distinguishes him, rather than from those which he has in common
+with all others.  But we should not allow ourselves to be so
+subject to words as to ignore and virtually deny his other
+callings when it comes to a consideration of the vocational
+phases of education.
+
+(ii) As a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically
+specialized phase of his diverse and variegated vocational
+activities, so his efficiency in it, in the humane sense of
+efficiency, is determined by its association with other callings.
+A person must have experience, he must live, if his artistry is
+to be more than a technical accomplishment.  He cannot find the
+subject matter of his artistic activity within his art; this must
+be an expression of what he suffers and enjoys in other
+relationships -- a thing which depends in turn upon the alertness
+and sympathy of his interests.  What is true of an artist is true
+of any other special calling.  There is doubtless--in general
+accord with the principle of habit -- a tendency for every
+distinctive vocation to become too dominant, too exclusive and
+absorbing in its specialized aspect.  This means emphasis upon
+skill or technical method at the expense of meaning.  Hence it is
+not the business of education to foster this tendency, but rather
+to safeguard against it, so that the scientific inquirer shall
+not be merely the scientist, the teacher merely the pedagogue,
+the clergyman merely one who wears the cloth, and so on.
+
+2.  The Place of Vocational Aims in Education.  Bearing in mind
+the varied and connected content of the vocation, and the broad
+background upon which a particular calling is projected, we shall
+now consider education for the more distinctive activity of an
+individual.
+
+1.  An occupation is the only thing which balances the
+distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service.
+To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity
+to do it is the key to happiness.  Nothing is more tragic than
+failure to discover one's true business in life, or to find that
+one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an
+uncongenial calling.  A right occupation means simply that the
+aptitudes of a person are in adequate play, working with the
+minimum of friction and the maximum of satisfaction.  With
+reference to other members of a community, this adequacy of
+action signifies, of course, that they are getting the best
+service the person can render.  It is generally believed, for
+example, that slave labor was ultimately wasteful even from the
+purely economic point of view -- that there was not sufficient
+stimulus to direct the energies of slaves, and that there was
+consequent wastage.  Moreover, since slaves were confined to
+certain prescribed callings, much talent must have remained
+unavailable to the community, and hence there was a dead loss.
+Slavery only illustrates on an obvious scale what happens in some
+degree whenever an individual does not find himself in his work.
+And he cannot completely find himself when vocations are looked
+upon with contempt, and a conventional ideal of a culture which
+is essentially the same for all is maintained.  Plato (ante, p.
+88) laid down the fundamental principle of a philosophy of
+education when he asserted that it was the business of education
+to discover what each person is good for, and to train him to
+mastery of that mode of excellence, because such development
+would also secure the fulfillment of social needs in the most
+harmonious way.  His error was not in qualitative principle, but
+in his limited conception of the scope of vocations socially
+needed; a limitation of vision which reacted to obscure his
+perception of the infinite variety of capacities found in
+different individuals.
+
+2.  An occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose.
+Education through occupations consequently combines within itself
+more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method.
+It calls instincts and habits into play; it is a foe to passive
+receptivity.  It has an end in view; results are to be
+accomplished.  Hence it appeals to thought; it demands that an
+idea of an end be steadily maintained, so that activity cannot be
+either routine or capricious.  Since the movement of activity
+must be progressive, leading from one stage to another,
+observation and ingenuity are required at each stage to overcome
+obstacles and to discover and readapt means of execution.  In
+short, an occupation, pursued under conditions where the
+realization of the activity rather than merely the external
+product is the aim, fulfills the requirements which were laid
+down earlier in connection with the discussion of aims, interest,
+and thinking.  (See Chapters VIII, X, XII.)
+
+A calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for
+information and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth.  It
+provides an axis which runs through an immense diversity of
+detail; it causes different experiences, facts, items of
+information to fall into order with one another.  The lawyer, the
+physician, the laboratory investigator in some branch of
+chemistry, the parent, the citizen interested in his own
+locality, has a constant working stimulus to note and relate
+whatever has to do with his concern.  He unconsciously, from the
+motivation of his occupation, reaches out for all relevant
+information, and holds to it.  The vocation acts as both magnet
+to attract and as glue to hold.  Such organization of knowledge
+is vital, because it has reference to needs; it is so expressed
+and readjusted in action that it never becomes stagnant.  No
+classification, no selection and arrangement of facts, which is
+consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever compare
+in solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of
+an occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal,
+superficial, and cold.
+
+3.  The only adequate training for occupations is training
+through occupations.  The principle stated early in this book
+(see Chapter VI) that the educative process is its own end, and
+that the only sufficient preparation for later responsibilities
+comes by making the most of immediately present life, applies in
+full force to the vocational phases of education.  The dominant
+vocation of all human beings at all times is living --
+intellectual and moral growth.  In childhood and youth, with
+their relative freedom from economic stress, this fact is naked
+and unconcealed.  To predetermine some future occupation for
+which education is to be a strict preparation is to injure the
+possibilities of present development and thereby to reduce the
+adequacy of preparation for a future right employment.  To repeat
+the principle we have had occasion to appeal to so often, such
+training may develop a machine-like skill in routine lines (it is
+far from being sure to do so, since it may develop distaste,
+aversion, and carelessness), but it will be at the expense of
+those qualities of alert observation and coherent and ingenious
+planning which make an occupation intellectually rewarding.  In
+an autocratically managed society, it is often a conscious object
+to prevent the development of freedom and responsibility, a few
+do the planning and ordering, the others follow directions and
+are deliberately confined to narrow and prescribed channels of
+endeavor.  However much such a scheme may inure to the prestige
+and profit of a class, it is evident that it limits the
+development of the subject class; hardens and confines the
+opportunities for learning through experience of the master
+class, and in both ways hampers the life of the society as a
+whole.  (See ante, p.  260.)
+
+The only alternative is that all the earlier preparation for
+vocations be indirect rather than direct; namely, through
+engaging in those active occupations which are indicated by the
+needs and interests of the pupil at the time.  Only in this way
+can there be on the part of the educator and of the one educated
+a genuine discovery of personal aptitudes so that the proper
+choice of a specialized pursuit in later life may be indicated.
+Moreover, the discovery of capacity and aptitude will be a
+constant process as long as growth continues.  It is a
+conventional and arbitrary view which assumes that discovery of
+the work to be chosen for adult life is made once for all at some
+particular date.  One has discovered in himself, say, an
+interest, intellectual and social, in the things which have to do
+with engineering and has decided to make that his calling.  At
+most, this only blocks out in outline the field in which further
+growth is to be directed.  It is a sort of rough sketch for use
+in direction of further activities.  It is the discovery of a
+profession in the sense in which Columbus discovered America when
+he touched its shores.  Future explorations of an indefinitely
+more detailed and extensive sort remain to be made.  When
+educators conceive vocational guidance as something which leads
+up to a definitive, irretrievable, and complete choice, both
+education and the chosen vocation are likely to be rigid,
+hampering further growth.  In so far, the calling chosen will be
+such as to leave the person concerned in a permanently
+subordinate position, executing the intelligence of others who
+have a calling which permits more flexible play and readjustment.
+And while ordinary usages of language may not justify terming a
+flexible attitude of readjustment a choice of a new and further
+calling, it is such in effect.  If even adults have to be on the
+lookout to see that their calling does not shut down on them and
+fossilize them, educators must certainly be careful that the
+vocational preparation of youth is such as to engage them in a
+continuous reorganization of aims and methods.
+
+3.  Present Opportunities and Dangers.  In the past, education
+has been much more vocational in fact than in name.  (i) The
+education of the masses was distinctly utilitarian.  It was
+called apprenticeship rather than education, or else just
+learning from experience.  The schools devoted themselves to the
+three R's in the degree in which ability to go through the forms
+of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements in all
+kinds of labor.  Taking part in some special line of work, under
+the direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this
+education.  The two supplemented each other; the school work in
+its narrow and formal character was as much a part of
+apprenticeship to a calling as that explicitly so termed.
+
+(ii) To a considerable extent, the education of the dominant
+classes was essentially vocational -- it only happened that their
+pursuits of ruling and of enjoying were not called professions.
+For only those things were named vocations or employments which
+involved manual labor, laboring for a reward in keep, or its
+commuted money equivalent, or the rendering of personal services
+to specific persons.  For a long time, for example, the
+profession of the surgeon and physician ranked almost with that
+of the valet or barber -- partly because it had so much to do
+with the body, and partly because it involved rendering direct
+service for pay to some definite person.  But if we go behind
+words, the business of directing social concerns, whether
+politically or economically, whether in war or peace, is as much
+a calling as anything else; and where education has not been
+completely under the thumb of tradition, higher schools in the
+past have been upon the whole calculated to give preparation for
+this business.  Moreover, display, the adornment of person, the
+kind of social
+companionship and entertainment which give prestige, and the
+spending of money, have been made into definite callings.
+Unconsciously to themselves the higher institutions of learning
+have been made to contribute to preparation for these
+employments.  Even at present, what is called higher education is
+for a certain class (much smaller than it once was) mainly
+preparation for engaging effectively in these pursuits.
+
+In other respects, it is largely, especially in the most advanced
+work, training for the calling of teaching and special research.
+By a peculiar superstition, education which has to do chiefly
+with preparation for the pursuit of conspicuous idleness, for
+teaching, and for literary callings, and for leadership, has been
+regarded as non-vocational and even as peculiarly cultural.  The
+literary training which indirectly fits for authorship, whether
+of books, newspaper editorials, or magazine articles, is
+especially subject to this superstition: many a teacher and
+author writes and argues in behalf of a cultural and humane
+education against the encroachments of a specialized practical
+education, without recognizing that his own education, which he
+calls liberal, has been mainly training for his own particular
+calling.  He has simply got into the habit of regarding his own
+business as essentially cultural and of overlooking the cultural
+possibilities of other employments.  At the bottom of these
+distinctions is undoubtedly the tradition which recognizes as
+employment only those pursuits where one is responsible for his
+work to a specific employer, rather than to the ultimate
+employer, the community.
+
+There are, however, obvious causes for the present conscious
+emphasis upon vocational education -- for the disposition to make
+explicit and deliberate vocational implications previously tacit.
+(i) In the first place, there is an increased esteem, in
+democratic communities, of whatever has to do with manual labor,
+commercial occupations, and the rendering of tangible services to
+society.  In theory, men and women are now expected to do
+something in return for their support -- intellectual and
+economic -- by society.  Labor is extolled; service is a
+much-lauded moral ideal.  While there is still much admiration
+and envy of those who can pursue lives of idle conspicuous
+display, better moral sentiment condemns such lives.  Social
+responsibility for the use of time and personal capacity is more
+generally recognized than it used to be.
+
+(ii) In the second place, those vocations which are specifically
+industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last
+century and a half.  Manufacturing and commerce are no longer
+domestic and local, and consequently more or less incidental, but
+are world-wide.  They engage the best energies of an increasingly
+large number of persons.  The manufacturer, banker, and captain
+of industry have practically displaced a hereditary landed gentry
+as the immediate directors of social affairs.  The problem of
+social readjustment is openly industrial, having to do with the
+relations of capital and labor.  The great increase in the social
+importance of conspicuous industrial processes has inevitably
+brought to the front questions having to do with the relationship
+of schooling to industrial life.  No such vast social
+readjustment could occur without offering a challenge to an
+education inherited from different social conditions, and without
+putting up to education new problems.
+
+(iii) In the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly
+mentioned: Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical,
+rule-of-thumb procedure, handed down by custom.  Its technique is
+now technological: that is to say, based upon machinery resulting
+from discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry,
+bacteriology, etc.  The economic revolution has stimulated
+science by setting problems for solution, by producing greater
+intellectual respect for mechanical appliances.  And industry
+received back payment from science with compound interest.  As a
+consequence, industrial occupations have infinitely greater
+intellectual content and infinitely larger cultural possibilities
+than they used to possess.  The demand for such education as will
+acquaint workers with the scientific and social bases and
+bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative, since those who
+are without it inevitably sink to the role of appendages to the
+machines they operate.  Under the old regime all workers in a
+craft were approximately equals in their knowledge and outlook.
+Personal knowledge and ingenuity were developed within at least a
+narrow range, because work was done with tools under the direct
+command of the worker.  Now the operator has to adjust himself to
+his machine, instead of his tool to his own purposes.  While the
+intellectual possibilities of industry have multiplied,
+industrial conditions tend to make industry, for great masses,
+less of an educative resource than it was in the days of hand
+production for local markets.  The burden of realizing the
+intellectual possibilities inhering in work is thus thrown back
+on the school.
+
+(iv) In the fourth place, the pursuit of
+knowledge has become, in science, more experimental, less
+dependent upon literary tradition, and less associated with
+dialectical methods of reasoning, and with symbols.  As a result,
+the subject matter of industrial occupation presents not only
+more of the content of science than it used to, but greater
+opportunity for familiarity with the method by which knowledge is
+made.  The ordinary worker in the factory is of course under too
+immediate economic pressure to have a chance to produce a
+knowledge like that of the worker in the laboratory.  But in
+schools, association with machines and industrial processes may
+be had under conditions where the chief conscious concern of the
+students is insight.  The separation of shop and laboratory,
+where these conditions are fulfilled, is largely conventional,
+the laboratory having the advantage of permitting the following
+up of any intellectual interest a problem may suggest; the shop
+the advantage of emphasizing the social bearings of the
+scientific principle, as well as, with many pupils, of
+stimulating a livelier interest.
+
+(v) Finally, the advances which have been made in the psychology
+of learning in general and of childhood in particular fall into
+line with the increased importance of industry in life.  For
+modern psychology emphasizes the radical importance of primitive
+unlearned instincts of exploring, experimentation, and "trying
+on." It reveals that learning is not the work of something
+ready-made called mind, but that mind itself is an organization
+of original capacities into activities having significance.  As
+we have already seen (ante, p.  204), in older pupils work is to
+educative development of raw native activities what play is for
+younger pupils.  Moreover, the passage from play to work should
+be gradual, not involving a radical change of attitude but
+carrying into work the elements of play, plus continuous
+reorganization in behalf of greater control.  The reader will
+remark that these five points practically resume the main
+contentions of the previous part of the work.  Both practically
+and philosophically, the key to the present educational situation
+lies in a gradual reconstruction of school materials and methods
+so as to utilize various forms of occupation typifying social
+callings, and to bring out their intellectual and moral content.
+This reconstruction must relegate purely literary methods --
+including textbooks--and dialectical methods to the position of
+necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent development of
+consecutive and cumulative activities.
+
+But our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational
+reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a
+technical preparation for industries and professions as they now
+operate, much less by merely reproducing existing industrial
+conditions in the school.  The problem is not that of making the
+schools an adjunct to manufacture and commerce, but of utilizing
+the factors of industry to make school life more active, more
+full of immediate meaning, more connected with out-of-school
+experience.  The problem is not easy of solution.  There is a
+standing danger that education will perpetuate the older
+traditions for a select few, and effect its adjustment to the
+newer economic conditions more or less on the basis of
+acquiescence in the untransformed, unrationalized, and
+unsocialized phases of our defective industrial regime.  Put in
+concrete terms, there is danger that vocational education will be
+interpreted in theory and practice as trade education: as a means
+of securing technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits.
+Education would then become an instrument of perpetuating
+unchanged the existing industrial order of society, instead of
+operating as a means of its transformation.  The desired
+transformation is not difficult to define in a formal way.  It
+signifies a society in which every person shall be occupied in
+something which makes the lives of others better worth living,
+and which accordingly makes the ties which bind persons together
+more perceptible -- which breaks down the barriers of distance
+between them.  It denotes a state of affairs in which the
+interest of each in his work is uncoerced and intelligent: based
+upon its congeniality to his own aptitudes.  It goes without
+saying that we are far from such a social state; in a literal and
+quantitative sense, we may never arrive at it.  But in principle,
+the quality of social changes already accomplished lies in this
+direction.  There are more ample resources for its achievement
+now than ever there have been before.  No insuperable obstacles,
+given the intelligent will for its realization, stand in the way.
+
+Success or failure in its realization depends more upon the
+adoption of educational methods calculated to effect the change
+than upon anything else.  For the change is essentially a change
+in the quality of mental disposition -- an educative change.
+This does not mean that we can change character and mind by
+direct instruction and exhortation, apart from a change in
+industrial and political conditions.  Such a conception
+contradicts our basic idea that character and mind are attitudes
+of participative response in social affairs.  But it does mean
+that we may produce in schools a projection in type of the
+society we should like to realize, and by forming minds in accord
+with it gradually modify the larger and more recalcitrant
+features of adult society.  Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to
+say that the greatest evil of the present regime is not found in
+poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact
+that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them,
+which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues.  For
+such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a
+desire to slight and evade.  Neither men's hearts nor their minds
+are in their work.  On the other hand, those who are not only
+much better off in worldly goods, but who are in excessive, if
+not monopolistic, control of the activities of the many are shut
+off from equality and generality of social intercourse.  They are
+stimulated to pursuits of indulgence and display; they try to
+make up for the distance which separates them from others by the
+impression of force and superior possession and enjoyment which
+they can make upon others.
+
+It would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of
+vocational education to perpetuate this division in a hardened
+form.  Taking its stand upon a dogma of social predestination, it
+would assume that some are to continue to be wage earners under
+economic conditions like the present, and would aim simply to
+give them what is termed a trade education -- that is, greater
+technical efficiency.  Technical proficiency is often sadly
+lacking, and is surely desirable on all accounts -- not merely
+for the sake of the production of better goods at less cost, but
+for the greater happiness found in work.  For no one cares for
+what one cannot half do.  But there is a great difference between
+a proficiency limited to immediate work, and a competency
+extended to insight into its social bearings; between efficiency
+in carrying out the plans of others and in one forming one's own.
+At present, intellectual and emotional limitation characterizes
+both the employing and the employed class.  While the latter
+often have no concern with their occupation beyond the money
+return it brings, the former's outlook may be confined to profit
+and power.  The latter interest generally involves much greater
+intellectual initiation and larger survey of conditions.  For it
+involves the direction and combination of a large number of
+diverse factors, while the interest in wages is restricted to
+certain direct muscular movements.  But none the less there is a
+limitation of intelligence to technical and non- humane,
+non-liberal channels, so far as the work does not take in its
+social bearings.  And when the animating motive is desire for
+private profit or personal power, this limitation is inevitable.
+In fact, the advantage in immediate social sympathy and humane
+disposition often lies with the economically unfortunate, who
+have not experienced the hardening effects of a one-sided control
+of the affairs of others.
+
+Any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of
+departure from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely
+to assume and to perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and
+thus to become an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of
+social predestination.  Those who are in a position to make their
+wishes good, will demand a liberal, a cultural occupation, and
+one which fits for directive power the youth in whom they are
+directly interested.  To split the system, and give to others,
+less fortunately situated, an education conceived mainly as
+specific trade preparation, is to treat the schools as an agency
+for transferring the older division of labor and leisure, culture
+and service, mind and body, directed and directive class, into a
+society nominally democratic.  Such a vocational education
+inevitably discounts the scientific and historic human
+connections of the materials and processes dealt with.  To
+include such things in narrow trade education would be to waste
+time; concern for them would not be "practical." They are
+reserved for those who have leisure at command--the leisure due
+to superior economic resources.  Such things might even be
+dangerous to the interests of the controlling class, arousing
+discontent or ambitions "beyond the station" of those working
+under the direction of others.  But an education which
+acknowledges the full intellectual and social meaning of a
+vocation would include instruction in the historic background of
+present conditions; training in science to give intelligence and
+initiative in dealing with material and agencies of production;
+and study of economics, civics, and politics, to bring the future
+worker into touch with the problems of the day and the various
+methods proposed for its improvement.  Above all, it would train
+power of readaptation to changing conditions so that future
+workers would not become blindly subject to a fate imposed upon
+them.  This ideal has to contend not only with the inertia of
+existing educational traditions, but also with the opposition of
+those who are entrenched in command of the industrial machinery,
+and who realize that such an educational system if made general
+would threaten their ability to use others for their own ends.
+But this very fact is the presage of a more equitable and
+enlightened social order, for it gives evidence of the dependence
+of social reorganization upon educational reconstruction.  It is
+accordingly an encouragement to those believing in a better order
+to undertake the promotion of a vocational education which does
+not subject youth to the demands and standards of the present
+system, but which utilizes its scientific and social factors to
+develop a courageous intelligence, and to make intelligence
+practical and executive.
+
+Summary.  A vocation signifies any form of continuous activity
+which renders service to others and engages personal powers in
+behalf of the accomplishment of results.  The question of the
+relation of vocation to education brings to a focus the various
+problems previously discussed regarding the connection of thought
+with bodily activity; of individual conscious development with
+associated life; of theoretical culture with practical behavior
+having definite results; of making a livelihood with the worthy
+enjoyment of leisure.  In general, the opposition to recognition
+of the vocational phases of life in education (except for the
+utilitarian three R's in elementary schooling) accompanies the
+conservation of aristocratic ideals of the past.  But, at the
+present juncture, there is a movement in behalf of something
+called vocational training which, if carried into effect, would
+harden these ideas into a form adapted to the existing industrial
+regime.  This movement would continue the traditional liberal
+or cultural education for the few economically able to enjoy it,
+and would give to the masses a narrow technical trade education
+for specialized callings, carried on under the control of others.
+This scheme denotes, of course, simply a perpetuation of the
+older social division, with its counterpart intellectual and
+moral dualisms.  But it means its continuation under conditions
+where it has much less justification for existence.  For
+industrial life is now so dependent upon science and so
+intimately affects all forms of social intercourse, that there is
+an opportunity to utilize it for development of mind and
+character.  Moreover, a right educational use of it would react
+upon intelligence and interest so as to modify, in connection
+with legislation and administration, the socially obnoxious
+features of the present industrial and commercial order.  It
+would turn the increasing fund of social sympathy to constructive
+account, instead of leaving it a somewhat blind philanthropic
+sentiment.
+
+It would give those who engage in industrial callings desire and
+ability to share in social control, and ability to become masters
+of their industrial fate.  It would enable them to saturate with
+meaning the technical and mechanical features which are so marked
+a feature of our machine system of production and distribution.
+So much for those who now have the poorer economic opportunities.
+With the representatives of the more privileged portion of the
+community, it would increase sympathy for labor, create a
+disposition of mind which can discover the culturing elements in
+useful activity, and increase a sense of social responsibility.
+The crucial position of the question of vocational education at
+present is due, in other words, to the fact that it concentrates
+in a specific issue two fundamental questions: -- Whether
+intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity
+which puts nature to human use, and whether individual culture is
+best secured under egoistic or social conditions.  No discussion
+of details is undertaken in this chapter, because this
+conclusion but summarizes the discussion of the previous
+chapters, XV to XXII, inclusive.
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
+
+1.  A Critical Review.  Although we are dealing with the
+philosophy of education, DO definition of philosophy has yet been
+given; nor has there been an explicit consideration of the nature
+of a philosophy of education.  This topic is now introduced by a
+summary account of the logical order implied in the previous
+discussions, for the purpose of bringing out the philosophic
+issues involved.  Afterwards we shall undertake a brief
+discussion, in more specifically philosophical terms, of the
+theories of knowledge and of morals implied in different
+educational ideals as they operate in practice.  The prior
+chapters fall logically into three parts.
+
+I.  The first chapters deal with education as a social need and
+function.  Their purpose is to outline the general features of
+education as the process by which social groups maintain their
+continuous existence.  Education was shown to be a process of
+renewal of the meanings of experience through a process of
+transmission, partly incidental to the ordinary companionship or
+intercourse of adults and youth, partly deliberately instituted
+to effect social continuity.  This process was seen to involve
+control and growth of both the immature individual and the group
+in which he lives.
+
+This consideration was formal in that it took no specific account
+of the quality of the social group concerned--the kind of society
+aiming at its own perpetuation through education.  The general
+discussion was then specified by application to social groups
+which are intentionally progressive, and which aim at a greater
+variety of mutually shared interests in distinction from those
+which aim simply at the preservation of established customs.
+Such societies were found to be democratic in quality, because of
+the greater freedom allowed the constituent members, and the
+conscious need of securing in individuals a consciously
+socialized interest, instead of trusting mainly to the force of
+customs operating under the control of a superior class.  The
+sort of education appropriate to the development of a democratic
+community was then explicitly taken as the criterion of the
+further, more detailed analysis of education.
+
+II.  This analysis, based upon the democratic criterion, was seen
+to imply the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing
+of experience, of such a nature as to increase its recognized
+meaning or social content, and as to increase the capacity of
+individuals to act as directive guardians of this reorganization.
+(See Chapters VI-VII.) This distinction was then used to outline
+the respective characters of subject matter and method.  It also
+defined their unity, since method in study and learning upon this
+basis is just the consciously directed movement of reorganization
+of the subject matter of experience.  From this point of view the
+main principles of method and subject matter of learning were
+developed (Chapters XIII-XIV.)
+
+III.  Save for incidental criticisms designed to illustrate
+principles by force of contrast, this phase of the discussion
+took for granted the democratic criterion and its application in
+present social life.  In the subsequent chapters (XVIII-XXII) we
+considered the present limitation of its actual realization.
+They were found to spring from the notion that experience
+consists of a variety of segregated domains, or interests, each
+having its own independent value, material, and method, each
+checking every other, and, when each is kept properly bounded by
+the others, forming a kind of "balance of powers" in education.
+We then proceeded to an analysis of the various assumptions
+underlying this segregation.  On the practical side, they were
+found to have their cause in the divisions of society into more
+or less rigidly marked-off classes and groups -- in other words,
+in obstruction to full and flexible social interaction and
+intercourse.  These social ruptures of continuity were seen to
+have their intellectual formulation in various dualisms or
+antitheses -- such as that of labor and leisure, practical and
+intellectual activity, man and nature, individuality and
+association, culture and vocation.  In this discussion, we found
+that these different issues have their counterparts in
+formulations which have been made in classic philosophic systems;
+and that they involve the chief problems of philosophy -- such as
+mind (or spirit) and matter, body and mind, the mind and the
+world, the individual and his relationships to others, etc.
+Underlying these various separations we found the fundamental
+assumption to be an isolation of mind from activity involving
+physical conditions, bodily organs, material appliances, and
+natural objects. Consequently, there was indicated a philosophy
+which recognizes the origin, place, and function of mind in an
+activity which controls the environment.  Thus we have completed
+the circuit and returned to the conceptions of the first portion
+of this book: such as the biological continuity of human impulses
+and instincts with natural energies; the dependence of the growth
+of mind upon participation in conjoint activities having a common
+purpose; the influence of the physical environment through the
+uses made of it in the social medium; the necessity of
+utilization of individual variations in desire and thinking for a
+progressively developing society; the essential unity of method
+and subject matter; the intrinsic continuity of ends and means;
+the recognition of mind as thinking which perceives and tests the
+meanings of behavior.  These conceptions are consistent with the
+philosophy which sees intelligence to be the purposive
+reorganization, through action, of the material of experience;
+and they are inconsistent with each of the dualistic philosophies
+mentioned.
+
+2.  The Nature of Philosophy.  Our further task is to extract and
+make explicit the idea of philosophy implicit in these
+considerations.  We have already virtually described, though not
+defined, philosophy in terms of the problems with which it deals:
+and that thing nor even to the aggregate of known things, but to
+the considerations which govern conduct.
+
+Hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of
+subject matter.  For this reason, the definition of such
+conceptions as generality, totality, and ultimateness is most
+readily reached from the side of the disposition toward the world
+which they connote.  In any literal and quantitative sense, these
+terms do not apply to the subject matter of knowledge, for
+completeness and finality are out of the question.  The very
+nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process forbids.  In
+a less rigid sense, they apply to science rather than to
+philosophy.  For obviously it is to mathematics, physics,
+chemistry, biology, anthropology, history, etc.  that we must go,
+not to philosophy, to find out the facts of the world.  It is for
+the sciences to say what generalizations are tenable about the
+world and what they specifically are.  But when we ask what sort
+of permanent disposition of action toward the world the
+scientific disclosures exact of us we are raising a philosophic
+question.
+
+
+From this point of view, "totality" does not mean the hopeless
+task of a quantitative summation.  It means rather consistency of
+mode of response in reference to the plurality of events which
+occur.  Consistency does not mean literal identity; for since the
+same thing does not happen twice, an exact repetition of a
+reaction involves some maladjustment.  Totality means
+continuity -- the carrying on of a former habit of action with
+the readaptation necessary to keep it alive and growing.  Instead
+of signifying a ready-made complete scheme of action, it means
+keeping the balance in a multitude of diverse actions, so that
+each borrows and gives significance to every other.  Any person
+who is open-minded and sensitive to new perceptions, and who has
+concentration and responsibility in connecting them has, in so
+far, a philosophic disposition.  One of the popular senses of
+philosophy is calm and endurance in the face of difficulty and
+loss; it is even supposed to be a power to bear pain without
+complaint.  This meaning is a tribute to the influence of the
+Stoic philosophy rather than an attribute of philosophy in
+general.  But in so far as it suggests that the wholeness
+characteristic of philosophy is a power to learn, or to extract
+meaning, from even the unpleasant vicissitudes of experience and
+to embody what is learned in an ability to go on learning, it is
+justified in any scheme.  An analogous interpretation
+applies to the generality and ultimateness of philosophy.  Taken
+literally, they are absurd pretensions; they indicate insanity.
+Finality does not mean, however, that experience is ended and
+exhausted, but means the disposition to penetrate to deeper
+levels of meaning -- to go below the surface and find out the
+connections of any event or object, and to keep at it.  In like
+manner the philosophic attitude is general in the sense that it
+is averse to taking anything as isolated; it tries to place an
+act in its context -- which constitutes its significance.
+It is of assistance to connect philosophy with thinking in its
+distinction from knowledge.  Knowledge, grounded knowledge, is
+science; it represents objects which have been settled, ordered,
+disposed of rationally.  Thinking, on the other hand, is
+prospective in reference.  It is occasioned by an unsettlement
+and it aims at overcoming a disturbance.  Philosophy is thinking
+what the known demands of us -- what responsive attitude it
+exacts.  It is an idea of what is possible, not a record of
+accomplished fact.  Hence it is hypothetical, like all thinking.
+It presents an assignment of something to be done -- something to
+be tried.  Its value lies not in furnishing solutions (which can
+be achieved only in action) but in defining difficulties and
+suggesting methods for dealing with them.  Philosophy might
+almost be
+described as thinking which has become conscious of
+itself -- which has generalized its place, function, and value in
+experience.
+
+More specifically, the demand for a "total" attitude arises
+because there is the need of integration in action of the
+conflicting various interests in life.  Where interests are so
+superficial that they glide readily into one another, or where
+they are not sufficiently organized to come into conflict with
+one another, the need for philosophy is not perceptible.  But
+when the scientific interest conflicts with, say, the religious,
+or the economic with the scientific or aesthetic, or when the
+conservative concern for order is at odds with the progressive
+interest in freedom, or when institutionalism clashes with
+individuality, there is a stimulus to discover some more
+comprehensive point of view from which the divergencies may be
+brought together, and consistency or continuity of experience
+recovered.  Often these clashes may be settled by an individual
+for himself; the area of the struggle of aims is limited and a
+person works out his own rough accommodations.  Such homespun
+philosophies are genuine and often adequate.  But they do not
+result in systems of philosophy.  These arise when the discrepant
+claims of different ideals of conduct affect the community as a
+whole, and the need for readjustment is general.  These traits
+explain some things which are often brought as objections against
+philosophies, such as the part played in them by individual
+speculation, and their controversial diversity, as well as the
+fact that philosophy seems to be repeatedly occupied with much
+the same questions differently stated.  Without doubt, all these
+things characterize historic philosophies more or less.  But they
+are not objections to philosophy so much as they are to human
+nature, and even to the world in which human nature is set.  If
+there are genuine uncertainties in life, philosophies must
+reflect that uncertainty.  If there are different diagnoses of
+the cause of a difficulty, and different proposals for dealing
+with it; if, that is, the conflict of interests is more or less
+embodied in different sets of persons, there must be divergent
+competing philosophies.  With respect to what has happened,
+sufficient evidence is all that is needed to bring agreement and
+certainty.  The thing itself is sure.  But with reference to what
+it is wise to do in a complicated situation, discussion is
+inevitable precisely because the thing itself is still
+indeterminate.  One would not expect a ruling class living at
+ease to have the same philosophy of life as those who were having
+a hard struggle for existence.  If the possessing and the
+dispossessed had the same fundamental disposition toward the
+world, it would argue either insincerity or lack of seriousness.
+A community devoted to industrial pursuits, active in business
+and commerce, is not likely to see the needs and possibilities of
+life in the same way as a country with high aesthetic culture and
+little enterprise in turning the energies of nature to mechanical
+account.  A social group with a fairly continuous history will
+respond mentally to a crisis in a very different way from one
+which has felt the shock of abrupt breaks.  Even if the same data
+were present, they would be evaluated differently.  But the
+different sorts of experience attending different types of life
+prevent just the same data from presenting themselves, as well as
+lead to a different scheme of values.  As for the similarity of
+problems, this is often more a matter of appearance than of fact,
+due to old discussions being translated into the terms of
+contemporary perplexities.  But in certain fundamental respects
+the same predicaments of life recur from time to time with only
+such changes as are due to change of social context, including
+the growth of the sciences.
+
+The fact that philosophic problems arise because of widespread
+and widely felt difficulties in social practice is disguised
+because philosophers become a specialized class which uses a
+technical language, unlike the vocabulary in which the direct
+difficulties are stated.  But where a system becomes influential,
+its connection with a conflict of interests calling for some
+program of social adjustment may always be discovered.  At this
+point, the intimate connection between philosophy and education
+appears.  In fact, education offers a vantage ground from which
+to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical,
+significance of philosophic discussions.  The student of
+philosophy "in itself" is always in danger of taking it as so
+much nimble or severe intellectual exercise -- as something said
+by philosophers and concerning them alone.  But when philosophic
+issues are approached from the side of the kind of mental
+disposition to which they correspond, or the differences in
+educational practice they make when acted upon, the
+life-situations which they formulate can never be far from view.
+If a theory makes no difference in educational endeavor, it must
+be artificial.  The educational point of view enables one to
+envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and thrive,
+where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a
+difference in practice.  If we are willing to conceive education
+as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual
+and emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even
+be defined as the general theory of education.  Unless a
+philosophy is to remain symbolic -- or verbal -- or a sentimental
+indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing
+of past experience and its program of values must take effect in
+conduct.  Public agitation, propaganda, legislative and
+administrative action are effective in producing the change of
+disposition which a philosophy indicates as desirable, but only
+in the degree in which they are educative -- that is to say, in
+the degree in which they modify mental and moral attitudes.  And
+at the best, such methods are compromised by the fact they are
+used with those whose habits are already largely set, while
+education of youth has a fairer and freer field of operation.  On
+the other side, the business of schooling tends to become a
+routine empirical affair unless its aims and methods are
+animated by such a broad and sympathetic survey of its place in
+contemporary life as it is the business of philosophy to provide.
+Positive science always implies practically the ends which the
+community is concerned to achieve.  Isolated from such ends, it
+is matter of indifference whether its disclosures are used to
+cure disease or to spread it; to increase the means of sustenance
+of life or to manufacture war material to wipe life out.  If
+society is interested in one of these things rather than another,
+science shows the way of attainment.  Philosophy thus has a
+double task: that of criticizing existing aims with respect to
+the existing state of science, pointing out values which have
+become obsolete with the command of new resources, showing what
+values are merely sentimental because there are no means for
+their realization; and also that of interpreting the results of
+specialized science in their bearing on future social endeavor.
+It is impossible that it should have any success in these tasks
+without educational equivalents as to what to do and what not to
+do.  For philosophic theory has no Aladdin's lamp to summon into
+immediate existence the values which it intellectually
+constructs.  In the mechanical arts, the sciences become methods
+of managing things so as to utilize their energies for recognized
+aims.  By the educative arts philosophy may generate methods of
+utilizing the energies of human beings in accord with serious and
+thoughtful conceptions of life.  Education is the laboratory in
+which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are tested.
+
+It is suggestive that European philosophy originated (among the
+Athenians) under the direct pressure of educational questions.
+The earlier history of philosophy, developed by the Greeks in
+Asia Minor and Italy, so far as its range of topics is concerned,
+is mainly a chapter in the history of science rather than of
+philosophy as that word is understood to-day.  It had nature for
+its subject, and speculated as to how things are made and
+changed.  Later the traveling teachers, known as the Sophists,
+began to apply the results and the methods of the natural
+philosophers to human conduct.
+
+When the Sophists, the first body of professional educators in
+Europe, instructed the youth in virtue, the political arts, and
+the management of city and household, philosophy began to deal
+with the relation of the individual to the universal, to some
+comprehensive class, or to some group; the relation of man and
+nature, of tradition and reflection, of knowledge and action.
+Can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be learned, they
+asked? What is learning? It has to do with knowledge.  What,
+then, is knowledge? How is it achieved? Through the senses, or by
+apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has
+undergone a preliminary logical discipline? Since learning is
+coming to know, it involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom,
+from privation to fullness from defect to perfection, from
+non-being to being, in the Greek way of putting it.  How is such
+a transition possible? Is change, becoming, development really
+possible and if so, how? And supposing such questions answered,
+what is the relation of instruction, of knowledge, to virtue?
+This last question led to opening the problem of the relation of
+reason to action, of theory to practice, since virtue clearly
+dwelt in action.  Was not knowing, the activity of reason, the
+noblest attribute of man? And consequently was not purely
+intellectual activity itself the highest of all excellences,
+compared with which the virtues of neighborliness and the
+citizen's life were secondary? Or, on the other hand, was the
+vaunted intellectual knowledge more than empty and vain pretense,
+demoralizing to character and destructive of the social ties that
+bound men together in their community life? Was not the only
+true, because the only moral, life gained through obedient
+habituation to the customary practices of the community? And was
+not the new education an enemy to good citizenship, because it
+set up a rival standard to the established traditions of the
+community?
+
+In the course of two or three generations such questions were cut
+loose from their original practical bearing upon education and
+were discussed on their own account; that is, as matters of
+philosophy as an independent branch of inquiry.  But the fact
+that the stream of European philosophical thought arose as a
+theory of educational procedure remains an eloquent witness to
+the intimate connection of philosophy and education.  "Philosophy
+of education" is not an external application of ready-made ideas
+to a system of practice having a radically different origin and
+purpose: it is only an explicit formulation of the problems of
+the formation of right mental and moral habitudes in respect to
+the difficulties of contemporary social life.  The most
+penetrating definition of philosophy which can be given is, then,
+that it is the theory of education in its most general phases.
+
+The reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social
+ideals and methods thus go hand in hand.  If there is especial
+need of educational reconstruction at the present time, if this
+need makes urgent a reconsideration of the basic ideas of
+traditional philosophic systems, it is because of the
+thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying the advance of
+science, the industrial revolution, and the development of
+democracy.  Such practical changes cannot take place without
+demanding an educational reformation to meet them, and without
+leading men to ask what ideas and ideals are implicit in these
+social changes, and what revisions they require of the ideas and
+ideals which are inherited from older and unlike cultures.
+Incidentally throughout the whole book, explicitly in the last
+few chapters, we have been dealing with just these questions as
+they affect the relationship of mind and body, theory and
+practice, man and nature, the individual and social, etc.  In our
+concluding chapters we shall sum up the prior discussions with
+respect first to the philosophy of knowledge, and then to the
+philosophy of morals.
+
+Summary.  After a review designed to bring out the philosophic
+issues implicit in the previous discussions, philosophy was
+defined as the generalized theory of education.  Philosophy was
+stated to be a form of thinking, which, like all thinking, finds
+its origin in what is uncertain in the subject matter of
+experience, which aims to locate the nature of the perplexity and
+to frame hypotheses for its clearing up to be tested in action.
+Philosophic thinking has for its differentia the fact that the
+uncertainties with which it deals are found in widespread social
+conditions and aims, consisting in a conflict of organized
+interests and institutional claims.  Since the only way of
+bringing about a harmonious readjustment of the opposed
+tendencies is through a modification of emotional and
+intellectual disposition, philosophy is at once an explicit
+formulation of the various interests of life and a propounding of
+points of view and methods through which a better balance of
+interests may be effected.  Since education is the process
+through which the needed transformation may be accomplished and
+not remain a mere hypothesis as to what is desirable, we reach a
+justification of the statement that philosophy is the theory of
+education as a deliberately conducted practice.
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
+
+1.  Continuity versus Dualism.  A number of theories of knowing
+have been criticized in the previous pages.  In spite of their
+differences from one another, they all agree in one fundamental
+respect which contrasts with the theory which has been positively
+advanced.  The latter assumes continuity; the former state or
+imply certain basic divisions, separations, or antitheses,
+technically called dualisms.  The origin of these divisions we
+have found in the hard and fast walls which mark off social
+groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and
+poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled.  These
+barriers mean absence of fluent and free intercourse.  This
+absence is equivalent to the setting up of different types of
+life-experience, each with isolated subject matter, aim, and
+standard of values.  Every such social condition must be
+formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is to be a
+sincere account of experience.  When it gets beyond dualism -- as
+many philosophies do in form -- it can only be by appeal to
+something higher than anything found in experience, by a flight
+to some transcendental realm.  And in denying duality in name
+such theories restore it in fact, for they end in a division
+between things of this world as mere appearances and an
+inaccessible essence of reality.
+
+So far as these divisions persist and others are added to them,
+each leaves its mark upon the educational system, until the
+scheme of education, taken as a whole, is a deposit of various
+purposes and procedures.  The outcome is that kind of check and
+balance of segregated factors and values which has been
+described.  (See Chapter XVIII.) The present discussion is simply
+a formulation, in the terminology of philosophy, of various
+antithetical conceptions involved in the theory of knowing.
+In the first place, there is the opposition of empirical and
+higher rational knowing.  The first is connected with everyday
+affairs, serves the purposes of the ordinary individual who has
+no specialized intellectual
+
+pursuit, and brings his wants into some kind of working
+connection with the immediate environment.  Such knowing is
+depreciated, if not despised, as purely utilitarian, lacking in
+cultural significance.  Rational knowledge is supposed to be
+something which touches reality in ultimate, intellectual
+fashion; to be pursued for its own sake and properly to terminate
+in purely theoretical insight, not debased by application in
+behavior.  Socially, the distinction corresponds to that of the
+intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a
+learned class remote from concern with the means of living.
+Philosophically, the difference turns about the distinction of
+the particular and universal.  Experience is an aggregate of more
+or less isolated particulars, acquaintance with each of which
+must be separately made.  Reason deals with universals, with
+general principles, with laws, which lie above the welter of
+concrete details.  In the educational precipitate, the pupil is
+supposed to have to learn, on one hand, a lot of items of
+specific information, each standing by itself, and upon the other
+hand, to become familiar with a certain number of laws and
+general relationships.  Geography, as often taught, illustrates
+the former; mathematics, beyond the rudiments of figuring, the
+latter.  For all practical purposes, they represent two
+independent worlds.
+
+Another antithesis is suggested by the two senses of the word
+"learning." On the one hand, learning is the sum total of what is
+known, as that is handed down by books and learned men.  It is
+something external, an accumulation of cognitions as one might
+store material commodities in a warehouse.  Truth exists ready-
+made somewhere.  Study is then the process by which an individual
+draws on what is in storage.  On the other hand, learning means
+something which the individual does when he studies.  It is an
+active, personally conducted affair.  The dualism here is between
+knowledge as something external, or, as it is often called,
+objective, and knowing as something purely internal, subjective,
+psychical.  There is, on one side, a body of truth, ready-made,
+and, on the other, a ready-made mind equipped with a faculty of
+knowing -- if it only wills to exercise it, which it is often
+strangely loath to do.  The separation, often touched upon,
+between subject matter and method is the educational equivalent
+of this dualism.  Socially the distinction has to do with the
+part of life which is dependent upon authority and that where
+individuals are free to advance.  Another dualism is that of
+activity and passivity in knowing.  Purely empirical and physical
+things are often supposed to be known by receiving impressions.
+Physical things somehow stamp themselves upon the mind or convey
+themselves into consciousness by means of the sense organs.
+Rational knowledge and knowledge of spiritual things is supposed,
+on the contrary, to spring from activity initiated within the
+mind, an activity carried on better if it is kept remote from all
+sullying touch of the senses and external objects.  The
+distinction between sense training and object lessons and
+laboratory exercises, and pure ideas contained in books, and
+appropriated -- so it is thought -- by some miraculous output of
+mental energy, is a fair expression in education of this
+distinction.  Socially, it reflects a division between those who
+are controlled by direct concern with things and those who are
+free to cultivate themselves.
+
+Another current opposition is that said to exist between the
+intellect and the emotions.  The emotions are conceived to be
+purely private and personal, having nothing to do with the work
+of pure intelligence in apprehending facts and truths, -- except
+perhaps the single emotion of intellectual curiosity.  The
+intellect is a pure light; the emotions are a disturbing heat.
+The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions turn inward to
+considerations of personal advantage and loss.  Thus in education
+we have that systematic depreciation of interest which has been
+noted, plus the necessity in practice, with most pupils, of
+recourse to extraneous and irrelevant rewards and penalties in
+order to induce the person who has a mind (much as his clothes
+have a pocket) to apply that mind to the truths to be known.
+Thus we have the spectacle of professional educators decrying
+appeal to interest while they uphold with great dignity the need
+of reliance upon examinations, marks, promotions and emotions,
+prizes, and the time-honored paraphernalia of rewards and
+punishments.  The effect of this situation in crippling the
+teacher's sense of humor has not received the attention which it
+deserves.
+
+All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and
+doing, theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of
+action and the body as its organ and means.  We shall not repeat
+what has been said about the source of this dualism in the
+division of society into a class laboring with their muscles for
+material sustenance and a class which, relieved from economic
+pressure, devotes itself to the arts of expression and social
+direction.  Nor is it necessary to speak again of the educational
+evils which spring from the separation.  We shall be content to
+summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of this
+conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity.
+(i) The advance of physiology and the psychology associated with
+it have shown the connection of mental activity with that of the
+nervous system.  Too often recognition of connection has stopped
+short at this point; the older dualism of soul and body has been
+replaced by that of the brain and the rest of the body.  But in
+fact the nervous system is only a specialized mechanism for
+keeping all bodily activities working together.  Instead of being
+isolated from them, as an organ of knowing from organs of motor
+response, it is the organ by which they interact responsively
+with one another.  The brain is essentially an organ for
+effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli
+received from the environment and responses directed upon it.
+Note that the adjusting is reciprocal; the brain not only enables
+organic activity to be brought to bear upon any object of the
+environment in response to a sensory stimulation, but this
+response also determines what the next stimulus will be.  See
+what happens, for example, when a carpenter is at work upon a
+board, or an etcher upon his plate -- or in any case of a
+consecutive activity.  While each motor response is adjusted to
+the state of affairs indicated through the sense organs, that
+motor response shapes the next sensory stimulus.  Generalizing
+this illustration, the brain is the machinery for a constant
+reorganizing of activity so as to maintain its continuity; that
+is to say, to make such modifications in future action as are
+required because of what has already been done.  The continuity
+of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it from a routine
+repetition of identically the same motion, and from a random
+activity where there is nothing cumulative.  What makes it
+continuous, consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act
+prepares the way for later acts, while these take account of or
+reckon with the results already attained -- the basis of all
+responsibility.  No one who has realized the full force of the
+facts of the connection of knowing with the nervous system and of
+the nervous system with the readjusting of activity continuously
+to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing has to do with
+reorganizing activity, instead of being something isolated from
+all activity, complete on its own account.
+
+(ii) The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its
+discovery of evolution.  For the philosophic significance of the
+doctrine of evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon
+continuity of simpler and more complex organic forms until we
+reach man.  The development of organic forms begins with
+structures where the adjustment of environment and organism is
+obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is at a
+minimum.  As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a
+greater number of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a
+more and more marked role, for it has a larger span of the future
+to forecast and plan for.  The effect upon the theory of knowing
+is to displace the notion that it is the activity of a mere
+onlooker or spectator of the world, the notion which goes with
+the idea of knowing as something complete in itself.  For the
+doctrine of organic development means that the living creature is
+a part of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes, and
+making itself secure in its precarious dependence only as it
+intellectually identifies itself with the things about it, and,
+forecasting the future consequences of what is going on, shapes
+its own activities accordingly.  If the living, experiencing
+being is an intimate participant in the activities of the world
+to which it belongs, then knowledge is a mode of participation,
+valuable in the degree in which it is effective.  It cannot be
+the idle view of an unconcerned spectator.
+
+(iii) The development of the experimental method as the method of
+getting knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not
+mere opinion -- the method of both discovery and proof -- is the
+remaining great force in bringing about a transformation in the
+theory of knowledge.  The experimental method has two sides.  (i)
+On one hand, it means that we have no right to call anything
+knowledge except where our activity has actually produced certain
+physical changes in things, which agree with and confirm the
+conception entertained.  Short of such specific changes, our
+beliefs are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and
+are to be entertained tentatively and to be utilized as
+indications of experiments to be tried.  (ii) On the other hand,
+the experimental method of thinking signifies that thinking is of
+avail; that it is of avail in just the degree in which the
+anticipation of future consequences is made on the basis of
+thorough observation of present conditions.  Experimentation, in
+other words, is not equivalent to blind reacting.  Such surplus
+activity -- a surplus with reference to what has been observed
+and is now anticipated -- is indeed an unescapable factor in all
+our behavior, but it is not experiment save as consequences are
+noted and are used to make predictions and plans in similar
+situations in the future.  The more the meaning of the
+experimental method is perceived, the more our trying out of a
+certain way of treating the material resources and obstacles
+which confront us embodies a prior use of intelligence.  What we
+call magic was with respect to many things the experimental
+method of the savage; but for him to try was to try his luck, not
+his ideas.  The scientific experimental method is, on the
+contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even when practically -- or
+immediately -- unsuccessful, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we
+learn from our failures when our endeavors are seriously
+thoughtful.
+
+The experimental method is new as a scientific resource--as a
+systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as
+a practical device.  Hence it is not surprising that men have not
+recognized its full scope.  For the most part, its significance
+is regarded as belonging to certain technical and merely physical
+matters.  It will doubtless take a long time to secure the
+perception that it holds equally as to the forming and testing of
+ideas in social and moral matters.  Men still want the crutch of
+dogma, of beliefs fixed by authority, to relieve them of the
+trouble of thinking and the responsibility of directing their
+activity by thought.  They tend to confine their own thinking to
+a consideration of which one among the rival systems of dogma
+they will accept.  Hence the schools are better adapted, as John
+Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers.  But every
+advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to
+aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative
+methods of forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the
+past, and to transfer their prestige to methods which will
+procure an active concern with things and persons, directed by
+aims of increasing temporal reach and deploying greater range of
+things in space.  In time the theory of knowing must be derived
+from the practice which is most successful in making knowledge;
+and then that theory will be employed to improve the methods
+which are less successful.
+
+2.  Schools of Method.  There are various systems of philosophy
+with characteristically different conceptions of the method of
+knowing.  Some of them are named scholasticism, sensationalism,
+rationalism, idealism, realism, empiricism, transcendentalism,
+pragmatism, etc.  Many of them have been criticized in connection
+with the discussion of some educational problem.  We are here
+concerned with them as involving deviations from that method
+which has proved most effective in achieving knowledge, for a
+consideration of the deviations may render clearer the true place
+of knowledge in experience.  In brief, the function of knowledge
+is to make one experience freely available in other experiences.
+The word "freely" marks the difference between the principle of
+knowledge and that of habit.  Habit means that an individual
+undergoes a modification through an experience, which
+modification forms a predisposition to easier and more effective
+action in a like direction in the future.  Thus it also has the
+function of making one experience available in subsequent
+experiences.  Within certain limits, it performs this function
+successfully.  But habit, apart from knowledge, does not make
+allowance for change of conditions, for novelty.  Prevision of
+change is not part of its scope, for habit assumes the essential
+likeness of the new situation with the old.  Consequently it
+often leads astray, or comes between a person and the successful
+performance of his task, just as the skill, based on habit alone,
+of the mechanic will desert him when something unexpected occurs
+in the running of the machine.  But a man who understands the
+machine is the man who knows what he is about.  He knows the
+conditions under which a given habit works, and is in a position
+to introduce the changes which will readapt it to new conditions.
+
+In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of
+an object which determine its applicability in a given situation.
+To take an extreme example; savages react to a flaming comet as
+they are accustomed to react to other events which threaten the
+security of their life.  Since they try to frighten wild animals
+or their enemies by shrieks, beating of gongs, brandishing of
+weapons, etc., they use the same methods to scare away the comet.
+To us, the method is plainly absurd -- so absurd that we fail to
+note that savages are simply falling back upon habit in a way
+which exhibits its limitations.  The only reason we do not act in
+some analogous fashion is because we do not take the comet as an
+isolated, disconnected event, but apprehend it in its connections
+with other events.  We place it, as we say, in the astronomical
+system.  We respond to its connections and not simply to the
+immediate occurrence.  Thus our attitude to it is much freer.  We
+may approach it, so to speak, from any one of the angles provided
+by its connections.  We can bring into play, as we deem wise, any
+one of the habits appropriate to any one of the connected
+objects.  Thus we get at a new event indirectly instead of
+immediately -- by invention, ingenuity, resourcefulness.  An
+ideally perfect knowledge would represent such a network of
+interconnections that any past experience would offer a point of
+advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new
+experience.  In fine, while a habit apart from knowledge supplies
+us with a single fixed method of attack, knowledge means that
+selection may be made from a much wider range of habits.
+
+Two aspects of this more general and freer availability of former
+experiences for subsequent ones may be distinguished.  (See ante,
+p.  77.) (i) One, the more tangible, is increased power of
+control.  What cannot be managed directly may be handled
+indirectly; or we can interpose barriers between us and
+undesirable consequences; or we may evade them if we cannot
+overcome them.  Genuine knowledge has all the practical value
+attaching to efficient habits in any case.  (ii) But it also
+increases the meaning, the experienced significance, attaching to
+an experience.  A situation to which we respond capriciously or
+by routine has only a minimum of conscious significance; we get
+nothing mentally from it.  But wherever knowledge comes into play
+in determining a new experience there is mental reward; even if
+we fail practically in getting the needed control we have the
+satisfaction of experiencing a meaning instead of merely
+reacting physically.
+
+While the content of knowledge is what has happened, what is
+taken as finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of
+knowledge is future or prospective.  For knowledge furnishes the
+means of understanding or giving meaning to what is still going
+on and what is to be done.  The knowledge of a physician is what
+he has found out by personal acquaintance and by study of what
+others have ascertained and recorded.  But it is knowledge to him
+because it supplies the resources by which he interprets the
+unknown things which confront him, fills out the partial obvious
+facts with connected suggested phenomena, foresees their probable
+future, and makes plans accordingly.  When knowledge is cut off
+from use in giving meaning to what is blind and baffling, it
+drops out of consciousness entirely or else becomes an object of
+aesthetic contemplation.  There is much emotional satisfaction to
+be had from a survey of the symmetry and order of possessed
+knowledge, and the satisfaction is a legitimate one.  But this
+contemplative attitude is aesthetic, not intellectual.  It is the
+same sort of joy that comes from viewing a finished picture or a
+well composed landscape.  It would make no difference if the
+subject matter were totally different, provided it had the same
+harmonious organization.  Indeed, it would make no difference if
+it were wholly invented, a play of fancy.  Applicability to the
+world means not applicability to what is past and gone -- that is
+out of the question by the nature of the case; it means
+applicability to what is still going on, what is still unsettled,
+in the moving scene in which we are implicated.  The very fact
+that we so easily overlook this trait, and regard statements of
+what is past and out of reach as knowledge is because we assume
+the continuity of past and future.  We cannot entertain the
+conception of a world in which knowledge of its past would not be
+helpful in forecasting and giving meaning to its future.  We
+ignore the prospective reference just because it is so
+irretrievably implied.
+
+Yet many of the philosophic schools of method which have been
+mentioned transform the ignoring into a virtual denial.  They
+regard knowledge as something complete in itself irrespective of
+its availability in dealing with what is yet to be.  And it is
+this omission which vitiates them and which makes them stand as
+sponsors for educational methods which an adequate conception of
+knowledge condemns.  For one has only to call to mind what is
+sometimes treated in schools as acquisition of knowledge to
+realize how lacking it is in any fruitful connection with the
+ongoing experience of the students -- how largely it seems to be
+believed that the mere appropriation of subject matter which
+happens to be stored in books constitutes knowledge.  No matter
+how true what is learned to those who found it out and in whose
+experience it functioned, there is nothing which makes it
+knowledge to the pupils.  It might as well be something about
+Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the
+individual's own life.
+
+At the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to
+social conditions.  It was a method for systematizing and lending
+rational sanction to material accepted on authority.  This
+subject matter meant so much that it vitalized the defining and
+systematizing brought to bear upon it.  Under present conditions
+the scholastic method, for most persons, means a form of knowing
+which has no especial connection with any particular subject
+matter.  It includes making distinctions, definitions, divisions,
+and classifications for the mere sake of making them -- with no
+objective in experience.  The view of thought as a purely
+physical activity having its own forms, which are applied to any
+material as a seal may be stamped on any plastic stuff, the view
+which underlies what is termed formal logic is essentially the
+scholastic method generalized.  The doctrine of formal discipline
+in education is the natural counterpart of the scholastic method.
+
+The contrasting theories of the method of knowledge which go by
+the name of sensationalism and rationalism correspond to an
+exclusive emphasis upon the particular and the general
+respectively -- or upon bare facts on one side and bare relations
+on the other.  In real knowledge, there is a particularizing and
+a generalizing function working together.  So far as a situation
+is confused, it has to be cleared up; it has to be resolved into
+details, as sharply defined as possible.  Specified facts and
+qualities constitute the elements of the problem to be dealt
+with, and it is through our sense organs that they are specified.
+As setting forth the problem, they may well be termed
+particulars, for they are fragmentary.  Since our task is to
+discover their connections and to recombine them, for us at the
+time they are partial.  They are to be given meaning; hence, just
+as they stand, they lack it.  Anything which is to be known,
+whose meaning has still to be made out, offers itself as
+particular.  But what is already known, if it has been worked
+over with a view to making it applicable to intellectually
+mastering new particulars, is general in function.  Its function
+of introducing connection into what is otherwise unconnected
+constitutes its generality.  Any fact is general if we use it to
+give meaning to the elements of a new experience.  "Reason" is
+just the ability to bring the subject matter of prior experience
+to bear to perceive the significance of the subject matter of a
+new experience.  A person is reasonable in the degree in which he
+is habitually open to seeing an event which immediately strikes
+his senses not as an isolated thing but in its connection with
+the common experience of mankind.
+
+Without the particulars as they are discriminated by the active
+responses of sense organs, there is no material for knowing and
+no intellectual growth.  Without placing these particulars in the
+context of the meanings wrought out in the larger experience of
+the past -- without the use of reason or thought -- particulars
+are mere excitations or irritations.  The mistake alike of the
+sensational and the rationalistic schools is that each fails to
+see that the function of sensory stimulation and thought is
+relative to reorganizing experience in applying the old to the
+new, thereby maintaining the continuity or consistency of life.
+The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these
+pages may be termed pragmatic.  Its essential feature is to
+maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which
+purposely modifies the environment.  It holds that knowledge in
+its strict sense of something possessed consists of our
+intellectual resources -- of all the habits that render our
+action intelligent.  Only that which has been organized into our
+disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our
+needs and to adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which
+we live is really knowledge.  Knowledge is not just something
+which we are now conscious of, but consists of the dispositions
+we consciously use in understanding what now happens.  Knowledge
+as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to consciousness
+with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by conceiving the
+connection between ourselves and the world in which we live.
+
+Summary.  Such social divisions as interfere with free and full
+intercourse react to make the intelligence and knowing of members
+of the separated classes one-sided.  Those whose experience has
+to do with utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve
+are practical empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a
+realm of meanings in whose active production they have had no
+share are practical rationalists.  Those who come in direct
+contact with things and have to adapt their activities to them
+immediately are, in effect, realists; those who isolate the
+meanings of these things and put them in a religious or so-called
+spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect, idealists.
+Those concerned with progress, who are striving to change
+received beliefs, emphasize the individual factor in knowing;
+those whose chief business it is to withstand change and conserve
+received truth emphasize the universal and the fixed -- and so
+on.  Philosophic systems in their opposed theories of knowledge
+present an explicit formulation of the traits characteristic of
+these cut-off and one-sided segments of experience -- one-sided
+because barriers to intercourse prevent the experience of one
+from being enriched and supplemented by that of others who are
+differently situated.
+
+In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free
+interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of
+knowledge which sees in knowledge the method by which one
+experience is made available in giving direction and meaning to
+another.  The recent advances in physiology, biology, and the
+logic of the experimental sciences supply the specific
+intellectual instrumentalities demanded to work out and formulate
+such a theory.  Their educational equivalent is the connection of
+the acquisition of knowledge in the schools with activities, or
+occupations, carried on in a medium of associated life.
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals
+
+1.  The Inner and the Outer.
+
+Since morality is concerned with conduct, any dualisms which are
+set up between mind and activity must reflect themselves in the
+theory of morals.  Since the formulations of the separation in
+the philosophic theory of morals are used to justify and idealize
+the practices employed in moral training, a brief critical
+discussion is in place.  It is a commonplace of educational
+theory that the establishing of character is a comprehensive aim
+of school instruction and discipline.  Hence it is important that
+we should be on our guard against a conception of the relations
+of intelligence to character which hampers the realization of the
+aim, and on the look-out for the conditions which have to be
+provided in order that the aim may be successfully acted upon.
+The first obstruction which meets us is the currency of moral
+ideas which split the course of activity into two opposed
+factors, often named respectively the inner and outer, or the
+spiritual and the physical.  This division is a culmination of
+the dualism of mind and the world, soul and body, end and means,
+which we have so frequently noted.  In morals it takes the form
+of a sharp demarcation of the motive of action from its
+consequences, and of character from conduct.  Motive and
+character are regarded as something purely "inner," existing
+exclusively in consciousness, while consequences and conduct are
+regarded as outside of mind, conduct having to do simply with the
+movements which carry out motives; consequences with what happens
+as a result.  Different schools identify morality with either the
+inner state of mind or the outer act and results, each in
+separation from the other.  Action with a purpose is deliberate;
+it involves a consciously foreseen end and a mental weighing of
+considerations pro and eon.  It also involves a conscious state
+of longing or desire for the end.  The deliberate choice of an
+aim and of a settled disposition of desire takes time.  During
+this time complete overt action is suspended.  A person who does
+not have his mind made up, does not know what to do. Consequently
+he postpones definite action so far as possible.  His position
+may be compared to that of a man considering jumping across a
+ditch.  If he were sure he could or could not make it, definite
+activity in some direction would occur.  But if he considers, he
+is in doubt; he hesitates.  During the time in which a single
+overt line of action is in suspense, his activities are confined
+to such redistributions of energy within the organism as will
+prepare a determinate course of action.  He measures the ditch
+with his eyes; he brings himself taut to get a feel of the energy
+at his disposal; he looks about for other ways across, he
+reflects upon the importance of getting across.  All this means
+an accentuation of consciousness; it means a turning in upon the
+individual's own attitudes, powers, wishes, etc.
+
+Obviously, however, this surging up of personal factors into
+conscious recognition is a part of the whole activity in its
+temporal development.  There is not first a purely psychical
+process, followed abruptly by a radically different physical one.
+There is one continuous behavior, proceeding from a more
+uncertain, divided, hesitating state to a more overt,
+determinate, or complete state.  The activity at first consists
+mainly of certain tensions and adjustments within the organism;
+as these are coordinated into a unified attitude, the organism as
+a whole acts -- some definite act is undertaken.  We may
+distinguish, of course, the more explicitly conscious phase of
+the continuous activity as mental or psychical.  But that only
+identifies the mental or psychical to mean the indeterminate,
+formative state of an activity which in its fullness involves
+putting forth of overt energy to modify the environment.
+
+Our conscious thoughts, observations, wishes, aversions are
+important, because they represent inchoate, nascent activities.
+They fulfill their destiny in issuing, later on, into specific
+and perceptible acts.  And these inchoate, budding organic
+readjustments are important because they are our sole escape from
+the dominion of routine habits and blind impulse.  They are
+activities having a new meaning in process of development.
+Hence, normally, there is an accentuation of personal
+consciousness whenever our instincts and ready formed habits find
+themselves blocked by novel conditions.  Then we are thrown back
+upon ourselves to reorganize our own attitude before proceeding
+to a definite and irretrievable course of action.  Unless we try
+to drive our way through by sheer brute force, we must modify our
+organic resources to adapt them to the specific features of the
+situation in which we find ourselves.  The conscious deliberating
+and desiring which precede overt action are, then, the methodic
+personal readjustment implied in activity in uncertain
+situations.  This role of mind in continuous activity is not
+always maintained, however.  Desires for something different,
+aversion to the given state of things caused by the blocking of
+successful activity, stimulates the imagination.  The picture of
+a different state of things does not always function to aid
+ingenious observation and recollection to find a way out and on.
+Except where there is a disciplined disposition, the tendency is
+for the imagination to run loose.  Instead of its objects being
+checked up by conditions with reference to their practicability
+in execution, they are allowed to develop because of the
+immediate emotional satisfaction which they yield.  When we find
+the successful display of our energies checked by uncongenial
+surroundings, natural and social, the easiest way out is to build
+castles in the air and let them be a substitute for an actual
+achievement which involves the pains of thought.  So in overt
+action we acquiesce, and build up an imaginary world in, mind.
+This break between thought and conduct is reflected in those
+theories which make a sharp separation between mind as inner and
+conduct and consequences as merely outer.
+
+For the split may be more than an incident of a particular
+individual's experience.  The social situation may be such as to
+throw the class given to articulate reflection back into their
+own thoughts and desires without providing the means by which
+these ideas and aspirations can be used to reorganize the
+environment.  Under such conditions, men take revenge, as it
+were, upon the alien and hostile environment by cultivating
+contempt for it, by giving it a bad name.  They seek refuge and
+consolation within their own states of mind, their own imaginings
+and wishes, which they compliment by calling both more real and
+more ideal than the despised outer world.  Such periods have
+recurred in history.  In the early centuries of the Christian
+era, the influential moral systems of Stoicism, of monastic and
+popular Christianity and other religious movements of the day,
+took shape under the influence of such conditions.  The more
+action which might express prevailing ideals was checked, the
+more the inner possession and cultivation of ideals was regarded
+as self-sufficient -- as the essence of morality.  The external
+world in which activity belongs was thought of as morally
+indifferent.  Everything lay in having the right motive, even
+though that motive was not a moving force in the world.  Much the
+same sort of situation recurred in Germany in the later
+eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it led to the Kantian
+insistence upon the good will as the sole moral good, the will
+being regarded as something complete in itself, apart from action
+and from the changes or consequences effected in the world.
+Later it led to any idealization of existing institutions as
+themselves the embodiment of reason.
+
+The purely internal morality of "meaning well," of having a good
+disposition regardless of what comes of it, naturally led to a
+reaction.  This is generally known as either hedonism or
+utilitarianism.  It was said in effect that the important thing
+morally is not what a man is inside of his own consciousness, but
+what he does -- the consequences which issue, the charges he
+actually effects.  Inner morality was attacked as sentimental,
+arbitrary, dogmatic, subjective -- as giving men leave to dignify
+and shield any dogma congenial to their self-interest or any
+caprice occurring to imagination by calling it an intuition or an
+ideal of conscience.  Results, conduct, are what counts; they
+afford the sole measure of morality.  Ordinary morality, and
+hence that of the schoolroom, is likely to be an inconsistent
+compromise of both views.  On one hand, certain states of feeling
+are made much of; the individual must "mean well," and if his
+intentions are good, if he had the right sort of emotional
+consciousness, he may be relieved of responsibility for full
+results in conduct.  But since, on the other hand, certain things
+have to be done to meet the convenience and the requirements of
+others, and of social order in general, there is great insistence
+upon the doing of certain things, irrespective of whether the
+individual has any concern or intelligence in their doing.  He
+must toe the mark; he must have his nose held to the grindstone;
+he must obey; he must form useful habits; he must learn
+self-control, -- all of these precepts being understood in a way
+which emphasizes simply the immediate thing tangibly done,
+irrespective of the spirit of thought and desire in which it is
+done, and irrespective therefore of its effect upon other less
+obvious doings.
+
+It is hoped that the prior discussion has sufficiently elaborated
+the method by which both of these evils are avoided.  One or both
+of these evils must result wherever individuals, whether young or
+old, cannot engage in a progressively cumulative undertaking
+under conditions which engage their interest and require their
+reflection.  For only in such cases is it possible that the
+disposition of desire and thinking should be an organic factor in
+overt and obvious conduct.  Given a consecutive activity
+embodying the student's own interest, where a definite result is
+to be obtained, and where neither routine habit nor the following
+of dictated directions nor capricious improvising will suffice,
+and there the rise of conscious purpose, conscious desire, and
+deliberate reflection are inevitable.  They are inevitable as the
+spirit and quality of an activity having specific consequences,
+not as forming an isolated realm of inner consciousness.
+
+2.  The Opposition of Duty and Interest.  Probably there is no
+antithesis more often set up in moral discussion than that
+between acting from "principle" and from "interest." To act on
+principle is to act disinterestedly, according to a general law,
+which is above all personal considerations.  To act according to
+interest is, so the allegation runs, to act selfishly, with one's
+own personal profit in view.  It substitutes the changing
+expediency of the moment for devotion to unswerving moral law.
+The false idea of interest underlying this opposition has already
+been criticized (See Chapter X), but some moral aspects of the
+question will now be considered.  A clew to the matter may be
+found in the fact that the supporters of the "interest" side of
+the controversy habitually use the term "self-interest." Starting
+from the premises that unless there is interest in an object or
+idea, there is no motive force, they end with the conclusion that
+even when a person claims to be acting from principle or from a
+sense of duty, he really acts as he does because there "is
+something in it" for himself.  The premise is sound; the
+conclusion false.  In reply the other school argues that since
+man is capable of generous self-forgetting and even
+self-sacrificing action, he is capable of acting without
+interest.  Again the premise is sound, and the conclusion false.
+The error on both sides lies in a false notion of the relation of
+interest and the self.
+
+Both sides assume that the self is a fixed and hence isolated
+quantity.  As a consequence, there is a rigid dilemma between
+acting for an interest of the self and without interest.  If the
+self is something fixed antecedent to action, then acting from
+interest means trying to get more in the way of possessions for
+the self -- whether in the way of fame, approval of others, power
+over others, pecuniary profit, or pleasure.  Then the reaction
+from this view as a cynical depreciation of human nature leads to
+the view that men who act nobly act with no interest at all.  Yet
+to an unbiased judgment it would appear plain that a man must be
+interested in what he is doing or he would not do it.  A
+physician who continues to serve the sick in a plague at almost
+certain danger to his own life must be interested in the
+efficient performance of his profession -- more interested in
+that than in the safety of his own bodily life.  But it is
+distorting facts to say that this interest is merely a mask for
+an interest in something else which he gets by continuing his
+customary services -- such as money or good repute or virtue;
+that it is only a means to an ulterior selfish end.  The moment
+we recognize that the self is not something ready-made, but
+something in continuous formation through choice of action, the
+whole situation clears up.  A man's interest in keeping at his
+work in spite of danger to life means that his self is found in
+that work; if he finally gave up, and preferred his personal
+safety or comfort, it would mean that he preferred to be that
+kind of a self.  The mistake lies in making a separation between
+interest and self, and supposing that the latter is the end to
+which interest in objects and acts and others is a mere means.
+In fact, self and interest are two names for the same fact; the
+kind and amount of interest actively taken in a thing reveals and
+measures the quality of selfhood which exists.  Bear in mind that
+interest means the active or moving identity of the self with a
+certain object, and the whole alleged dilemma falls to the
+ground.
+
+Unselfishness, for example, signifies neither lack of interest in
+what is done (that would mean only machine-like indifference) nor
+selflessness--which would mean absence of virility and character.
+As employed everywhere outside of this particular theoretical
+controversy, the term "unselfishness" refers to the kind of aims
+and objects which habitually interest a man.  And if we make a
+mental survey of the kind of interests which evoke the use of
+this epithet, we shall see that they have two intimately
+associated features.  (i) The generous self consciously
+identifies itself with the full range of relationships implied in
+its activity, instead of drawing a sharp line between itself and
+considerations which are excluded as alien or indifferent; (ii)
+it readjusts and expands its past ideas of itself to take in new
+consequences as they become perceptible.  When the physician
+began his career he may not have thought of a pestilence; he may
+not have consciously identified himself with service under such
+conditions.  But, if he has a normally growing or active self,
+when he finds that his vocation involves such risks, he willingly
+adopts them as integral portions of his activity.  The wider or
+larger self which means inclusion instead of denial of
+relationships is identical with a self which enlarges in order to
+assume previously unforeseen ties.
+
+In such crises of readjustment -- and the crisis may be slight as
+well as great -- there may be a transitional conflict of
+"principle" with "interest." It is the nature of a habit to
+involve ease in the accustomed line of activity.  It is the
+nature of a readjusting of habit to involve an effort which is
+disagreeable -- something to which a man has deliberately to hold
+himself.  In other words, there is a tendency to identify the
+self -- or take interest -- in what one has got used to, and to
+turn away the mind with aversion or irritation when an unexpected
+thing which involves an unpleasant modification of habit comes
+up.  Since in the past one has done one's duty without having to
+face such a disagreeable circumstance, why not go on as one has
+been? To yield to this temptation means to narrow and isolate the
+thought of the self -- to treat it as complete.  Any habit, no
+matter how efficient in the past, which has become set, may at
+any time bring this temptation with it.  To act from principle in
+such an emergency is not to act on some abstract principle, or
+duty at large; it is to act upon the principle of a course of
+action, instead of upon the circumstances which have attended it.
+The principle of a physician's conduct is its animating aim and
+spirit -- the care for the diseased.  The principle is not what
+justifies an activity, for the principle is but another name for
+the continuity of the activity.  If the activity as manifested in
+its consequences is undesirable, to act upon principle is to
+accentuate its evil.  And a man who prides himself upon acting
+upon principle is likely to be a man who insists upon having his
+own way without learning from experience what is the better way.
+He fancies that some abstract principle justifies his course of
+action without recognizing that his principle needs
+justification.
+
+Assuming, however, that school conditions are such as to provide
+desirable occupations, it is interest in the occupation as a
+whole -- that is, in its continuous development -- which keeps a
+pupil at his work in spite of temporary diversions and unpleasant
+obstacles.  Where there is no activity having a growing
+significance, appeal to principle is either purely verbal, or a
+form of obstinate pride or an appeal to extraneous considerations
+clothed with a dignified title.  Undoubtedly there are junctures
+where momentary interest ceases and attention flags, and where
+reinforcement is needed.  But what carries a person over these
+hard stretches is not loyalty to duty in the abstract, but
+interest in his occupation.  Duties are "offices" -- they are the
+specific acts needed for the fulfilling of a function -- or, in
+homely language -- doing one's job.  And the man who is genuinely
+interested in his job is the man who is able to stand temporary
+discouragement, to persist in the face of obstacles, to take the
+lean with the fat: he makes an interest out of meeting and
+overcoming difficulties and distraction.
+
+3.  Intelligence and Character.  A noteworthy paradox often
+accompanies discussions of morals.  On the one hand, there is an
+identification of the moral with the rational.  Reason is set up
+as a faculty from which proceed ultimate moral intuitions, and
+sometimes, as in the Kantian theory, it is said to supply the
+only proper moral motive.  On the other hand, the value of
+concrete, everyday intelligence is constantly underestimated, and
+even deliberately depreciated.  Morals is often thought to be an
+affair with which ordinary knowledge has nothing to do.  Moral
+knowledge is thought to be a thing apart, and conscience is
+thought of as something radically different from consciousness.
+This separation, if valid, is of especial significance for
+education.  Moral education in school is practically hopeless
+when we set up the development of character as a supreme end, and
+at the same time treat the acquiring of knowledge and the
+development of understanding, which of necessity occupy the chief
+part of school time, as having nothing to do with character.  On
+such a basis, moral education is inevitably reduced to some kind
+of catechetical instruction, or lessons about morals.  Lessons
+"about morals" signify as matter of course lessons in what other
+people think about virtues and duties.  It amounts to something
+only in the degree in which pupils happen to be already animated
+by a sympathetic and dignified regard for the sentiments of
+others.  Without such a regard, it has no more influence on
+character than information about the mountains of Asia; with a
+servile regard, it increases dependence upon others, and throws
+upon those in authority the responsibility for conduct.  As a
+matter of fact, direct instruction in morals has been effective
+only in social groups where it was a part of the authoritative
+control of the many by the few.  Not the teaching as such but the
+reinforcement of it by the whole regime of which it was an
+incident made it effective.  To attempt to get similar results
+from lessons about morals in a democratic society is to rely upon
+sentimental magic.
+
+At the other end of the scale stands the Socratic-Platonic
+teaching which identifies knowledge and virtue--which holds that
+no man does evil knowingly but only because of ignorance of the
+good.  This doctrine is commonly attacked on the ground that
+nothing is more common than for a man to know the good and yet do
+the bad: not knowledge, but habituation or practice, and motive
+are what is required.  Aristotle, in fact, at once attacked the
+Platonic teaching on the ground that moral virtue is like an art,
+such as medicine; the experienced practitioner is better than a
+man who has theoretical knowledge but no practical experience of
+disease and remedies.  The issue turns, however, upon what is
+meant by knowledge.  Aristotle's objection ignored the gist of
+Plato's teaching to the effect that man could not attain a
+theoretical insight into the good except as he had passed through
+years of practical habituation and strenuous discipline.
+Knowledge of the good was not a thing to be got either from books
+or from others, but was achieved through a prolonged education.
+It was the final and culminating grace of a mature experience of
+life.  Irrespective of Plato's position, it is easy to perceive
+that the term knowledge is used to denote things as far apart as
+intimate and vital personal realization, -- a conviction gained
+and tested in experience, -- and a second- handed, largely
+symbolic, recognition that persons in general believe so and so
+-- a devitalized remote information.  That the latter does not
+guarantee conduct, that it does not profoundly affect character,
+goes without saying.  But if knowledge means something of the
+same sort as our conviction gained by trying and testing that
+sugar is sweet and quinine bitter, the case stands otherwise.
+Every time a man sits on a chair rather than on a stove, carries
+an umbrella when it rains, consults a doctor when ill -- or in
+short performs any of the thousand acts which make up his daily
+life, he proves that knowledge of a certain kind finds direct
+issue in conduct.  There is every reason to suppose that the same
+sort of knowledge of good has a like expression; in fact "good"
+is an empty term unless it includes the satisfactions experienced
+in such situations as those mentioned.  Knowledge that other
+persons are supposed to know something might lead one to act so
+as to win the approbation others attach to certain actions, or at
+least so as to give others the impression that one agrees with
+them; there is no reason why it should lead to personal
+initiative and loyalty in behalf of the beliefs attributed to
+them.
+
+It is not necessary, accordingly, to dispute about the proper
+meaning of the term knowledge.  It is enough for educational
+purposes to note the different qualities covered by the one name,
+to realize that it is knowledge gained at first hand through the
+exigencies of experience which affects conduct in significant
+ways.  If a pupil learns things from books simply in connection
+with school lessons and for the sake of reciting what he has
+learned when called upon, then knowledge will have effect upon
+some conduct -- namely upon that of reproducing statements at the
+demand of others.  There is nothing surprising that such
+"knowledge" should not have much influence in the life out of
+school.  But this is not a reason for making a divorce between
+knowledge and conduct, but for holding in low esteem this kind of
+knowledge.  The same thing may be said of knowledge which relates
+merely to an isolated and technical specialty; it modifies action
+but only in its own narrow line.  In truth, the problem of moral
+education in the schools is one with the problem of securing
+knowledge -- the knowledge connected with the system of impulses
+and habits.  For the use to which any known fact is put depends
+upon its connections.  The knowledge of dynamite of a safecracker
+may be identical in verbal form with that of a chemist; in fact,
+it is different, for it is knit into connection with different
+aims and habits, and thus has a different import.
+
+Our prior discussion of subject-matter as proceeding from direct
+activity having an immediate aim, to the enlargement of meaning
+found in geography and history, and then to scientifically
+organized knowledge, was based upon the idea of maintaining a
+vital connection between knowledge and activity.  What is learned
+and employed in an occupation having an aim and involving
+cooperation with others is moral knowledge, whether consciously
+so regarded or not.  For it builds up a social interest and
+confers the intelligence needed to make that interest effective
+in practice.  Just because the studies of the curriculum
+represent standard factors in social life, they are organs of
+initiation into social values.  As mere school studies, their
+acquisition has only a technical worth.  Acquired under
+conditions where their social significance is realized, they feed
+moral interest and develop moral insight.  Moreover, the
+qualities of mind discussed under the topic of method of learning
+are all of them intrinsically moral qualities.  Open-mindedness,
+single-mindedness, sincerity, breadth of outlook, thoroughness,
+assumption of responsibility for developing the consequences of
+ideas which are accepted, are moral traits.  The habit of
+identifying moral characteristics with external conformity to
+authoritative prescriptions may lead us to ignore the ethical
+value of these intellectual attitudes, but the same habit tends
+to reduce morals to a dead and machinelike routine.  Consequently
+while such an attitude has moral results, the results are morally
+undesirable -- above all in a democratic society where so much
+depends upon personal disposition.
+
+4.  The Social and the Moral.  All of the separations which we
+have been criticizing -- and which the idea of education set
+forth in the previous chapters is designed to avoid -- spring
+from taking morals too narrowly, -- giving them, on one side, a
+sentimental goody-goody turn without reference to effective
+ability to do what is socially needed, and, on the other side,
+overemphasizing convention and tradition so as to limit morals to
+a list of definitely stated acts.  As a matter of fact, morals
+are as broad as acts which concern our relationships with others.
+And
+potentially this includes all our acts, even though their social
+bearing may not be thought of at the time of performance.  For
+every act, by the principle of habit, modifies disposition -- it
+sets up a certain kind of inclination and desire.  And it is
+impossible to tell when the habit thus strengthened may have a
+direct and perceptible influence on our association with others.
+Certain traits of character have such an obvious connection with
+our social relationships that we call them "moral" in an emphatic
+sense -- truthfulness, honesty, chastity, amiability, etc.  But
+this only means that they are, as compared with some other
+attitudes, central: -- that they carry other attitudes with them.
+They are moral in an emphatic sense not because they are isolated
+and exclusive, but because they are so intimately connected with
+thousands of other attitudes which we do not explicitly
+recognize -- which perhaps we have not even names for.  To call
+them virtues in their isolation is like taking the skeleton for
+the living body.  The bones are certainly important, but their
+importance lies in the fact that they support other organs of the
+body in such a way as to make them capable of integrated
+effective activity.  And the same is true of the qualities of
+character which we specifically designate virtues.  Morals
+concern nothing less than the whole character, and the whole
+character is identical with the man in all his concrete make-up
+and manifestations.  To possess virtue does not signify to have
+cultivated a few namable and exclusive traits; it means to be
+fully and adequately what one is capable of becoming through
+association with others in all the offices of life.
+
+The moral and the social quality of conduct are, in the last
+analysis, identical with each other.  It is then but to restate
+explicitly the import of our earlier chapters regarding the
+social function of education to say that the measure of the worth
+of the administration, curriculum, and methods of instruction of
+the school is the extent to which they are animated by a social
+spirit.  And the great danger which threatens school work is the
+absence of conditions which make possible a permeating social
+spirit; this is the great enemy of effective moral training.  For
+this spirit can be actively present only when certain conditions
+are met.
+
+(i) In the first place, the school must itself be a community
+life in all which that implies.  Social perceptions and interests
+can be developed only in a genuinely social medium--one where
+there is give and take in the building up of a common experience.
+Informational statements about things can be acquired in relative
+isolation by any one who previously has had enough intercourse
+with others to have learned language.  But realization of the
+meaning of the linguistic signs is quite another matter.  That
+involves a context of work and play in association with others.
+The plea which has been made for education through continued
+constructive activities in this book rests upon the fact they
+afford an opportunity for a social atmosphere.  In place of a
+school set apart from life as a place for learning lessons, we
+have a miniature social group in which study and growth are
+incidents of present shared experience.  Playgrounds, shops,
+workrooms, laboratories not only direct the natural active
+tendencies of youth, but they involve intercourse,
+communication, and cooperation, -- all extending the perception
+of connections.
+
+(ii) The learning in school should be continuous with that out of
+school.  There should be a free interplay between the two.  This
+is possible only when there are numerous points of contact
+between the social interests of the one and of the other.  A
+school is conceivable in which there should be a spirit of
+companionship and shared activity, but where its social life
+would no more represent or typify that of the world beyond the
+school walls than that of a monastery.  Social concern and
+understanding would be developed, but they would not be available
+outside; they would not carry over.  The proverbial separation of
+town and gown, the cultivation of academic seclusion, operate in
+this direction.  So does such adherence to the culture of the
+past as generates a reminiscent social spirit, for this makes an
+individual feel more at home in the life of other days than in
+his own.  A professedly cultural education is peculiarly exposed
+to this danger.  An idealized past becomes the refuge and solace
+of the spirit; present-day concerns are found sordid, and
+unworthy of attention.  But as a rule, the absence of a social
+environment in connection with which learning is a need and a
+reward is the chief reason for the isolation of the school; and
+this isolation renders school knowledge inapplicable to life and
+so infertile in character.
+
+
+A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the
+failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are
+desirable in education are themselves moral.  Discipline, natural
+development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits --
+marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it
+is the business of education to further.  There is an old saying
+to the effect that it is not enough for a man to be good; he must
+be good for something.  The something for which a man must be
+good is capacity to live as a social member so that what he gets
+from living with others balances with what he contributes.  What
+he gets and gives as a human being, a being with desires,
+emotions, and ideas, is not external possessions, but a widening
+and deepening of conscious life -- a more intense, disciplined,
+and expanding realization of meanings.  What he materially
+receives and gives is at most opportunities and means for the
+evolution of conscious life.  Otherwise, it is neither giving nor
+taking, but a shifting about of the position of things in space,
+like the stirring of water and sand with a stick.  Discipline,
+culture, social efficiency, personal refinement, improvement of
+character are but phases of the growth of capacity nobly to share
+in such a balanced experience.  And education is not a mere means
+to such a life.  Education is such a life.  To maintain capacity
+for such education is the essence of morals.  For conscious life
+is a continual beginning afresh.
+
+Summary.  The most important problem of moral education in the
+school concerns the relationship of knowledge and conduct.  For
+unless the learning which accrues in the regular course of study
+affects character, it is futile to conceive the moral end as the
+unifying and culminating end of education.  When there is no
+intimate organic connection between the methods and materials of
+knowledge and moral growth, particular lessons and modes of
+discipline have to be resorted to: knowledge is not integrated
+into the usual springs of action and the outlook on life, while
+morals become moralistic -- a scheme of separate virtues.
+
+The two theories chiefly associated with the separation of
+learning from activity, and hence from morals, are those which
+cut off inner disposition and motive -- the conscious personal
+factor -- and deeds as purely physical and outer; and which set
+action from interest in opposition to that from principle.  Both
+of these separations are overcome in an educational scheme where
+learning is the accompaniment of continuous activities or
+occupations which have a social aim and utilize the materials of
+typical social situations.  For under such conditions, the school
+becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community and
+one in close interaction with other modes of associated
+experience beyond school walls.  All education which develops
+power to share effectively in social life is moral.  It forms a
+character which not only does the particular deed socially
+necessary but one which is interested in that continuous
+readjustment which is essential to growth.  Interest in learning
+from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Democracy and Education, by Dewey
+
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+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
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+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Democracy and Education
+
+Author: John Dewey
+
+Release Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #852]
+Last Updated: August 1, 2015
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Reed, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      by John Dewey
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      Transcriber's Note:
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      I have tried to make this the most accurate text possible but I am sure
+      that there are still mistakes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would like to dedicate this etext to my mother who was a elementary
+      school teacher for more years than I can remember. Thanks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      David Reed
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> <b>Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of
+        Life</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. It
+        is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> <b>Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM27"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        development within the young of the attitudes </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> <b>Chapter Three: Education as Direction</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM3"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        natural or native impulses of the young do not agree </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> <b>Chapter Four: Education as Growth</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM4"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> <b>Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and
+        Formal Discipline</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM5"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        conception that the result of the educative process </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> <b>Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and
+        Progressive</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM6"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Education may be conceived either retrospectively </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> <b>Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in
+        Education</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM7"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> <b>Chapter Eight: Aims in Education</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM8"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. An
+        aim denotes the result of any natural process </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> <b>Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social
+        Efficiency as Aims</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM9"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> <b>Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM10"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> <b>Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM11"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. In
+        determining the place of thinking </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> <b>Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM12"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Processes of instruction are unified in the degree </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> <b>Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM13"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Method is a statement of the way the subject matter </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> <b>Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject
+        Matter</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM15"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        subject matter of education consists primarily </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> <b>Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the
+        Curriculum</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM16"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. In
+        the previous chapter we found that the primary subject </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> <b>Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of
+        Geography and History</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM17"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. It
+        is the nature of an experience to have implications </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> <b>Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of
+        Study</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM18"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> <b>Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM19"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> <b>Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM20"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. Of
+        the segregations of educational values </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> <b>Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical
+        Studies</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM21"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        Greeks were induced to philosophize </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> <b>Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social
+        Studies: Naturalism and Humanism</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM22"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022"> <b>Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the
+        World</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM23"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        True individualism is a product of the relaxation of the grip </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023"> <b>Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of
+        Education</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM24"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. A
+        vocation signifies any form of continuous activity </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024"> <b>Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM25"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        After a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025"> <b>Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM26"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary.
+        Such social divisions as interfere with free and full </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026"> <b>Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals</b>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_SUMM27"> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Summary. The
+        most important problem of moral education in the school </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between
+      living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by
+      renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than
+      the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise,
+      it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react
+      in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so
+      as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action.
+      While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none
+      the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its
+      own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into
+      smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its
+      identity as a living thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own
+      behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say
+      that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own
+      conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus
+      turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the
+      return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense,
+      it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for
+      its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up.
+      Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up indefinitely. After
+      a while they succumb; they die. The creature is not equal to the task of
+      indefinite self-renewal. But continuity of the life process is not
+      dependent upon the prolongation of the existence of any one individual.
+      Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous sequence. And
+      though, as the geological record shows, not merely individuals but also
+      species die out, the life process continues in increasingly complex forms.
+      As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles
+      against which they struggled in vain come into being. Continuity of life
+      means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living
+      organisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have been speaking of life in its lowest terms&mdash;as a physical
+      thing. But we use the word "Life" to denote the whole range of experience,
+      individual and racial. When we see a book called the Life of Lincoln we do
+      not expect to find within its covers a treatise on physiology. We look for
+      an account of social antecedents; a description of early surroundings, of
+      the conditions and occupation of the family; of the chief episodes in the
+      development of character; of signal struggles and achievements; of the
+      individual's hopes, tastes, joys and sufferings. In precisely similar
+      fashion we speak of the life of a savage tribe, of the Athenian people, of
+      the American nation. "Life" covers customs, institutions, beliefs,
+      victories and defeats, recreations and occupations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense. And to it, as
+      well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the principle of
+      continuity through renewal applies. With the renewal of physical existence
+      goes, in the case of human beings, the recreation of beliefs, ideals,
+      hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. The continuity of any experience,
+      through renewing of the social group, is a literal fact. Education, in its
+      broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every one
+      of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a
+      savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs,
+      ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier
+      of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of
+      the group goes on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the
+      constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of
+      education. On one hand, there is the contrast between the immaturity of
+      the new-born members of the group&mdash;its future sole representatives&mdash;and
+      the maturity of the adult members who possess the knowledge and customs of
+      the group. On the other hand, there is the necessity that these immature
+      members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers, but that
+      they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and
+      practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will cease its
+      characteristic life. Even in a savage tribe, the achievements of adults
+      are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of if left to
+      themselves. With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original
+      capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the elders
+      increases. Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities
+      of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group.
+      Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required. Beings
+      who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and
+      habits of the social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and
+      actively interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as
+      biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of
+      habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.
+      Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards,
+      opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group
+      life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. If
+      the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might
+      educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal
+      interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is
+      obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of
+      each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took them
+      all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born
+      as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and practices
+      the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not
+      automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough
+      transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into
+      barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the human young are so immature
+      that if they were left to themselves without the guidance and succor of
+      others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities necessary for
+      physical existence. The young of human beings compare so poorly in
+      original efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals, that even
+      the powers needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under
+      tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the
+      technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of
+      teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we may
+      seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. But justification is found in the
+      fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an unduly
+      scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are, indeed, one
+      important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the
+      immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a
+      relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the necessity of
+      more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we make sure of
+      placing the scholastic methods in their true context.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but
+      it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is
+      more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and
+      communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they
+      have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess
+      things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a
+      community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge&mdash;a
+      common understanding&mdash;like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such
+      things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks; they
+      cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical
+      pieces. The communication which insures participation in a common
+      understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual
+      dispositions&mdash;like ways of responding to expectations and
+      requirements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more
+      than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles
+      removed from others. A book or a letter may institute a more intimate
+      association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each
+      other than exists between dwellers under the same roof. Individuals do not
+      even compose a social group because they all work for a common end. The
+      parts of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common
+      result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were all
+      cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that they
+      regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a
+      community. But this would involve communication. Each would have to know
+      what the other was about and would have to have some way of keeping the
+      other informed as to his own purpose and progress. Consensus demands
+      communication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most social group
+      there are many relations which are not as yet social. A large number of
+      human relationships in any social group are still upon the machine-like
+      plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired results, without
+      reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of
+      those used. Such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of
+      position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools, mechanical or
+      fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and child, teacher and pupil,
+      employer and employee, governor and governed, remain upon this level, they
+      form no true social group, no matter how closely their respective
+      activities touch one another. Giving and taking of orders modifies action
+      and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a
+      communication of interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
+      communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a
+      recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed
+      experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far,
+      meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who
+      communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating, with
+      fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be
+      somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your
+      experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations.
+      The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. To
+      formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see
+      it, considering what points of contact it has with the life of another so
+      that it may be got into such form that he can appreciate its meaning.
+      Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to
+      assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to
+      tell him intelligently of one's own experience. All communication is like
+      art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that
+      remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who
+      participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a
+      routine way does it lose its educative power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and
+      learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together
+      educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and
+      enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness
+      of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone mentally as
+      well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his
+      past experience to extract its net meaning. The inequality of achievement
+      between the mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the
+      young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus to
+      reducing experience to that order and form which will render it most
+      easily communicable and hence most usable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a marked
+      difference between the education which every one gets from living with
+      others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist,
+      and the deliberate educating of the young. In the former case the
+      education is incidental; it is natural and important, but it is not the
+      express reason of the association. While it may be said, without
+      exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution,
+      economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in
+      enlarging and improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of its
+      original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.
+      Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to secure the
+      favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; family life in
+      the desire to gratify appetites and secure family perpetuity; systematic
+      labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others, etc. Only
+      gradually was the by-product of the institution, its effect upon the
+      quality and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still
+      was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct of the
+      institution. Even today, in our industrial life, apart from certain values
+      of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of
+      the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried on
+      receives little attention as compared with physical output.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as an
+      immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy to ignore in
+      our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition, or to
+      subordinate that educative effect to some external and tangible result, it
+      is not so easy as in dealing with adults. The need of training is too
+      evident; the pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits
+      is too urgent to leave these consequences wholly out of account. Since our
+      chief business with them is to enable them to share in a common life we
+      cannot help considering whether or no we are forming the powers which will
+      secure this ability. If humanity has made some headway in realizing that
+      the ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect&mdash;its
+      effect upon conscious experience&mdash;we may well believe that this
+      lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process which
+      we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of education&mdash;that
+      of direct tuition or schooling. In undeveloped social groups, we find very
+      little formal teaching and training. Savage groups mainly rely for
+      instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the same sort of
+      association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special
+      devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with
+      initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted into full social
+      membership. For the most part, they depend upon children learning the
+      customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas,
+      by sharing in what the elders are doing. In part, this sharing is direct,
+      taking part in the occupations of adults and thus serving an
+      apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the dramatic plays in
+      which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and thus learn to know
+      what they are like. To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a
+      place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might
+      learn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the young
+      and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in the
+      pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the case of
+      the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so remote in
+      space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less adequate to
+      reproduce its spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult activities
+      thus depends upon a prior training given with this end in view.
+      Intentional agencies&mdash;schools&mdash;and explicit material&mdash;studies&mdash;are
+      devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special
+      group of persons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the
+      resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way to a
+      kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if they
+      were left to pick up their training in informal association with others,
+      since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from
+      indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether directly
+      or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital. These qualities
+      compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of available
+      opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes remote
+      and dead&mdash;abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of
+      depreciation. What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies is
+      at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists
+      with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within urgent daily
+      interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in
+      symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. Such
+      material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the ordinary
+      standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this measure is
+      connection with practical concerns. Such material exists in a world by
+      itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression. There
+      is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be
+      merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter
+      of life-experience. The permanent social interests are likely to be lost
+      from view. Those which have not been carried over into the structure of
+      social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information
+      expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. Thus we reach the
+      ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores its social
+      necessity and its identity with all human association that affects
+      conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about
+      remote matters and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the
+      acquisition of literacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
+      education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between
+      the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional, modes of
+      education. When the acquiring of information and of technical intellectual
+      skill do not influence the formation of a social disposition, ordinary
+      vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far,
+      creates only "sharps" in learning&mdash;that is, egoistic specialists. To
+      avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are aware of
+      having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they
+      unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the formation of their
+      characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate
+      task with every development of special schooling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM" id="link2H_SUMM">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Since this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life is a
+      self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to
+      physiological life, education is to social life. This education consists
+      primarily in transmission through communication. Communication is a
+      process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It
+      modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it. That the
+      ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in the
+      contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of
+      experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the immature.
+      That is to say, while every social arrangement is educative in effect, the
+      educative effect first becomes an important part of the purpose of the
+      association in connection with the association of the older with the
+      younger. As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the
+      need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. As formal
+      teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an
+      undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct
+      associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater
+      than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few
+      centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a community or
+      social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and that
+      this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the
+      immature members of the group. By various agencies, unintentional and
+      designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into
+      robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a
+      fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. All of these words mean
+      that it implies attention to the conditions of growth. We also speak of
+      rearing, raising, bringing up&mdash;words which express the difference of
+      level which education aims to cover. Etymologically, the word education
+      means just a process of leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome
+      of the process in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding
+      activity&mdash;that is, a shaping into the standard form of social
+      activity. In this chapter we are concerned with the general features of
+      the way in which a social group brings up its immature members into its
+      own social form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience
+      till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the
+      social group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical forming.
+      Things can be physically transported in space; they may be bodily
+      conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically extracted and
+      inserted. How then are they communicated? Given the impossibility of
+      direct contagion or literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the
+      method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or the
+      older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves. The answer, in
+      general formulation, is: By means of the action of the environment in
+      calling out certain responses. The required beliefs cannot be hammered in;
+      the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on. But the particular medium in
+      which an individual exists leads him to see and feel one thing rather than
+      another; it leads him to have certain plans in order that he may act
+      successfully with others; it strengthens some beliefs and weakens others
+      as a condition of winning the approval of others. Thus it gradually
+      produces in him a certain system of behavior, a certain disposition of
+      action. The words "environment," "medium" denote something more than
+      surroundings which encompass an individual. They denote the specific
+      continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies. An
+      inanimate being is, of course, continuous with its surroundings; but the
+      environing circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an
+      environment. For the inorganic being is not concerned in the influences
+      which affect it. On the other hand, some things which are remote in space
+      and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his
+      environment even more truly than some of the things close to him. The
+      things with which a man varies are his genuine environment. Thus the
+      activities of the astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or
+      about which he calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is
+      most intimately his environment. The environment of an antiquarian, as an
+      antiquarian, consists of the remote epoch of human life with which he is
+      concerned, and the relics, inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes
+      connections with that period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or
+      hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living
+      being. Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the
+      fish's activities&mdash;to its life. The north pole is a significant
+      element in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in
+      reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what
+      they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive
+      existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting,
+      environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a
+      sustaining or frustrating condition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Social Environment. A being whose activities are associated with
+      others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend
+      upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others. A
+      being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities
+      without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the
+      indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he
+      moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as well try to imagine a
+      business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to
+      conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms of
+      his isolated actions. The manufacturer moreover is as truly socially
+      guided in his activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his own
+      counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling his
+      finished goods. Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in
+      association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the
+      most overt cooperative or hostile act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium nurtures
+      its immature members. There is no great difficulty in seeing how it shapes
+      the external habits of action. Even dogs and horses have their actions
+      modified by association with human beings; they form different habits
+      because human beings are concerned with what they do. Human beings control
+      animals by controlling the natural stimuli which influence them; by
+      creating a certain environment in other words. Food, bits and bridles,
+      noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in which the natural or
+      instinctive responses of horses occur. By operating steadily to call out
+      certain acts, habits are formed which function with the same uniformity as
+      the original stimuli. If a rat is put in a maze and finds food only by
+      making a given number of turns in a given sequence, his activity is
+      gradually modified till he habitually takes that course rather than
+      another when he is hungry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Human actions are modified in a like fashion. A burnt child dreads the
+      fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every time a child touched a
+      certain toy he got burned, the child would learn to avoid that toy as
+      automatically as he avoids touching fire. So far, however, we are dealing
+      with what may be called training in distinction from educative teaching.
+      The changes considered are in outer action rather than in mental and
+      emotional dispositions of behavior. The distinction is not, however, a
+      sharp one. The child might conceivably generate in time a violent
+      antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class of toys
+      resembling it. The aversion might even persist after he had forgotten
+      about the original burns; later on he might even invent some reason to
+      account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases, altering
+      the external habit of action by changing the environment to affect the
+      stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in the
+      action. Yet this does not always happen; a person trained to dodge a
+      threatening blow, dodges automatically with no corresponding thought or
+      emotion. We have to find, then, some differentia of training from
+      education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really share in
+      the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the horse to
+      secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous to the
+      horse to perform the act&mdash;he gets food, etc. But the horse,
+      presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains interested in food,
+      not in the service he is rendering. He is not a partner in a shared
+      activity. Were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging in the
+      conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment which
+      others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now in many cases&mdash;too many cases&mdash;the activity of the immature
+      human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is
+      trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His
+      instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure.
+      But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a
+      way agreeable to others. In other cases, he really shares or participates
+      in the common activity. In this case, his original impulse is modified. He
+      not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of others, but, in so
+      acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused in him that animate the
+      others. A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The successes for which it
+      strives, the achievements upon which it sets store, are connected with
+      fighting and victory. The presence of this medium incites bellicose
+      exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then in fact when he is strong
+      enough. As he fights he wins approval and advancement; as he refrains, he
+      is disliked, ridiculed, shut out from favorable recognition. It is not
+      surprising that his original belligerent tendencies and emotions are
+      strengthened at the expense of others, and that his ideas turn to things
+      connected with war. Only in this way can he become fully a recognized
+      member of his group. Thus his mental habitudes are gradually assimilated
+      to those of his group.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we shall
+      perceive that the social medium neither implants certain desires and ideas
+      directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular habits of
+      action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow. Setting up
+      conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways of acting is
+      the first step. Making the individual a sharer or partner in the
+      associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its
+      failure as his failure, is the completing step. As soon as he is possessed
+      by the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to recognize the
+      special ends at which it aims and the means employed to secure success.
+      His beliefs and ideas, in other words, will take a form similar to those
+      of others in the group. He will also achieve pretty much the same stock of
+      knowledge since that knowledge is an ingredient of his habitual pursuits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief
+      cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one
+      to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an idea into
+      the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus imparting
+      knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process. But learning from
+      language will be found, when analyzed, to confirm the principle just laid
+      down. It would probably be admitted with little hesitation that a child
+      gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as other persons do; by covering
+      the head with it, giving it to others to wear, having it put on by others
+      when going out, etc. But it may be asked how this principle of shared
+      activity applies to getting through speech or reading the idea of, say, a
+      Greek helmet, where no direct use of any kind enters in. What shared
+      activity is there in learning from books about the discovery of America?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about many
+      things, let us see how it works. The baby begins of course with mere
+      sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning, expressing, that is, no idea.
+      Sounds are just one kind of stimulus to direct response, some having a
+      soothing effect, others tending to make one jump, and so on. The sound
+      h-a-t would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a seemingly
+      inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection with an action
+      which is participated in by a number of people. When the mother is taking
+      the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she puts something on the
+      baby's head. Being taken out becomes an interest to the child; mother and
+      child not only go out with each other physically, but both are concerned
+      in the going out; they enjoy it in common. By conjunction with the other
+      factors in activity the sound "hat" soon gets the same meaning for the
+      child that it has for the parent; it becomes a sign of the activity into
+      which it enters. The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are
+      mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends
+      upon connection with a shared experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way that the
+      thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. And they acquire the
+      same meaning with the child which they have with the adult because they
+      are used in a common experience by both. The guarantee for the same manner
+      of use is found in the fact that the thing and the sound are first
+      employed in a joint activity, as a means of setting up an active
+      connection between the child and a grownup. Similar ideas or meanings
+      spring up because both persons are engaged as partners in an action where
+      what each does depends upon and influences what the other does. If two
+      savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a certain signal meant
+      "move to the right" to the one who uttered it, and "move to the left" to
+      the one who heard it, they obviously could not successfully carry on their
+      hunt together. Understanding one another means that objects, including
+      sounds, have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common
+      pursuit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After sounds have got meaning through connection with other things
+      employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with other
+      like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for which
+      they stand are combined. Thus the words in which a child learns about,
+      say, the Greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were understood) by use
+      in an action having a common interest and end. They now arouse a new
+      meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads to rehearse imaginatively
+      the activities in which the helmet has its use. For the time being, the
+      one who understands the words "Greek helmet" becomes mentally a partner
+      with those who used the helmet. He engages, through his imagination, in a
+      shared activity. It is not easy to get the full meaning of words. Most
+      persons probably stop with the idea that "helmet" denotes a queer kind of
+      headgear a people called the Greeks once wore. We conclude, accordingly,
+      that the use of language to convey and acquire ideas is an extension and
+      refinement of the principle that things gain meaning by being used in a
+      shared experience or joint action; in no sense does it contravene that
+      principle. When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation,
+      either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli,
+      not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running
+      in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or
+      meaning. Thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the
+      act of writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the
+      person performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless
+      he realizes the meaning of what he does.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that social
+      environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of behavior in
+      individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse and strengthen
+      certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail certain
+      consequences. A child growing up in a family of musicians will inevitably
+      have whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and, relatively,
+      stimulated more than other impulses which might have been awakened in
+      another environment. Save as he takes an interest in music and gains a
+      certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he is unable to share in the
+      life of the group to which he belongs. Some kinds of participation in the
+      life of those with whom the individual is connected are inevitable; with
+      respect to them, the social environment exercises an educative or
+      formative influence unconsciously and apart from any set purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
+      (constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we have
+      spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the young into the
+      practices and beliefs of the group. Even in present-day societies, it
+      furnishes the basic nurture of even the most insistently schooled youth.
+      In accord with the interests and occupations of the group, certain things
+      become objects of high esteem; others of aversion. Association does not
+      create impulses or affection and dislike, but it furnishes the objects to
+      which they attach themselves. The way our group or class does things tends
+      to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus to prescribe the
+      directions and limits of observation and memory. What is strange or
+      foreign (that is to say outside the activities of the groups) tends to be
+      morally forbidden and intellectually suspect. It seems almost incredible
+      to us, for example, that things which we know very well could have escaped
+      recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing
+      congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native
+      intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes of
+      life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds
+      riveted to other things. Just as the senses require sensible objects to
+      stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and
+      imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the
+      demands set up by current social occupations. The main texture of
+      disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences.
+      What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the
+      capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their
+      grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more
+      productive of meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so subtle and
+      pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and mind, it may be
+      worth while to specify a few directions in which its effect is most
+      marked. First, the habits of language. Fundamental modes of speech, the
+      bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life,
+      carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.
+      The babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech habits
+      thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious teaching,
+      yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes of speech often
+      fall away, and individuals relapse into their really native tongue.
+      Secondly, manners. Example is notoriously more potent than precept. Good
+      manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding;
+      and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual
+      stimuli, not by conveying information. Despite the never ending play of
+      conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere and
+      spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners. And manners are
+      but minor morals. Moreover, in major morals, conscious instruction is
+      likely to be efficacious only in the degree in which it falls in with the
+      general "walk and conversation" of those who constitute the child's social
+      environment. Thirdly, good taste and esthetic appreciation. If the eye is
+      constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and
+      color, a standard of taste naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry,
+      unarranged, and over-decorated environment works for the deterioration of
+      taste, just as meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for
+      beauty. Against such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than
+      convey second-hand information as to what others think. Such taste never
+      becomes spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a labored
+      reminder of what those think to whom one has been taught to look up. To
+      say that the deeper standards of judgments of value are framed by the
+      situations into which a person habitually enters is not so much to mention
+      a fourth point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned.
+      We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is
+      worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not
+      conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we
+      take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which
+      determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these
+      habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which
+      have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with
+      others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. The School as a Special Environment. The chief importance of this
+      foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on willy-nilly is
+      to lead us to note that the only way in which adults consciously control
+      the kind of education which the immature get is by controlling the
+      environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. We never educate
+      directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit
+      chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for
+      the purpose makes a great difference. And any environment is a chance
+      environment so far as its educative influence is concerned unless it has
+      been deliberately regulated with reference to its educative effect. An
+      intelligent home differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the
+      habits of life and intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least
+      colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the development of children.
+      But schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed
+      with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of
+      their members.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are so
+      complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to
+      writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are even
+      more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked up in
+      accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form tends to
+      select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday
+      life. The achievements accumulated from generation to generation are
+      deposited in it even though some of them have fallen temporarily out of
+      use. Consequently as soon as a community depends to any considerable
+      extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its own immediate
+      generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools to insure adequate
+      transmission of all its resources. To take an obvious illustration: The
+      life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own,
+      and yet the ways in which they affect us do not present themselves on the
+      surface of our ordinary experiences. In similar fashion, peoples still
+      existing, but remote in space, British, Germans, Italians, directly
+      concern our own social affairs, but the nature of the interaction cannot
+      be understood without explicit statement and attention. In precisely
+      similar fashion, our daily associations cannot be trusted to make clear to
+      the young the part played in our activities by remote physical energies,
+      and by invisible structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is
+      instituted, the school, to care for such matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific, as
+      compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. First, a complex
+      civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. It has to be broken
+      up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a gradual and
+      graded way. The relationships of our present social life are so numerous
+      and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable position could
+      not readily share in many of the most important of them. Not sharing in
+      them, their meaning would not be communicated to him, would not become a
+      part of his own mental disposition. There would be no seeing the trees
+      because of the forest. Business, politics, art, science, religion, would
+      make all at once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome.
+      The first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide a
+      simplified environment. It selects the features which are fairly
+      fundamental and capable of being responded to by the young. Then it
+      establishes a progressive order, using the factors first acquired as means
+      of gaining insight into what is more complicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the second place, it is the business of the school environment to
+      eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing
+      environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a
+      purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but at
+      weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what
+      is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively
+      perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things from the
+      environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to counteract
+      their influence in the ordinary social environment. By selecting the best
+      for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the power of this best. As
+      a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not
+      to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only
+      such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency
+      for the accomplishment of this end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to balance
+      the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each
+      individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the
+      social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a
+      broader environment. Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to
+      be misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single
+      thing corresponding to the single word. As a matter of fact, a modern
+      society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each household
+      with its immediate extension of friends makes a society; the village or
+      street group of playmates is a community; each business group, each club,
+      is another. Passing beyond these more intimate groups, there is in a
+      country like our own a variety of races, religious affiliations, economic
+      divisions. Inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal political
+      unity, there are probably more communities, more differing customs,
+      traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control, than existed
+      in an entire continent at an earlier epoch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active dispositions
+      of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's household of thieves,
+      the prisoners in a jail, provide educative environments for those who
+      enter into their collective or conjoint activities, as truly as a church,
+      a labor union, a business partnership, or a political party. Each of them
+      is a mode of associated or community life, quite as much as is a family, a
+      town, or a state. There are also communities whose members have little or
+      no direct contact with one another, like the guild of artists, the
+      republic of letters, the members of the professional learned class
+      scattered over the face of the earth. For they have aims in common, and
+      the activity of each member is directly modified by knowledge of what
+      others are doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical
+      matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory, was
+      comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce,
+      transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the
+      United States are composed of a combination of different groups with
+      different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps
+      more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational
+      institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced
+      environment for the young. Only in this way can the centrifugal forces set
+      up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and the same political
+      unit be counteracted. The intermingling in the school of youth of
+      different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a
+      new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a
+      unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of
+      any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American
+      public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and
+      balanced appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition of
+      each individual the diverse influences of the various social environments
+      into which he enters. One code prevails in the family; another, on the
+      street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth, in the religious
+      association. As a person passes from one of the environments to another,
+      he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is in danger of being split
+      into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion for
+      different occasions. This danger imposes upon the school a steadying and
+      integrating office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM27" id="link2H_SUMM27">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The development within the young of the attitudes and
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society
+      cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and
+      knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary of the environment. The
+      environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are concerned in
+      the execution of the activity characteristic of a living being. The social
+      environment consists of all the activities of fellow beings that are bound
+      up in the carrying on of the activities of any one of its members. It is
+      truly educative in its effect in the degree in which an individual shares
+      or participates in some conjoint activity. By doing his share in the
+      associated activity, the individual appropriates the purpose which
+      actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and subject matters,
+      acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its emotional spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition comes,
+      without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the activities
+      of the various groups to which they may belong. As a society becomes more
+      complex, however, it is found necessary to provide a special social
+      environment which shall especially look after nurturing the capacities of
+      the immature. Three of the more important functions of this special
+      environment are: simplifying and ordering the factors of the disposition
+      it is wished to develop; purifying and idealizing the existing social
+      customs; creating a wider and better balanced environment than that by
+      which the young would be likely, if left to themselves, to be influenced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Three: Education as Direction
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Environment as Directive.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We now pass to one of the special forms which the general function of
+      education assumes: namely, that of direction, control, or guidance. Of
+      these three words, direction, control, and guidance, the last best conveys
+      the idea of assisting through cooperation the natural capacities of the
+      individuals guided; control conveys rather the notion of an energy brought
+      to bear from without and meeting some resistance from the one controlled;
+      direction is a more neutral term and suggests the fact that the active
+      tendencies of those directed are led in a certain continuous course,
+      instead of dispersing aimlessly. Direction expresses the basic function,
+      which tends at one extreme to become a guiding assistance and at another,
+      a regulation or ruling. But in any case, we must carefully avoid a meaning
+      sometimes read into the term "control." It is sometimes assumed,
+      explicitly or unconsciously, that an individual's tendencies are naturally
+      purely individualistic or egoistic, and thus antisocial. Control then
+      denotes the process by which he is brought to subordinate his natural
+      impulses to public or common ends. Since, by conception, his own nature is
+      quite alien to this process and opposes it rather than helps it, control
+      has in this view a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it. Systems of
+      government and theories of the state have been built upon this notion, and
+      it has seriously affected educational ideas and practices. But there is no
+      ground for any such view. Individuals are certainly interested, at times,
+      in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of
+      others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the
+      whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part in
+      conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as a community
+      would be possible. And there would not even be any one interested in
+      furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of harmony unless he thought
+      that thereby he could gain some personal advantage. Control, in truth,
+      means only an emphatic form of direction of powers, and covers the
+      regulation gained by an individual through his own efforts quite as much
+      as that brought about when others take the lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite it
+      or stir it up, but directs it toward an object. Put the other way around,
+      a response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were, against being
+      disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. It meets the stimulus,
+      and corresponds with it. There is an adaptation of the stimulus and
+      response to each other. A light is the stimulus to the eye to see
+      something, and the business of the eye is to see. If the eyes are open and
+      there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a condition of the
+      fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an outside
+      interruption. To some extent, then, all direction or control is a guiding
+      of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully what some
+      organ is already tending to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two respects. In
+      the first place, except in the case of a small number of instincts, the
+      stimuli to which an immature human being is subject are not sufficiently
+      definite to call out, in the beginning, specific responses. There is
+      always a great deal of superfluous energy aroused. This energy may be
+      wasted, going aside from the point; it may also go against the successful
+      performance of an act. It does harm by getting in the way. Compare the
+      behavior of a beginner in riding a bicycle with that of the expert. There
+      is little axis of direction in the energies put forth; they are largely
+      dispersive and centrifugal. Direction involves a focusing and fixating of
+      action in order that it may be truly a response, and this requires an
+      elimination of unnecessary and confusing movements. In the second place,
+      although no activity can be produced in which the person does not
+      cooperate to some extent, yet a response may be of a kind which does not
+      fit into the sequence and continuity of action. A person boxing may dodge
+      a particular blow successfully, but in such a way as to expose himself the
+      next instant to a still harder blow. Adequate control means that the
+      successive acts are brought into a continuous order; each act not only
+      meets its immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, direction is both simultaneous and successive. At a given time,
+      it requires that, from all the tendencies that are partially called out,
+      those be selected which center energy upon the point of need.
+      Successively, it requires that each act be balanced with those which
+      precede and come after, so that order of activity is achieved. Focusing
+      and ordering are thus the two aspects of direction, one spatial, the other
+      temporal. The first insures hitting the mark; the second keeps the balance
+      required for further action. Obviously, it is not possible to separate
+      them in practice as we have distinguished them in idea. Activity must be
+      centered at a given time in such a way as to prepare for what comes next.
+      The problem of the immediate response is complicated by one's having to be
+      on the lookout for future occurrences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two conclusions emerge from these general statements. On the one hand,
+      purely external direction is impossible. The environment can at most only
+      supply stimuli to call out responses. These responses proceed from
+      tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even when a person is
+      frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because
+      the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having
+      it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him
+      than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes. While the
+      customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli which direct as well as evoke
+      the activities of the young, the young, after all, participate in the
+      direction which their actions finally take. In the strict sense, nothing
+      can be forced upon them or into them. To overlook this fact means to
+      distort and pervert human nature. To take into account the contribution
+      made by the existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct
+      them economically and wisely. Speaking accurately, all direction is but
+      re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another
+      channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in
+      operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and regulations of
+      others may be short-sighted. It may accomplish its immediate effect, but
+      at the expense of throwing the subsequent action of the person out of
+      balance. A threat may, for example, prevent a person from doing something
+      to which he is naturally inclined by arousing fear of disagreeable
+      consequences if he persists. But he may be left in the position which
+      exposes him later on to influences which will lead him to do even worse
+      things. His instincts of cunning and slyness may be aroused, so that
+      things henceforth appeal to him on the side of evasion and trickery more
+      than would otherwise have been the case. Those engaged in directing the
+      actions of others are always in danger of overlooking the importance of
+      the sequential development of those they direct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Modes of Social Direction. Adults are naturally most conscious of
+      directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so to do.
+      As a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find themselves
+      resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish them to do. But
+      the more permanent and influential modes of control are those which
+      operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate
+      intention on our part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. When others are not doing what we would like them to or are threatening
+      disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of controlling them and of
+      the influences by which they are controlled. In such cases, our control
+      becomes most direct, and at this point we are most likely to make the
+      mistakes just spoken of. We are even likely to take the influence of
+      superior force for control, forgetting that while we may lead a horse to
+      water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a
+      penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. In all such cases of immediate
+      action upon others, we need to discriminate between physical results and
+      moral results. A person may be in such a condition that forcible feeding
+      or enforced confinement is necessary for his own good. A child may have to
+      be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt.
+      But no improvement of disposition, no educative effect, need follow. A
+      harsh and commanding tone may be effectual in keeping a child away from
+      the fire, and the same desirable physical effect will follow as if he had
+      been snatched away. But there may be no more obedience of a moral sort in
+      one case than in the other. A man can be prevented from breaking into
+      other persons' houses by shutting him up, but shutting him up may not
+      alter his disposition to commit burglary. When we confuse a physical with
+      an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the person's
+      own participating disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby
+      of developing within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the
+      right way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control should be
+      limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive that the one
+      performing them has no means of foreseeing their outcome. If a person
+      cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of
+      understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more
+      experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In
+      such a state, every act is alike to him. Whatever moves him does move him,
+      and that is all there is to it. In some cases, it is well to permit him to
+      experiment, and to discover the consequences for himself in order that he
+      may act intelligently next time under similar circumstances. But some
+      courses of action are too discommoding and obnoxious to others to allow of
+      this course being pursued. Direct disapproval is now resorted to. Shaming,
+      ridicule, disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used. Or contrary
+      tendencies in the child are appealed to to divert him from his troublesome
+      line of behavior. His sensitiveness to approbation, his hope of winning
+      favor by an agreeable act, are made use of to induce action in another
+      direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. These methods of control are so obvious (because so intentionally
+      employed) that it would hardly be worth while to mention them if it were
+      not that notice may now be taken, by way of contrast, of the other more
+      important and permanent mode of control. This other method resides in the
+      ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is associated, use
+      things; the instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own ends.
+      The very existence of the social medium in which an individual lives,
+      moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of directing his
+      activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail what is
+      meant by the social environment. We are given to separating from each
+      other the physical and social environments in which we live. The
+      separation is responsible on one hand for an exaggeration of the moral
+      importance of the more direct or personal modes of control of which we
+      have been speaking; and on the other hand for an exaggeration, in current
+      psychology and philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of contact
+      with a purely physical environment. There is not, in fact, any such thing
+      as the direct influence of one human being on another apart from use of
+      the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke, a
+      word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change.
+      Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the attitude of
+      another. Comparatively speaking, such modes of influence may be regarded
+      as personal. The physical medium is reduced to a mere means of personal
+      contact. In contrast with such direct modes of mutual influence, stand
+      associations in common pursuits involving the use of things as means and
+      as measures of results. Even if the mother never told her daughter to help
+      her, or never rebuked her for not helping, the child would be subjected to
+      direction in her activities by the mere fact that she was engaged, along
+      with the parent, in the household life. Imitation, emulation, the need of
+      working together, enforce control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must reach the
+      thing in order to get it. Where there is giving there must be taking. The
+      way the child handles the thing after it is got, the use to which it is
+      put, is surely influenced by the fact that the child has watched the
+      mother. When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as
+      natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it
+      finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply
+      such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has
+      a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to
+      the activities of the young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously about
+      participating in a joint activity as the chief way of forming disposition.
+      We have explicitly added, however, the recognition of the part played in
+      the joint activity by the use of things. The philosophy of learning has
+      been unduly dominated by a false psychology. It is frequently stated that
+      a person learns by merely having the qualities of things impressed upon
+      his mind through the gateway of the senses. Having received a store of
+      sensory impressions, association or some power of mental synthesis is
+      supposed to combine them into ideas&mdash;into things with a meaning. An
+      object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is supposed to convey different
+      impressions of color, shape, size, hardness, smell, taste, etc., which
+      aggregated together constitute the characteristic meaning of each thing.
+      But as matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to which the thing is
+      put, because of its specific qualities, which supplies the meaning with
+      which it is identified. A chair is a thing which is put to one use; a
+      table, a thing which is employed for another purpose; an orange is a thing
+      which costs so much, which is grown in warm climes, which is eaten, and
+      when eaten has an agreeable odor and refreshing taste, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental
+      act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning; the
+      former does not. A noise may make me jump without my mind being
+      implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get water and put out a blaze,
+      I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant need of
+      being extinguished. I bump into a stone, and kick it to one side purely
+      physically. I put it to one side for fear some one will stumble upon it,
+      intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has. I am startled
+      by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not&mdash;more likely, if I do
+      not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud or to myself, that is
+      thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a meaning. My behavior has a
+      mental quality. When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend,
+      propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously,
+      unintelligently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or
+      controlled. But in the merely blind response, direction is also blind.
+      There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated responses to
+      recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. All of us
+      have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were
+      formed without our knowing what we were about. Consequently they possess
+      us, rather than we them. They move us; they control us. Unless we become
+      aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the worth of the
+      result, we do not control them. A child might be made to bow every time he
+      met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would
+      finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of recognition
+      or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view&mdash;as
+      having a certain meaning. And not till he knew what he was about and
+      performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to be
+      "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an idea of a
+      thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. It is to be able
+      to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of
+      action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of the action
+      of the thing upon us and of our action upon it. To have the same ideas
+      about things which others have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to
+      be really members of a social group, is therefore to attach the same
+      meanings to things and to acts which others attach. Otherwise, there is no
+      common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared activity,
+      each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and
+      vice-versa. That is, the activity of each is placed in the same inclusive
+      situation. To pull at a rope at which others happen to be pulling is not a
+      shared or conjoint activity, unless the pulling is done with knowledge
+      that others are pulling and for the sake of either helping or hindering
+      what they are doing. A pin may pass in the course of its manufacture
+      through the hands of many persons. But each may do his part without
+      knowledge of what others do or without any reference to what they do; each
+      may operate simply for the sake of a separate result&mdash;his own pay.
+      There is, in this case, no common consequence to which the several acts
+      are referred, and hence no genuine intercourse or association, in spite of
+      juxtaposition, and in spite of the fact that their respective doings
+      contribute to a single outcome. But if each views the consequences of his
+      own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into
+      account the consequences of their behavior upon himself, then there is a
+      common mind; a common intent in behavior. There is an understanding set up
+      between the different contributors; and this common understanding controls
+      the action of each. Suppose that conditions were so arranged that one
+      person automatically caught a ball and then threw it to another person who
+      caught and automatically returned it; and that each so acted without
+      knowing where the ball came from or went to. Clearly, such action would be
+      without point or meaning. It might be physically controlled, but it would
+      not be socially directed. But suppose that each becomes aware of what the
+      other is doing, and becomes interested in the other's action and thereby
+      interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the action of the
+      other. The behavior of each would then be intelligent; and socially
+      intelligent and guided. Take one more example of a less imaginary kind. An
+      infant is hungry, and cries while food is prepared in his presence. If he
+      does not connect his own state with what others are doing, nor what they
+      are doing with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with increasing
+      impatience to his own increasing discomfort. He is physically controlled
+      by his own organic state. But when he makes a back and forth reference,
+      his whole attitude changes. He takes an interest, as we say; he takes note
+      and watches what others are doing. He no longer reacts just to his own
+      hunger, but behaves in the light of what others are doing for its
+      prospective satisfaction. In that way, he also no longer just gives way to
+      hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or recognizes, or identifies his
+      own state. It becomes an object for him. His attitude toward it becomes in
+      some degree intelligent. And in such noting of the meaning of the actions
+      of others and of his own state, he is socially directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. One of them
+      has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do not influence
+      mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are implicated in action
+      for prospective consequences. The other point is persons modify one
+      another's dispositions only through the special use they make of physical
+      conditions. Consider first the case of so-called expressive movements to
+      which others are sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning, clinching of
+      fists, natural gestures of all kinds. In themselves, these are not
+      expressive. They are organic parts of a person's attitude. One does not
+      blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but because the
+      capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli. But others use the
+      blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of the muscles of a person
+      with whom they are associated, as a sign of the state in which that person
+      finds himself, and as an indication of what course to pursue. The frown
+      signifies an imminent rebuke for which one must prepare, or an uncertainty
+      and hesitation which one must, if possible, remove by saying or doing
+      something to restore confidence. A man at some distance is waving his arms
+      wildly. One has only to preserve an attitude of detached indifference, and
+      the motions of the other person will be on the level of any remote
+      physical change which we happen to note. If we have no concern or
+      interest, the waving of the arms is as meaningless to us as the gyrations
+      of the arms of a windmill. But if interest is aroused, we begin to
+      participate. We refer his action to something we are doing ourselves or
+      that we should do. We have to judge the meaning of his act in order to
+      decide what to do. Is he beckoning for help? Is he warning us of an
+      explosion to be set off, against which we should guard ourselves? In one
+      case, his action means to run toward him; in the other case, to run away.
+      In any case, it is the change he effects in the physical environment which
+      is a sign to us of how we should conduct ourselves. Our action is socially
+      controlled because we endeavor to refer what we are to do to the same
+      situation in which he is acting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Language is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this joint
+      reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation.
+      Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social direction. But
+      language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that it
+      takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of physical
+      means to accomplish results. A child sees persons with whom he lives using
+      chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws, plows, horses, money in certain ways.
+      If he has any share at all in what they are doing, he is led thereby to
+      use things in the same way, or to use other things in a way which will fit
+      in. If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign that he is to sit in
+      it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to extend his; and so on in
+      a never ending stream of detail. The prevailing habits of using the
+      products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by all
+      odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control. When children
+      go to school, they already have "minds"&mdash;they have knowledge and
+      dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to through the use of
+      language. But these "minds" are the organized habits of intelligent
+      response which they have previously required by putting things to use in
+      connection with the way other persons use things. The control is
+      inescapable; it saturates disposition. The net outcome of the discussion
+      is that the fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual.
+      It is not "moral" in the sense that a person is moved by direct personal
+      appeal from others, important as is this method at critical junctures. It
+      consists in the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects
+      in correspondence with others, whether by way of cooperation and
+      assistance or rivalry and competition. Mind as a concrete thing is
+      precisely the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them;
+      a socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to
+      which they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this
+      sense is the method of social control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the defects of a
+      psychology of learning which places the individual mind naked, as it were,
+      in contact with physical objects, and which believes that knowledge,
+      ideas, and beliefs accrue from their interaction. Only comparatively
+      recently has the predominating influence of association with fellow beings
+      in the formation of mental and moral disposition been perceived. Even now
+      it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an alleged method of
+      learning by direct contact with things, and as merely supplementing
+      knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of persons. The purport of
+      our discussion is that such a view makes an absurd and impossible
+      separation between persons and things. Interaction with things may form
+      habits of external adjustment. But it leads to activity having a meaning
+      and conscious intent only when things are used to produce a result. And
+      the only way one person can modify the mind of another is by using
+      physical conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering
+      activity from him. Such are our two main conclusions. It is desirable to
+      amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast with the theory which
+      uses a psychology of supposed direct relationships of human beings to one
+      another as an adjunct to the psychology of the supposed direct relation of
+      an individual to physical objects. In substance, this so-called social
+      psychology has been built upon the notion of imitation. Consequently, we
+      shall discuss the nature and role of imitation in the formation of mental
+      disposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to this theory, social control of individuals rests upon the
+      instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of
+      others. The latter serve as models. The imitative instinct is so strong
+      that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by
+      others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behavior. According to
+      our theory, what is here called imitation is a misleading name for
+      partaking with others in a use of things which leads to consequences of
+      common interest. The basic error in the current notion of imitation is
+      that it puts the cart before the horse. It takes an effect for the cause
+      of the effect. There can be no doubt that individuals in forming a social
+      group are like-minded; they understand one another. They tend to act with
+      the same controlling ideas, beliefs, and intentions, given similar
+      circumstances. Looked at from without, they might be said to be engaged in
+      "imitating" one another. In the sense that they are doing much the same
+      sort of thing in much the same sort of way, this would be true enough. But
+      "imitation" throws no light upon why they so act; it repeats the fact as
+      an explanation of itself. It is an explanation of the same order as the
+      famous saying that opium puts men to sleep because of its dormitive power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Objective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in being in
+      conformity with others are baptized by the name imitation. This social
+      fact is then taken for a psychological force, which produced the likeness.
+      A considerable portion of what is called imitation is simply the fact that
+      persons being alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli.
+      Quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted get angry and
+      attack the insulter. This statement may be met by citing the undoubted
+      fact that response to an insult takes place in different ways in groups
+      having different customs. In one group, it may be met by recourse to
+      fisticuffs, in another by a challenge to a duel, in a third by an
+      exhibition of contemptuous disregard. This happens, so it is said, because
+      the model set for imitation is different. But there is no need to appeal
+      to imitation. The mere fact that customs are different means that the
+      actual stimuli to behavior are different. Conscious instruction plays a
+      part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a large influence. Still more
+      effective is the fact that unless an individual acts in the way current in
+      his group, he is literally out of it. He can associate with others on
+      intimate and equal terms only by behaving in the way in which they behave.
+      The pressure that comes from the fact that one is let into the group
+      action by acting in one way and shut out by acting in another way is
+      unremitting. What is called the effect of imitation is mainly the product
+      of conscious instruction and of the selective influence exercised by the
+      unconscious confirmations and ratifications of those with whom one
+      associates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls it
+      back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not just the sight of the
+      ball, or the sight of the other rolling it. It is the situation&mdash;the
+      game which is playing. The response is not merely rolling the ball back;
+      it is rolling it back so that the other one may catch and return it,&mdash;that
+      the game may continue. The "pattern" or model is not the action of the
+      other person. The whole situation requires that each should adapt his
+      action in view of what the other person has done and is to do. Imitation
+      may come in but its role is subordinate. The child has an interest on his
+      own account; he wants to keep it going. He may then note how the other
+      person catches and holds the ball in order to improve his own acts. He
+      imitates the means of doing, not the end or thing to be done. And he
+      imitates the means because he wishes, on his own behalf, as part of his
+      own initiative, to take an effective part in the game. One has only to
+      consider how completely the child is dependent from his earliest days for
+      successful execution of his purposes upon fitting his acts into those of
+      others to see what a premium is put upon behaving as others behave, and of
+      developing an understanding of them in order that he may so behave. The
+      pressure for likemindedness in action from this source is so great that it
+      is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation. As matter of fact, imitation
+      of ends, as distinct from imitation of means which help to reach ends, is
+      a superficial and transitory affair which leaves little effect upon
+      disposition. Idiots are especially apt at this kind of imitation; it
+      affects outward acts but not the meaning of their performance. When we
+      find children engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging
+      them (as we would do if it were an important means of social control) we
+      are more likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy cats.
+      Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent
+      act. It involves close observation, and judicious selection of what will
+      enable one to do better something which he already is trying to do. Used
+      for a purpose, the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become
+      a factor in the development of effective action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing the
+      conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of a certain
+      mental disposition; a way of understanding objects, events, and acts which
+      enables one to participate effectively in associated activities. Only the
+      friction engendered by meeting resistance from others leads to the view
+      that it takes place by forcing a line of action contrary to natural
+      inclinations. Only failure to take account of the situations in which
+      persons are mutually concerned (or interested in acting responsively to
+      one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief agent in promoting
+      social control.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group perpetuate
+      savagery, and a civilized group civilization? Doubtless the first answer
+      to occur to mind is because savages are savages; being of low-grade
+      intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. But careful study has made
+      it doubtful whether their native capacities are appreciably inferior to
+      those of civilized man. It has made it certain that native differences are
+      not sufficient to account for the difference in culture. In a sense the
+      mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their
+      backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict
+      their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to
+      mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope
+      of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and
+      imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. Lack of
+      control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects
+      enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of natural resources
+      are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The advance
+      of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces and objects
+      have been transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for
+      securing ends. We start not so much with superior capacities as with
+      superior stimuli for evocation and direction of our capacities. The savage
+      deals largely with crude stimuli; we have weighted stimuli. Prior human
+      efforts have made over natural conditions. As they originally existed they
+      were indifferent to human endeavors. Every domesticated plant and animal,
+      every tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article,
+      every esthetic decoration, every work of art means a transformation of
+      conditions once hostile or indifferent to characteristic human activities
+      into friendly and favoring conditions. Because the activities of children
+      today are controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are
+      able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow,
+      tortured ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes
+      which have preceded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our system
+      of roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat, light,
+      and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every purpose,
+      do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a civilization.
+      But the uses to which they are put are civilization, and without the
+      things the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise necessarily devoted to
+      wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment and securing a
+      precarious protection against its inclemencies is freed. A body of
+      knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which is guaranteed by the
+      fact that the physical equipment in which it is incarnated leads to
+      results that square with the other facts of nature. Thus these appliances
+      of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief protection, against a
+      recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and
+      infertile imaginings about nature in which so much of the best
+      intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we add one other factor,
+      namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the interests
+      of a truly shared or associated life, then the appliances become the
+      positive resources of civilization. If Greece, with a scant tithe of our
+      material resources, achieved a worthy and noble intellectual and artistic
+      career, it is because Greece operated for social ends such resources as it
+      had. But whatever the situation, whether one of barbarism or civilization,
+      whether one of stinted control of physical forces, or of partial
+      enslavement to a mechanism not yet made tributary to a shared experience,
+      things as they enter into action furnish the educative conditions of daily
+      life and direct the formation of mental and moral disposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially
+      selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials
+      and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. Since
+      language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to
+      the maximum transformation in the interests of social life&mdash;physical
+      things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools&mdash;it
+      is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other
+      appliances. By it we are led to share vicariously in past human
+      experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of the present. We
+      are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate situations. In
+      countless ways, language condenses meanings that record social outcomes
+      and presage social outlooks. So significant is it of a liberal share in
+      what is worth while in life that unlettered and uneducated have become
+      almost synonymous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its dangers&mdash;dangers
+      which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice. Why is it, in spite
+      of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption,
+      are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice?
+      That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active
+      and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in
+      practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to
+      the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is
+      lectured; it is written about. But its enactment into practice requires
+      that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with
+      tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely attained. It requires
+      that methods of instruction and administration be modified to allow and to
+      secure direct and continuous occupations with things. Not that the use of
+      language as an educational resource should lessen; but that its use should
+      be more vital and fruitful by having its normal connection with shared
+      activities. "These things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the
+      others undone." And for the school "these things" mean equipment with the
+      instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in
+      the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a
+      pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go to
+      school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most
+      adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When treating it
+      as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which comes
+      from sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the effort at
+      isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim. We may secure
+      motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an individual by himself,
+      but we cannot thereby get him to understand the meaning which things have
+      in the life of which he is a part. We may secure technical specialized
+      ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence
+      which directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in a joint
+      activity, where one person's use of material and tools is consciously
+      referred to the use other persons are making of their capacities and
+      appliances, is a social direction of disposition attained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM3" id="link2H_SUMM3">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      the life-customs of the group into which they are born. Consequently they
+      have to be directed or guided. This control is not the same thing as
+      physical compulsion; it consists in centering the impulses acting at any
+      one time upon some specific end and in introducing an order of continuity
+      into the sequence of acts. The action of others is always influenced by
+      deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions. But in some cases as
+      in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and disapprovals, the stimuli
+      proceed from persons with a direct view to influencing action. Since in
+      such cases we are most conscious of controlling the action of others, we
+      are likely to exaggerate the importance of this sort of control at the
+      expense of a more permanent and effective method. The basic control
+      resides in the nature of the situations in which the young take part. In
+      social situations the young have to refer their way of acting to what
+      others are doing and make it fit in. This directs their action to a common
+      result, and gives an understanding common to the participants. For all
+      mean the same thing, even when performing different acts. This common
+      understanding of the means and ends of action is the essence of social
+      control. It is indirect, or emotional and intellectual, not direct or
+      personal. Moreover it is intrinsic to the disposition of the person, not
+      external and coercive. To achieve this internal control through identity
+      of interest and understanding is the business of education. While books
+      and conversation can do much, these agencies are usually relied upon too
+      exclusively. Schools require for their full efficiency more opportunity
+      for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so that they
+      may acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and
+      appliances used.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Four: Education as Growth
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Conditions of Growth.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In directing the activities of the young, society determines its own
+      future in determining that of the young. Since the young at a given time
+      will at some later date compose the society of that period, the latter's
+      nature will largely turn upon the direction children's activities were
+      given at an earlier period. This cumulative movement of action toward a
+      later result is what is meant by growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The primary condition of growth is immaturity. This may seem to be a mere
+      truism&mdash;saying that a being can develop only in some point in which
+      he is undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the word immaturity means
+      something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is noteworthy that the
+      terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one sense being
+      negative, the other positive. Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like
+      the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by potentiality a merely
+      dormant or quiescent state&mdash;a capacity to become something different
+      under external influences. But we also mean by capacity an ability, a
+      power; and by potentiality potency, force. Now when we say that immaturity
+      means the possibility of growth, we are not referring to absence of powers
+      which may exist at a later time; we express a force positively present&mdash;the
+      ability to develop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something
+      which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to
+      regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat it
+      simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed
+      standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not, and will not
+      have till he becomes a man. This comparative standpoint is legitimate
+      enough for some purposes, but if we make it final, the question arises
+      whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption. Children, if they
+      could express themselves articulately and sincerely, would tell a
+      different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for the conviction
+      that for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults must become as
+      little children. The seriousness of the assumption of the negative quality
+      of the possibilities of immaturity is apparent when we reflect that it
+      sets up as an ideal and standard a static end. The fulfillment of growing
+      is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is to say, an Ungrowth,
+      something which is no longer growing. The futility of the assumption is
+      seen in the fact that every adult resents the imputation of having no
+      further possibilities of growth; and so far as he finds that they are
+      closed to him mourns the fact as evidence of loss, instead of falling back
+      on the achieved as adequate manifestation of power. Why an unequal measure
+      for child and man?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a
+      positive force or ability,&mdash;the pouter to grow. We do not have to
+      draw out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational
+      doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager and
+      impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is
+      something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility
+      gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity,
+      dependence and plasticity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive,
+      still more absurd as a power. Yet if helplessness were all there were in
+      dependence, no development could ever take place. A merely impotent being
+      has to be carried, forever, by others. The fact that dependence is
+      accompanied by growth in ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into
+      parasitism, suggests that it is already something constructive. Being
+      merely sheltered by others would not promote growth. For
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) it would only build a wall around impotence. With reference to the
+      physical world, the child is helpless. He lacks at birth and for a long
+      time thereafter power to make his way physically, to make his own living.
+      If he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive an hour. On this
+      side his helplessness is almost complete. The young of the brutes are
+      immeasurably his superiors. He is physically weak and not able to turn the
+      strength which he possesses to coping with the physical environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however,
+      some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
+      animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an
+      early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound up
+      with the life of those about them. They are compelled, so to speak, to
+      have physical gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. Human
+      infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
+      because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk and think as if they
+      simply happened to be physically in a social environment; as if social
+      forces exclusively existed in the adults who take care of them, they being
+      passive recipients. If it were said that children are themselves
+      marvelously endowed with power to enlist the cooperative attention of
+      others, this would be thought to be a backhanded way of saying that others
+      are marvelously attentive to the needs of children. But observation shows
+      that children are gifted with an equipment of the first order for social
+      intercourse. Few grown-up persons retain all of the flexible and sensitive
+      ability of children to vibrate sympathetically with the attitudes and
+      doings of those about them. Inattention to physical things (going with
+      incapacity to control them) is accompanied by a corresponding
+      intensification of interest and attention as to the doings of people. The
+      native mechanism of the child and his impulses all tend to facile social
+      responsiveness. The statement that children, before adolescence, are
+      egotistically self-centered, even if it were true, would not contradict
+      the truth of this statement. It would simply indicate that their social
+      responsiveness is employed on their own behalf, not that it does not
+      exist. But the statement is not true as matter of fact. The facts which
+      are cited in support of the alleged pure egoism of children really show
+      the intensity and directness with which they go to their mark. If the ends
+      which form the mark seem narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because
+      adults (by means of a similar engrossment in their day) have mastered
+      these ends, which have consequently ceased to interest them. Most of the
+      remainder of children's alleged native egoism is simply an egoism which
+      runs counter to an adult's egoism. To a grown-up person who is too
+      absorbed in his own affairs to take an interest in children's affairs,
+      children doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a
+      weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that
+      increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an
+      individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more
+      self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes
+      an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an
+      illusion of being really able to stand and act alone&mdash;an unnamed form
+      of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable
+      suffering of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
+      constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different from the
+      plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a capacity to take on change of form
+      in accord with external pressure. It lies near the pliable elasticity by
+      which some persons take on the color of their surroundings while retaining
+      their own bent. But it is something deeper than this. It is essentially
+      the ability to learn from experience; the power to retain from one
+      experience something which is of avail in coping with the difficulties of
+      a later situation. This means power to modify actions on the basis of the
+      results of prior experiences, the power to develop dispositions. Without
+      it, the acquisition of habits is impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and especially
+      the human young, have to learn to utilize their instinctive reactions. The
+      human being is born with a greater number of instinctive tendencies than
+      other animals. But the instincts of the lower animals perfect themselves
+      for appropriate action at an early period after birth, while most of those
+      of the human infant are of little account just as they stand. An original
+      specialized power of adjustment secures immediate efficiency, but, like a
+      railway ticket, it is good for one route only. A being who, in order to
+      use his eyes, ears, hands, and legs, has to experiment in making varied
+      combinations of their reactions, achieves a control that is flexible and
+      varied. A chick, for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few
+      hours after hatching. This means that definite coordinations of activities
+      of the eyes in seeing and of the body and head in striking are perfected
+      in a few trials. An infant requires about six months to be able to gauge
+      with approximate accuracy the action in reaching which will coordinate
+      with his visual activities; to be able, that is, to tell whether he can
+      reach a seen object and just how to execute the reaching. As a result, the
+      chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original endowment. The
+      infant has the advantage of the multitude of instinctive tentative
+      reactions and of the experiences that accompany them, even though he is at
+      a temporary disadvantage because they cross one another. In learning an
+      action, instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity learns to
+      vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them, according to change
+      of circumstances. A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the
+      fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other
+      situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires
+      a habit of learning. He learns to learn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and variable
+      control has been summed up in the doctrine of the significance of
+      prolonged infancy. 1 This prolongation is significant from the standpoint
+      of the adult members of the group as well as from that of the young. The
+      presence of dependent and learning beings is a stimulus to nurture and
+      affection. The need for constant continued care was probably a chief means
+      in transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent unions. It
+      certainly was a chief influence in forming habits of affectionate and
+      sympathetic watchfulness; that constructive interest in the well-being of
+      others which is essential to associated life. Intellectually, this moral
+      development meant the introduction of many new objects of attention; it
+      stimulated foresight and planning for the future. Thus there is a
+      reciprocal influence. Increasing complexity of social life requires a
+      longer period of infancy in which to acquire the needed powers; this
+      prolongation of dependence means prolongation of plasticity, or power of
+      acquiring variable and novel modes of control. Hence it provides a further
+      push to social progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Habits as Expressions of Growth. We have already noted that plasticity
+      is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior experience factors
+      which modify subsequent activities. This signifies the capacity to acquire
+      habits, or develop definite dispositions. We have now to consider the
+      salient features of habits. In the first place, a habit is a form of
+      executive skill, of efficiency in doing. A habit means an ability to use
+      natural conditions as means to ends. It is an active control of the
+      environment through control of the organs of action. We are perhaps apt to
+      emphasize the control of the body at the expense of control of the
+      environment. We think of walking, talking, playing the piano, the
+      specialized skills characteristic of the etcher, the surgeon, the
+      bridge-builder, as if they were simply ease, deftness, and accuracy on the
+      part of the organism. They are that, of course; but the measure of the
+      value of these qualities lies in the economical and effective control of
+      the environment which they secure. To be able to walk is to have certain
+      properties of nature at our disposal&mdash;and so with all other habits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the acquisition of
+      those habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his
+      environment. The definition expresses an essential phase of growth. But it
+      is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense of control
+      of means for achieving ends. If we think of a habit simply as a change
+      wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change consists in
+      ability to effect subsequent changes in the environment, we shall be led
+      to think of "adjustment" as a conformity to environment as wax conforms to
+      the seal which impresses it. The environment is thought of as something
+      fixed, providing in its fixity the end and standard of changes taking
+      place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting ourselves to this fixity
+      of external conditions. 2 Habit as habituation is indeed something
+      relatively passive; we get used to our surroundings&mdash;to our clothing,
+      our shoes, and gloves; to the atmosphere as long as it is fairly equable;
+      to our daily associates, etc. Conformity to the environment, a change
+      wrought in the organism without reference to ability to modify
+      surroundings, is a marked trait of such habituations. Aside from the fact
+      that we are not entitled to carry over the traits of such adjustments
+      (which might well be called accommodations, to mark them off from active
+      adjustments) into habits of active use of our surroundings, two features
+      of habituations are worth notice. In the first place, we get used to
+      things by first using them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider getting used to a strange city. At first, there is excessive
+      stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response. Gradually certain
+      stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are degraded.
+      We can say either that we do not respond to them any longer, or more truly
+      that we have effected a persistent response to them&mdash;an equilibrium
+      of adjustment. This means, in the second place, that this enduring
+      adjustment supplies the background upon which are made specific
+      adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never interested in changing the
+      whole environment; there is much that we take for granted and accept just
+      as it already is. Upon this background our activities focus at certain
+      points in an endeavor to introduce needed changes. Habituation is thus our
+      adjustment to an environment which at the time we are not concerned with
+      modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active habits. Adaptation,
+      in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the environment to our own
+      activities as of our activities to the environment. A savage tribe manages
+      to live on a desert plain. It adapts itself. But its adaptation involves a
+      maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a
+      maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control, of
+      subjection to use. A civilized people enters upon the scene. It also
+      adapts itself. It introduces irrigation; it searches the world for plants
+      and animals that will flourish under such conditions; it improves, by
+      careful selection, those which are growing there. As a consequence, the
+      wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the
+      civilized man has habits which transform the environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its executive and
+      motor phase. It means formation of intellectual and emotional disposition
+      as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency of action. Any
+      habit marks an inclination&mdash;an active preference and choice for the
+      conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not wait, Micawber-like,
+      for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy; it actively seeks for
+      occasions to pass into full operation. If its expression is unduly
+      blocked, inclination shows itself in uneasiness and intense craving. A
+      habit also marks an intellectual disposition. Where there is a habit,
+      there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment to which action is
+      applied. There is a definite way of understanding the situations in which
+      the habit operates. Modes of thought, of observation and reflection, enter
+      as forms of skill and of desire into the habits that make a man an
+      engineer, an architect, a physician, or a merchant. In unskilled forms of
+      labor, the intellectual factors are at minimum precisely because the
+      habits involved are not of a high grade. But there are habits of judging
+      and reasoning as truly as of handling a tool, painting a picture, or
+      conducting an experiment. Such statements are, however, understatements.
+      The habits of mind involved in habits of the eye and hand supply the
+      latter with their significance. Above all, the intellectual element in a
+      habit fixes the relation of the habit to varied and elastic use, and hence
+      to continued growth. We speak of fixed habits. Well, the phrase may mean
+      powers so well established that their possessor always has them as
+      resources when needed. But the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine
+      ways, with loss of freshness, open-mindedness, and originality. Fixity of
+      habit may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our
+      having a free hold upon things. This fact explains two points in a common
+      notion about habits: their identification with mechanical and external
+      modes of action to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the
+      tendency to give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad habits."
+      Many a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his chosen
+      profession called a habit, and would naturally think of his use of
+      tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the meaning of habit. A
+      habit is to him something which has a hold on him, something not easily
+      thrown off even though judgment condemn it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into
+      ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which
+      intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking
+      habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that they are
+      opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation and decision. As we
+      have seen, the acquiring of habits is due to an original plasticity of our
+      natures: to our ability to vary responses till we find an appropriate and
+      efficient way of acting. Routine habits, and habits that possess us
+      instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to plasticity.
+      They mark the close of power to vary. There can be no doubt of the
+      tendency of organic plasticity, of the physiological basis, to lessen with
+      growing years. The instinctively mobile and eagerly varying action of
+      childhood, the love of new stimuli and new developments, too easily passes
+      into a "settling down," which means aversion to change and a resting on
+      past achievements. Only an environment which secures the full use of
+      intelligence in the process of forming habits can counteract this
+      tendency. Of course, the same hardening of the organic conditions affects
+      the physiological structures which are involved in thinking. But this fact
+      only indicates the need of persistent care to see to it that the function
+      of intelligence is invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted
+      method which falls back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure
+      external efficiency of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought,
+      marks a deliberate closing in of surroundings upon growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development. We have had
+      so far but little to say in this chapter about education. We have been
+      occupied with the conditions and implications of growth. If our
+      conclusions are justified, they carry with them, however, definite
+      educational consequences. When it is said that education is development,
+      everything depends upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion
+      is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is life.
+      Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the
+      educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and that
+      (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing,
+      reconstructing, transforming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. Development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that is, with
+      respect to the special traits of child and adult life, means the direction
+      of power into special channels: the formation of habits involving
+      executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific objects of
+      observation and thought. But the comparative view is not final. The child
+      has specific powers; to ignore that fact is to stunt or distort the organs
+      upon which his growth depends. The adult uses his powers to transform his
+      environment, thereby occasioning new stimuli which redirect his powers and
+      keep them developing. Ignoring this fact means arrested development, a
+      passive accommodation. Normal child and normal adult alike, in other
+      words, are engaged in growing. The difference between them is not the
+      difference between growth and no growth, but between the modes of growth
+      appropriate to different conditions. With respect to the development of
+      powers devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems we
+      may say the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to
+      sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we
+      may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. One statement
+      is as true as the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely privative
+      nature of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and
+      rigidity of habit, are all connected with a false idea of growth or
+      development,&mdash;that it is a movement toward a fixed goal. Growth is
+      regarded as having an end, instead of being an end. The educational
+      counterparts of the three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take
+      account of the instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly,
+      failure to develop initiative in coping with novel situations; thirdly, an
+      undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure automatic skill
+      at the expense of personal perception. In all cases, the adult environment
+      is accepted as a standard for the child. He is to be brought up to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Natural instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances&mdash;as
+      obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be brought into
+      conformity with external standards. Since conformity is the aim, what is
+      distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or regarded
+      as a source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to
+      uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the novel,
+      aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown. Since
+      the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process of growing,
+      external agents have to be resorted to to induce movement toward it.
+      Whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be
+      sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more
+      growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more
+      education. It is a commonplace to say that education should not cease when
+      one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that the purpose of
+      school education is to insure the continuance of education by organizing
+      the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from life itself
+      and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process
+      of living is the finest product of schooling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed
+      comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up
+      thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. Abandoning this notion,
+      we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of instruction as a
+      method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge into a mental and moral
+      hole which awaits filling. Since life means growth, a living creature
+      lives as truly and positively at one stage as at another, with the same
+      intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims. Hence education means the
+      enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure growth, or adequacy of
+      life, irrespective of age. We first look with impatience upon immaturity,
+      regarding it as something to be got over as rapidly as possible. Then the
+      adult formed by such educative methods looks back with impatient regret
+      upon childhood and youth as a scene of lost opportunities and wasted
+      powers. This ironical situation will endure till it is recognized that
+      living has its own intrinsic quality and that the business of education is
+      with that quality. Realization that life is growth protects us from that
+      so-called idealizing of childhood which in effect is nothing but lazy
+      indulgence. Life is not to be identified with every superficial act and
+      interest. Even though it is not always easy to tell whether what appears
+      to be mere surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained
+      power, we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as ends
+      in themselves. They are signs of possible growth. They are to be turned
+      into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or
+      cultivated for their own sake. Excessive attention to surface phenomena
+      (even in the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to their
+      fixation and thus to arrested development. What impulses are moving
+      toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for parent and
+      teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity cannot be better put
+      than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the child. Be not too much his
+      parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry which replies
+      to this suggestion: Would you verily throw up the reins of public and
+      private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of
+      his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the
+      child's nature? I answer,&mdash;Respect the child, respect him to the end,
+      but also respect yourself.... The two points in a boy's training are, to
+      keep his naturel and train off all but that; to keep his naturel, but stop
+      off his uproar, fooling, and horseplay; keep his nature and arm it with
+      knowledge in the very direction in which it points." And as Emerson goes
+      on to show this reverence for childhood and youth instead of opening up an
+      easy and easy-going path to the instructors, "involves at once, immense
+      claims on the time, the thought, on the life of the teacher. It requires
+      time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of God;
+      and only to think of using it implies character and profoundness."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM4" id="link2H_SUMM4">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Both of these conditions are at their height in childhood and youth.
+      Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of
+      habits. Habits give control over the environment, power to utilize it for
+      human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or a general and
+      persistent balance of organic activities with the surroundings, and of
+      active capacities to readjust activity to meet new conditions. The former
+      furnishes the background of growth; the latter constitute growing. Active
+      habits involve thought, invention, and initiative in applying capacities
+      to new aims. They are opposed to routine which marks an arrest of growth.
+      Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with
+      growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school
+      education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth
+      and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 Intimations of its significance are found in a number of writers, but
+      John Fiske, in his Excursions of an Evolutionist, is accredited with its
+      first systematic exposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2 This conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the conceptions of
+      the external relation of stimulus and response, considered in the last
+      chapter, and of the negative conceptions of immaturity and plasticity
+      noted in this chapter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Education as Preparation. We have laid it down that the educative
+      process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every
+      stage an added capacity of growth. This conception contrasts sharply with
+      other ideas which have influenced practice. By making the contrast
+      explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to
+      light. The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process of
+      preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared for is, of course,
+      the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. Children are not
+      regarded as social members in full and regular standing. They are looked
+      upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list. The conception is
+      only carried a little farther when the life of adults is considered as not
+      having meaning on its own account, but as a preparatory probation for
+      "another life." The idea is but another form of the notion of the negative
+      and privative character of growth already criticized; hence we shall not
+      repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the evil consequences which flow
+      from putting education on this basis. In the first place, it involves loss
+      of impetus. Motive power is not utilized. Children proverbially live in
+      the present; that is not only a fact not to be evaded, but it is an
+      excellence. The future just as future lacks urgency and body. To get ready
+      for something, one knows not what nor why, is to throw away the leverage
+      that exists, and to seek for motive power in a vague chance. Under such
+      circumstances, there is, in the second place, a premium put on
+      shilly-shallying and procrastination. The future prepared for is a long
+      way off; plenty of time will intervene before it becomes a present. Why be
+      in a hurry about getting ready for it? The temptation to postpone is much
+      increased because the present offers so many wonderful opportunities and
+      proffers such invitations to adventure. Naturally attention and energy go
+      to them; education accrues naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education
+      than if the full stress of effort had been put upon making conditions as
+      educative as possible. A third undesirable result is the substitution of a
+      conventional average standard of expectation and requirement for a
+      standard which concerns the specific powers of the individual under
+      instruction. For a severe and definite judgment based upon the strong and
+      weak points of the individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion
+      concerning what youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some
+      more or less remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions
+      are to take place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to
+      enter upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as
+      the serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the loss
+      which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point to
+      a comparatively unproductive point. It fails most just where it thinks it
+      is succeeding&mdash;in getting a preparation for the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a large
+      scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The future
+      having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the
+      possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make
+      it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy
+      work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely
+      unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is
+      actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to be
+      told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
+      accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future,
+      rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely systems
+      of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems which
+      neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a future. Then,
+      in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this method, the pendulum
+      swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of information required
+      against some later day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be fooled into
+      taking something which they do not care for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the
+      future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present
+      possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later
+      requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd moments;
+      it is a continuous leading into the future. If the environment, in school
+      and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the present
+      capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of the present is
+      surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching importance to
+      preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of present
+      effort. Because the need of preparation for a continually developing life
+      is great, it is imperative that every energy should be bent to making the
+      present experience as rich and significant as possible. Then as the
+      present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education which
+      professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it takes back with
+      one hand what it proffers with the other. Development is conceived not as
+      continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent powers toward a
+      definite goal. The goal is conceived of as completion,&mdash;perfection.
+      Life at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an unfolding
+      toward it. Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the preparation
+      theory. Practically the two differ in that the adherents of the latter
+      make much of the practical and professional duties for which one is
+      preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal and
+      spiritual qualities of the principle which is unfolding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a final
+      unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its transition from a
+      static to a dynamic understanding of life. It simulates the style of the
+      latter. It pays the tribute of speaking much of development, process,
+      progress. But all of these operations are conceived to be merely
+      transitional; they lack meaning on their own account. They possess
+      significance only as movements toward something away from what is now
+      going on. Since growth is just a movement toward a completed being, the
+      final ideal is immobile. An abstract and indefinite future is in control
+      with all which that connotes in depreciation of present power and
+      opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is very far
+      away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is unattainable.
+      Consequently, in order to be available for present guidance it must be
+      translated into something which stands for it. Otherwise we should be
+      compelled to regard any and every manifestation of the child as an
+      unfolding from within, and hence sacred. Unless we set up some definite
+      criterion representing the ideal end by which to judge whether a given
+      attitude or act is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is
+      to withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere with
+      proper development. Since that is not practicable, a working substitute is
+      set up. Usually, of course, this is some idea which an adult would like to
+      have a child acquire. Consequently, by "suggestive questioning" or some
+      other pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out" from the
+      pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that is evidence
+      that the child is unfolding properly. But as the pupil generally has no
+      initiative of his own in this direction, the result is a random groping
+      after what is wanted, and the formation of habits of dependence upon the
+      cues furnished by others. Just because such methods simulate a true
+      principle and claim to have its sanction they may do more harm than would
+      outright "telling," where, at least, it remains with the child how much
+      will stick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two typical
+      attempts to provide a working representative of the absolute goal. Both
+      start from the conception of a whole&mdash;an absolute&mdash;which is
+      "immanent" in human life. The perfect or complete ideal is not a mere
+      ideal; it is operative here and now. But it is present only implicitly,
+      "potentially," or in an enfolded condition. What is termed development is
+      the gradual making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up.
+      Froebel and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes referred to,
+      have different ideas of the path by which the progressive realization of
+      manifestation of the complete principle is effected. According to Hegel,
+      it is worked out through a series of historical institutions which embody
+      the different factors in the Absolute. According to Froebel, the actuating
+      force is the presentation of symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding
+      to the essential traits of the Absolute. When these are presented to the
+      child, the Whole, or perfection, sleeping within him, is awakened. A
+      single example may indicate the method. Every one familiar with the
+      kindergarten is acquainted with the circle in which the children gather.
+      It is not enough that the circle is a convenient way of grouping the
+      children. It must be used "because it is a symbol of the collective life
+      of mankind in general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the
+      native capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his
+      influence in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the most
+      effective single force in modern educational theory in effecting
+      widespread acknowledgment of the idea of growth. But his formulation of
+      the notion of development and his organization of devices for promoting it
+      were badly hampered by the fact that he conceived development to be the
+      unfolding of a ready-made latent principle. He failed to see that growing
+      is growth, developing is development, and consequently placed the emphasis
+      upon the completed product. Thus he set up a goal which meant the arrest
+      of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to immediate guidance
+      of powers, save through translation into abstract and symbolic formulae.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical philosophic
+      language, transcendental. That is, it is something apart from direct
+      experience and perception. So far as experience is concerned, it is empty;
+      it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything which
+      can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be
+      compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection
+      between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of
+      development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To regard
+      known things as symbols, according to some arbitrary a priori formula&mdash;and
+      every a priori conception must be arbitrary&mdash;is an invitation to
+      romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal to it and treat
+      them as laws. After the scheme of symbolism has been settled upon, some
+      definite technique must be invented by which the inner meaning of the
+      sensible symbols used may be brought home to children. Adults being the
+      formulators of the symbolism are naturally the authors and controllers of
+      the technique. The result was that Froebel's love of abstract symbolism
+      often got the better of his sympathetic insight; and there was substituted
+      for development as arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation
+      as the history of instruction has ever seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of
+      the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional, rather than symbolic,
+      form. His philosophy, like Froebel's, marks in one direction an
+      indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the process of life.
+      The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident to
+      him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical
+      institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and
+      nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated the
+      efforts of a whole series of German writers&mdash;Lessing, Herder, Kant,
+      Schiller, Goethe&mdash;to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great
+      collective institutional products of humanity. For those who learned the
+      lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive of
+      institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely&mdash;in
+      idea, not in fact&mdash;the psychology that regarded "mind" as a
+      ready-made possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of
+      "objective mind"&mdash;language, government, art, religion&mdash;in the
+      formation of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the
+      conception of an absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as
+      they concretely exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each
+      in its time and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the
+      self-realizing process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or
+      stage, its existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an
+      integral element in the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as
+      they are, individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and
+      nurture, consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing
+      institutions. Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education.
+      Institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and fall
+      of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the great
+      "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have no share or
+      lot in it. In the later nineteenth century, this type of idealism was
+      amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end. As against it,
+      or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of individuals
+      are impotent. Or, rather, they are but the means by which it works itself
+      out. Social progress is an "organic growth," not an experimental
+      selection. Reason is all powerful, but only Absolute Reason has any power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the Greeks)
+      that great historic institutions are active factors in the intellectual
+      nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational philosophy. It
+      indicated a genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had marred his assertion
+      that education must be a natural development and not something forced or
+      grafted upon individuals from without, by the notion that social
+      conditions are not natural. But in its notion of a complete and
+      all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory swallowed up
+      concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual in the
+      abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the claims of the
+      Whole and of individuality by the conception of society as an organic
+      whole, or organism. That social organization is presupposed in the
+      adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted. But the
+      social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of the body
+      to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual has a
+      certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented by the
+      place and functions of the other organs. As one portion of the bodily
+      tissue is differentiated so that it can be the hand and the hand only,
+      another, the eye, and so on, all taken together making the organism, so
+      one individual is supposed to be differentiated for the exercise of the
+      mechanical operations of society, another for those of a statesman,
+      another for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion of "organism" is
+      thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class distinctions in social
+      organization&mdash;a notion which in its educational application again
+      means external dictation instead of growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had great vogue
+      and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much
+      influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." It has in view a
+      correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of specific
+      powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do the chief
+      things which it is important for him to do better than he could without
+      training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency, economy,
+      promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education was indicated in
+      what was said about habits as the product of educative development. But
+      the theory in question takes, as it were, a short cut; it regards some
+      powers (to be presently named) as the direct and conscious aims of
+      instruction, and not simply as the results of growth. There is a definite
+      number of powers to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of
+      strokes which a golfer has to master. Consequently education should get
+      directly at the business of training them. But this implies that they are
+      already there in some untrained form; otherwise their creation would have
+      to be an indirect product of other activities and agencies. Being there
+      already in some crude form, all that remains is to exercise them in
+      constant and graded repetitions, and they will inevitably be refined and
+      perfected. In the phrase "formal discipline" as applied to this
+      conception, "discipline" refers both to the outcome of trained power and
+      to the method of training through repeated exercise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of
+      perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing,
+      feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise upon
+      material presented. In its classic form, this theory was expressed by
+      Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the material or content
+      of knowledge through passively received sensations. On the other hand, the
+      mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation, retention,
+      comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. Knowledge results if the mind
+      discriminates and combines things as they are united and divided in nature
+      itself. But the important thing for education is the exercise or practice
+      of the faculties of the mind till they become thoroughly established
+      habitudes. The analogy constantly employed is that of a billiard player or
+      gymnast, who by repeated use of certain muscles in a uniform way at last
+      secures automatic skill. Even the faculty of thinking was to be formed
+      into a trained habit by repeated exercises in making and combining simple
+      distinctions, for which, Locke thought, mathematics affords unrivaled
+      opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to
+      do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of
+      the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which mind
+      should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which were few in
+      number and which might be trained by specific exercises. The scheme
+      appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and yet it
+      insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception and storage
+      of information, but the formation of personal powers of attention, memory,
+      observation, abstraction, and generalization. It was realistic in its
+      emphatic assertion that all material whatever is received from without; it
+      was idealistic in that final stress fell upon the formation of
+      intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal in its assertion that
+      the individual cannot possess or generate any true ideas on his own
+      account; it was individualistic in placing the end of education in the
+      perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset by the individual.
+      This kind of distribution of values expressed with nicety the state of
+      opinion in the generations following upon Locke. It became, without
+      explicit reference to Locke, a common-place of educational theory and of
+      psychology. Practically, it seemed to provide the educator with definite,
+      instead of vague, tasks. It made the elaboration of a technique of
+      instruction relatively easy. All that was necessary was to provide for
+      sufficient practice of each of the powers. This practice consists in
+      repeated acts of attending, observing, memorizing, etc. By grading the
+      difficulty of the acts, making each set of repetitions somewhat more
+      difficult than the set which preceded it, a complete scheme of instruction
+      is evolved. There are various ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing
+      this conception, in both its alleged foundations and in its educational
+      application. (1) Perhaps the most direct mode of attack consists in
+      pointing out that the supposed original faculties of observation,
+      recollection, willing, thinking, etc., are purely mythological. There are
+      no such ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained.
+      There are, indeed, a great number of original native tendencies,
+      instinctive modes of action, based on the original connections of neurones
+      in the central nervous system. There are impulsive tendencies of the eyes
+      to follow and fixate light; of the neck muscles to turn toward light and
+      sound; of the hands to reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of
+      the vocal apparatus to make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant
+      substances; to gag and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite
+      number. But these tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply
+      marked off from one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving
+      with one another in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent
+      intellectual powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they
+      are tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment so
+      as to bring about other changes. Something in the throat makes one cough;
+      the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus modify the
+      subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a hot thing; it is impulsively,
+      wholly unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal alters the
+      stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with the needs of
+      the organism. It is by such specific changes of organic activities in
+      response to specific changes in the medium that that control of the
+      environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is effected. Now all
+      of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and smellings and tastings
+      are of this kind. In any legitimate sense of the words mental or
+      intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these qualities, and no
+      amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any intellectual properties of
+      observation, judgment, or intentional action (volition) upon them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is not
+      a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one might strengthen
+      a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in selecting from the
+      diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which are
+      especially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to say,
+      among the reactions of the body in general occur upon stimulation of the
+      eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to reaching,
+      grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are gradually eliminated&mdash;or
+      else no training occurs. As we have already noted, the primary reactions,
+      with a very few exceptions are too diffused and general to be practically
+      of much use in the case of the human infant. Hence the identity of
+      training with selective response. (Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important
+      is the specific coordination of different factors of response which takes
+      place. There is not merely a selection of the hand reactions which effect
+      grasping, but of the particular visual stimuli which call out just these
+      reactions and no others, and an establishment of connection between the
+      two. But the coordinating does not stop here. Characteristic temperature
+      reactions may take place when the object is grasped. These will also be
+      brought in; later, the temperature reaction may be connected directly with
+      the optical stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed&mdash;as a bright
+      flame, independent of close contact, may steer one away. Or the child in
+      handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues.
+      The ear response is then brought into the system of response. If a certain
+      sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies the
+      activity, response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected with
+      auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the complex
+      response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each
+      other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the stimuli
+      are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the more rigid
+      and the less generally available is the training secured. In equivalent
+      language, less intellectual or educative quality attaches to the training.
+      The usual way of stating this fact is that the more specialized the
+      reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing and perfecting it
+      transferable to other modes of behavior. According to the orthodox theory
+      of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his spelling lesson acquires,
+      besides ability to spell those particular words, an increase of power of
+      observation, attention, and recollection which may be employed whenever
+      these powers are needed. As matter of fact, the more he confines himself
+      to noticing and fixating the forms of words, irrespective of connection
+      with other things (such as the meaning of the words, the context in which
+      they are habitually used, the derivation and classification of the verbal
+      form, etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be used
+      for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not
+      even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions among
+      geometrical forms, to say nothing of ability to observe in general. He is
+      merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the
+      motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination
+      (to use our prior terminology) is extremely limited. The connections which
+      are employed in other observations and recollections (or reproductions)
+      are deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon forms
+      of letters and words. Having been excluded, they cannot be restored when
+      needed. The ability secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is not
+      available for perceiving and recalling other things. In the ordinary
+      phraseology, it is not transferable. But the wider the context&mdash;that
+      is to say, the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated&mdash;the
+      more the ability acquired is available for the effective performance of
+      other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any "transfer," but
+      because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is
+      equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to a
+      narrow and rigid, coordination. (4) Going to the root of the matter, the
+      fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its
+      separation of activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no
+      such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there is
+      only the ability to see or hear or remember something. To talk about
+      training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject
+      matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. Exercise may react upon
+      circulation, breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigor or strength,
+      but this reservoir is available for specific ends only by use in
+      connection with the material means which accomplish them. Vigor will
+      enable a man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he would
+      if he were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and club,
+      sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one of
+      them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far as
+      it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordinations or as the
+      same kind of coordination is involved in all of them. Moreover, the
+      difference between the training of ability to spell which comes from
+      taking visual forms in a narrow context and one which takes them in
+      connection with the activities required to grasp meaning, such as context,
+      affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the difference between
+      exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to "develop" certain
+      muscles, and a game or sport. The former is uniform and mechanical; it is
+      rigidly specialized. The latter is varied from moment to moment; no two
+      acts are quite alike; novel emergencies have to be met; the coordinations
+      forming have to be kept flexible and elastic. Consequently, the training
+      is much more "general"; that is to say, it covers a wider territory and
+      includes more factors. Exactly the same thing holds of special and general
+      education of the mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one
+      special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping or
+      calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. One may be an
+      authority in a particular field and yet of more than usually poor judgment
+      in matters not closely allied, unless the training in the special field
+      has been of a kind to ramify into the subject matter of the other fields.
+      (5) Consequently, such powers as observation, recollection, judgment,
+      esthetic taste, represent organized results of the occupation of native
+      active tendencies with certain subject matters. A man does not observe
+      closely and fully by pressing a button for the observing faculty to get to
+      work (in other words by "willing" to observe); but if he has something to
+      do which can be accomplished successfully only through intensive and
+      extensive use of eye and hand, he naturally observes. Observation is an
+      outcome, a consequence, of the interaction of sense organ and subject
+      matter. It will vary, accordingly, with the subject matter employed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of
+      faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first determined
+      what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become expert in
+      observing and recalling and for what purpose. And it is only repeating in
+      another form what has already been said, to declare that the criterion
+      here must be social. We want the person to note and recall and judge those
+      things which make him an effective competent member of the group in which
+      he is associated with others. Otherwise we might as well set the pupil to
+      observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to memorizing
+      meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue&mdash;which is about what
+      we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of formal discipline. If
+      the observing habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer are better
+      habits than those which are thus formed, it is because they deal with
+      subject matter which is more significant in life. In concluding this
+      portion of the discussion, we note that the distinction between special
+      and general education has nothing to do with the transferability of
+      function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer is miraculous and
+      impossible. But some activities are broad; they involve a coordination of
+      many factors. Their development demands continuous alternation and
+      readjustment. As conditions change, certain factors are subordinated, and
+      others which had been of minor importance come to the front. There is
+      constant redistribution of the focus of the action, as is seen in the
+      illustration of a game as over against pulling a fixed weight by a series
+      of uniform motions. Thus there is practice in prompt making of new
+      combinations with the focus of activity shifted to meet change in subject
+      matter. Wherever an activity is broad in scope (that is, involves the
+      coordinating of a large variety of sub-activities), and is constantly and
+      unexpectedly obliged to change direction in its progressive development,
+      general education is bound to result. For this is what "general" means;
+      broad and flexible. In practice, education meets these conditions, and
+      hence is general, in the degree in which it takes account of social
+      relationships. A person may become expert in technical philosophy, or
+      philology, or mathematics or engineering or financiering, and be inept and
+      ill-advised in his action and judgment outside of his specialty. If
+      however his concern with these technical subject matters has been
+      connected with human activities having social breadth, the range of active
+      responses called into play and flexibly integrated is much wider.
+      Isolation of subject matter from a social context is the chief obstruction
+      in current practice to securing a general training of mind. Literature,
+      art, religion, when thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the
+      technical things which the professional upholders of general education
+      strenuously oppose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM5" id="link2H_SUMM5">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The conception that the result of the educative process is
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other ideas
+      which have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting
+      conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some
+      future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which
+      result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher and
+      taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully directed&mdash;namely,
+      taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the immediate present.
+      Consequently it defeats its own professed purpose. The notion that
+      education is an unfolding from within appears to have more likeness to the
+      conception of growth which has been set forth. But as worked out in the
+      theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves ignoring the interaction of
+      present organic tendencies with the present environment, just as much as
+      the notion of preparation. Some implicit whole is regarded as given
+      ready-made and the significance of growth is merely transitory; it is not
+      an end in itself, but simply a means of making explicit what is already
+      implicit. Since that which is not explicit cannot be made definite use of,
+      something has to be found to represent it. According to Froebel, the
+      mystic symbolic value of certain objects and acts (largely mathematical)
+      stand for the Absolute Whole which is in process of unfolding. According
+      to Hegel, existing institutions are its effective actual representatives.
+      Emphasis upon symbols and institutions tends to divert perception from the
+      direct growth of experience in richness of meaning. Another influential
+      but defective theory is that which conceives that mind has, at birth,
+      certain mental faculties or powers, such as perceiving, remembering,
+      willing, judging, generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is the
+      training of these faculties through repeated exercise. This theory treats
+      subject matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its value
+      residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of the general
+      powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of the alleged powers
+      from one another and from the material upon which they act. The outcome of
+      the theory in practice was shown to be an undue emphasis upon the training
+      of narrow specialized modes of skill at the expense of initiative,
+      inventiveness, and readaptability&mdash;qualities which depend upon the
+      broad and consecutive interaction of specific activities with one another.
+      1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is so great, there are so many
+      paths of construction, that every stimulus brings about some change in all
+      of the organs of response. We are accustomed however to ignore most of
+      these modifications of the total organic activity, concentrating upon that
+      one which is most specifically adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the
+      moment. 2 This statement should be compared with what was said earlier
+      about the sequential ordering of responses (p. 25). It is merely a more
+      explicit statement of the way in which that consecutive arrangement
+      occurs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Education as Formation. We now come to a type of theory which denies
+      the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique role of subject
+      matter in the development of mental and moral disposition. According to
+      it, education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it a
+      training of faculties resident in mind itself. It is rather the formation
+      of mind by setting up certain associations or connections of content by
+      means of a subject matter presented from without. Education proceeds by
+      instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind
+      from without. That education is formative of mind is not questioned; it is
+      the conception already propounded. But formation here has a technical
+      meaning dependent upon the idea of something operating from without.
+      Herbart is the best historical representative of this type of theory. He
+      denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties. The mind is simply
+      endowed with the power of producing various qualities in reaction to the
+      various realities which act upon it. These qualitatively different
+      reactions are called presentations (Vorstellungen). Every presentation
+      once called into being persists; it may be driven below the "threshold" of
+      consciousness by new and stronger presentations, produced by the reaction
+      of the soul to new material, but its activity continues by its own
+      inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness. What are termed
+      faculties&mdash;attention, memory, thinking, perception, even the
+      sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and complications, formed by
+      the interaction of these submerged presentations with one another and with
+      new presentations. Perception, for example, is the complication of
+      presentations which result from the rise of old presentations to greet and
+      combine with new ones; memory is the evoking of an old presentation above
+      the threshold of consciousness by getting entangled with another
+      presentation, etc. Pleasure is the result of reinforcement among the
+      independent activities of presentations; pain of their pulling different
+      ways, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the various
+      arrangements formed by the various presentations in their different
+      qualities. The "furniture" of the mind is the mind. Mind is wholly a
+      matter of "contents." The educational implications of this doctrine are
+      threefold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) This or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects which evoke
+      this or that kind of reaction and which produce this or that arrangement
+      among the reactions called out. The formation of mind is wholly a matter
+      of the presentation of the proper educational materials.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) Since the earlier presentations constitute the "apperceiving organs"
+      which control the assimilation of new presentations, their character is
+      all important. The effect of new presentations is to reinforce groupings
+      previously formed. The business of the educator is, first, to select the
+      proper material in order to fix the nature of the original reactions, and,
+      secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations on the basis
+      of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions. The control is from
+      behind, from the past, instead of, as in the unfolding conception, in the
+      ultimate goal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down.
+      Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the central thing, but
+      since knowing consists in the way in which this interacts with the
+      contents already submerged below consciousness, the first thing is the
+      step of "preparation,"&mdash;that is, calling into special activity and
+      getting above the floor of consciousness those older presentations which
+      are to assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation, follow the
+      processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the application of the
+      newly formed content to the performance of some task. Everything must go
+      through this course; consequently there is a perfectly uniform method in
+      instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the
+      region of routine and accident. He brought it into the sphere of conscious
+      method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim and procedure,
+      instead of being a compound of casual inspiration and subservience to
+      tradition. Moreover, everything in teaching and discipline could be
+      specified, instead of our having to be content with vague and more or less
+      mystic generalities about ultimate ideals and speculative spiritual
+      symbols. He abolished the notion of ready-made faculties, which might be
+      trained by exercise upon any sort of material, and made attention to
+      concrete subject matter, to the content, all-important. Herbart
+      undoubtedly has had a greater influence in bringing to the front questions
+      connected with the material of study than any other educational
+      philosopher. He stated problems of method from the standpoint of their
+      connection with subject matter: method having to do with the manner and
+      sequence of presenting new subject matter to insure its proper interaction
+      with old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring the
+      existence in a living being of active and specific functions which are
+      developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they are
+      occupied with their environment. The theory represents the Schoolmaster
+      come to his own. This fact expresses at once its strength and its
+      weakness. The conception that the mind consists of what has been taught,
+      and that the importance of what has been taught consists in its
+      availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue's view of life.
+      The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in instructing
+      pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of learning. It
+      emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment upon the mind; it
+      slurs over the fact that the environment involves a personal sharing in
+      common experiences. It exaggerates beyond reason the possibilities of
+      consciously formulated and used methods, and underestimates the role of
+      vital, unconscious, attitudes. It insists upon the old, the past, and
+      passes lightly over the operation of the genuinely novel and
+      unforeseeable. It takes, in brief, everything educational into account
+      save its essence,&mdash;vital energy seeking opportunity for effective
+      exercise. All education forms character, mental and moral, but formation
+      consists in the selection and coordination of native activities so that
+      they may utilize the subject matter of the social environment. Moreover,
+      the formation is not only a formation of native activities, but it takes
+      place through them. It is a process of reconstruction, reorganization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar combination
+      of the ideas of development and formation from without has given rise to
+      the recapitulation theory of education, biological and cultural. The
+      individual develops, but his proper development consists in repeating in
+      orderly stages the past evolution of animal life and human history. The
+      former recapitulation occurs physiologically; the latter should be made to
+      occur by means of education. The alleged biological truth that the
+      individual in his growth from the simple embryo to maturity repeats the
+      history of the evolution of animal life in the progress of forms from the
+      simplest to the most complex (or expressed technically, that ontogenesis
+      parallels phylogenesis) does not concern us, save as it is supposed to
+      afford scientific foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past.
+      Cultural recapitulation says, first, that children at a certain age are in
+      the mental and moral condition of savagery; their instincts are vagrant
+      and predatory because their ancestors at one time lived such a life.
+      Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper subject matter of their
+      education at this time is the material&mdash;especially the literary
+      material of myths, folk-tale, and song&mdash;produced by humanity in the
+      analogous stage. Then the child passes on to something corresponding, say,
+      to the pastoral stage, and so on till at the time when he is ready to take
+      part in contemporary life, he arrives at the present epoch of culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a small
+      school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part), has had little
+      currency. But the idea which underlies it is that education is essentially
+      retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past and especially to the
+      literary products of the past, and that mind is adequately formed in the
+      degree in which it is patterned upon the spiritual heritage of the past.
+      This idea has had such immense influence upon higher instruction
+      especially, that it is worth examination in its extreme formulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embyronic growth
+      of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of lower
+      forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of past stages.
+      If there were any strict "law" of repetition, evolutionary development
+      would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation would simply have
+      repeated its predecessors' existence. Development, in short, has taken
+      place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in the prior scheme of
+      growth. And this suggests that the aim of education is to facilitate such
+      short-circuited growth. The great advantage of immaturity, educationally
+      speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate the young from the need of
+      dwelling in an outgrown past. The business of education is rather to
+      liberate the young from reviving and retraversing the past than to lead
+      them to a recapitulation of it. The social environment of the young is
+      constituted by the presence and action of the habits of thinking and
+      feeling of civilized men. To ignore the directive influence of this
+      present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate the educational
+      function. A biologist has said: "The history of development in different
+      animals. . . offers to us. . . a series of ingenious, determined, varied
+      but more or less unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of
+      recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral method a more direct
+      method." Surely it would be foolish if education did not deliberately
+      attempt to facilitate similar efforts in conscious experience so that they
+      become increasingly successful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled from
+      association with the false context which perverts them. On the biological
+      side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with precisely the
+      assortment of impulsive activities with which he does start, they being
+      blind, and many of them conflicting with one another, casual, sporadic,
+      and unadapted to their immediate environment. The other point is that it
+      is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of past history so far as they
+      are of help for the future. Since they represent the results of prior
+      experience, their value for future experience may, of course, be
+      indefinitely great. Literatures produced in the past are, so far as men
+      are now in possession and use of them, a part of the present environment
+      of individuals; but there is an enormous difference between availing
+      ourselves of them as present resources and taking them as standards and
+      patterns in their retrospective character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through misuse
+      of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity means that past life
+      has somehow predetermined the main traits of an individual, and that they
+      are so fixed that little serious change can be introduced into them. Thus
+      taken, the influence of heredity is opposed to that of the environment,
+      and the efficacy of the latter belittled. But for educational purposes
+      heredity means neither more nor less than the original endowment of an
+      individual. Education must take the being as he is; that a particular
+      individual has just such and such an equipment of native activities is a
+      basic fact. That they were produced in such and such a way, or that they
+      are derived from one's ancestry, is not especially important for the
+      educator, however it may be with the biologist, as compared with the fact
+      that they now exist. Suppose one had to advise or direct a person
+      regarding his inheritance of property. The fallacy of assuming that the
+      fact it is an inheritance, predetermines its future use, is obvious. The
+      advisor is concerned with making the best use of what is there&mdash;putting
+      it at work under the most favorable conditions. Obviously he cannot
+      utilize what is not there; neither can the educator. In this sense,
+      heredity is a limit of education. Recognition of this fact prevents the
+      waste of energy and the irritation that ensue from the too prevalent habit
+      of trying to make by instruction something out of an individual which he
+      is not naturally fitted to become. But the doctrine does not determine
+      what use shall be made of the capacities which exist. And, except in the
+      case of the imbecile, these original capacities are much more varied and
+      potential, even in the case of the more stupid, than we as yet know
+      properly how to utilize. Consequently, while a careful study of the native
+      aptitudes and deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary
+      necessity, the subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment
+      which will adequately function whatever activities are present. The
+      relation of heredity and environment is well expressed in the case of
+      language. If a being had no vocal organs from which issue articulate
+      sounds, if he had no auditory or other sense-receptors and no connections
+      between the two sets of apparatus, it would be a sheer waste of time to
+      try to teach him to converse. He is born short in that respect, and
+      education must accept the limitation. But if he has this native equipment,
+      its possession in no way guarantees that he will ever talk any language or
+      what language he will talk. The environment in which his activities occur
+      and by which they are carried into execution settles these things. If he
+      lived in a dumb unsocial environment where men refused to talk to one
+      another and used only that minimum of gestures without which they could
+      not get along, vocal language would be as unachieved by him as if he had
+      no vocal organs. If the sounds which he makes occur in a medium of persons
+      speaking the Chinese language, the activities which make like sounds will
+      be selected and coordinated. This illustration may be applied to the
+      entire range of the educability of any individual. It places the heritage
+      from the past in its right connection with the demands and opportunities
+      of the present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is found in
+      the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or more specifically
+      in the particular literatures which were produced in the culture epoch
+      which is supposed to correspond with the stage of development of those
+      taught) affords another instance of that divorce between the process and
+      product of growth which has been criticized. To keep the process alive, to
+      keep it alive in ways which make it easier to keep it alive in the future,
+      is the function of educational subject matter. But an individual can live
+      only in the present. The present is not just something which comes after
+      the past; much less something produced by it. It is what life is in
+      leaving the past behind it. The study of past products will not help us
+      understand the present, because the present is not due to the products,
+      but to the life of which they were the products. A knowledge of the past
+      and its heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present,
+      but not otherwise. And the mistake of making the records and remains of
+      the past the main material of education is that it cuts the vital
+      connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the
+      present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the past. Under
+      such circumstances, culture becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge and
+      an asylum. Men escape from the crudities of the present to live in its
+      imagined refinements, instead of using what the past offers as an agency
+      for ripening these crudities. The present, in short, generates the
+      problems which lead us to search the past for suggestion, and which
+      supplies meaning to what we find when we search. The past is the past
+      precisely because it does not include what is characteristic in the
+      present. The moving present includes the past on condition that it uses
+      the past to direct its own movement. The past is a great resource for the
+      imagination; it adds a new dimension to life, but OD condition that it be
+      seen as the past of the present, and not as another and disconnected
+      world. The principle which makes little of the present act of living and
+      operation of growing, the only thing always present, naturally looks to
+      the past because the future goal which it sets up is remote and empty. But
+      having turned its back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it
+      laden with the spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive to
+      the needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the liveliest
+      of motives for interest in the background of the present, and will never
+      have to hunt for a way back because it will never have lost connection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas both of
+      unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the formation from without,
+      whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the past, the
+      ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant
+      reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an
+      immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end&mdash;the
+      direct transformation of the quality of experience. Infancy, youth, adult
+      life,&mdash;all stand on the same educative level in the sense that what
+      is really learned at any and every stage of experience constitutes the
+      value of that experience, and in the sense that it is the chief business
+      of life at every point to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of
+      its own perceptible meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
+      reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning
+      of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of
+      subsequent experience. (1) The increment of meaning corresponds to the
+      increased perception of the connections and continuities of the activities
+      in which we are engaged. The activity begins in an impulsive form; that
+      is, it is blind. It does not know what it is about; that is to say, what
+      are its interactions with other activities. An activity which brings
+      education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of the
+      connections which had been imperceptible. To recur to our simple example,
+      a child who reaches for a bright light gets burned. Henceforth he knows
+      that a certain act of touching in connection with a certain act of vision
+      (and vice-versa) means heat and pain; or, a certain light means a source
+      of heat. The acts by which a scientific man in his laboratory learns more
+      about flame differ no whit in principle. By doing certain things, he makes
+      perceptible certain connections of heat with other things, which had been
+      previously ignored. Thus his acts in relation to these things get more
+      meaning; he knows better what he is doing or "is about" when he has to do
+      with them; he can intend consequences instead of just letting them happen&mdash;all
+      synonymous ways of saying the same thing. At the same stroke, the flame
+      has gained in meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation,
+      about light and temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its
+      intellectual content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) The other side of an educative experience is an added power of
+      subsequent direction or control. To say that one knows what he is about,
+      or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of course, that he can
+      better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can, therefore, get
+      ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial consequences and
+      avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative experience, then, one in
+      which instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is
+      contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a capricious
+      activity on the other. (a) In the latter one "does not care what happens";
+      one just lets himself go and avoids connecting the consequences of one's
+      act (the evidences of its connections with other things) with the act. It
+      is customary to frown upon such aimless random activity, treating it as
+      willful mischief or carelessness or lawlessness. But there is a tendency
+      to seek the cause of such aimless activities in the youth's own
+      disposition, isolated from everything else. But in fact such activity is
+      explosive, and due to maladjustment with surroundings. Individuals act
+      capriciously whenever they act under external dictation, or from being
+      told, without having a purpose of their own or perceiving the bearing of
+      the deed upon other acts. One may learn by doing something which he does
+      not understand; even in the most intelligent action, we do much which we
+      do not mean, because the largest portion of the connections of the act we
+      consciously intend are not perceived or anticipated. But we learn only
+      because after the act is performed we note results which we had not noted
+      before. But much work in school consists in setting up rules by which
+      pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they
+      are not led to see the connection between the result&mdash;say the answer&mdash;and
+      the method pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a
+      trick and a kind of miracle. Such action is essentially capricious, and
+      leads to capricious habits. (b) Routine action, action which is automatic,
+      may increase skill to do a particular thing. In so far, it might be said
+      to have an educative effect. But it does not lead to new perceptions of
+      bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens the
+      meaning-horizon. And since the environment changes and our way of acting
+      has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced connection
+      with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at some
+      critical moment. The vaunted "skill" turns out gross ineptitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
+      reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been
+      criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the end
+      (the result) and the process. This is verbally self-contradictory, but
+      only verbally. It means that experience as an active process occupies time
+      and that its later period completes its earlier portion; it brings to
+      light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived. The later outcome
+      thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the experience as a whole
+      establishes a bent or disposition toward the things possessing this
+      meaning. Every such continuous experience or activity is educative, and
+      all education resides in having such experiences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention
+      later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as
+      personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken in the earlier
+      chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them
+      with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of
+      catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult
+      group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of
+      established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in the
+      main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the
+      experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits,
+      better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an
+      improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of the extent
+      to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social
+      evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these
+      ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an
+      instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless far
+      from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive
+      agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only a
+      development of children and youth but also of the future society of which
+      they will be the constituents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM6" id="link2H_SUMM6">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Education may be conceived either retrospectively or
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      prospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as process of
+      accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the past for
+      a resource in a developing future. The former finds its standards and
+      patterns in what has gone before. The mind may be regarded as a group of
+      contents resulting from having certain things presented. In this case, the
+      earlier presentations constitute the material to which the later are to be
+      assimilated. Emphasis upon the value of the early experiences of immature
+      beings is most important, especially because of the tendency to regard
+      them as of little account. But these experiences do not consist of
+      externally presented material, but of interaction of native activities
+      with the environment which progressively modifies both the activities and
+      the environment. The defect of the Herbartian theory of formation through
+      presentations consists in slighting this constant interaction and change.
+      The same principle of criticism applies to theories which find the primary
+      subject matter of study in the cultural products&mdash;especially the
+      literary products&mdash;of man's history. Isolated from their connection
+      with the present environment in which individuals have to act, they become
+      a kind of rival and distracting environment. Their value lies in their use
+      to increase the meaning of the things with which we have actively to do at
+      the present time. The idea of education advanced in these chapters is
+      formally summed up in the idea of continuous reconstruction of experience,
+      an idea which is marked off from education as preparation for a remote
+      future, as unfolding, as external formation, and as recapitulation of the
+      past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned with
+      education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to make
+      explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of education
+      as it operates in different types of community life. To say that education
+      is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature
+      through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong,
+      is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life
+      which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that a society which
+      not only changes but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve
+      it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which
+      aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs. To make the general
+      ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is,
+      therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of present
+      social life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word, but many
+      things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of
+      purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in which
+      his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they had
+      nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life. Within
+      every larger social organization there are numerous minor groups: not only
+      political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious,
+      associations. There are political parties with differing aims, social
+      sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely
+      together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. In many modern
+      states and in some ancient, there is great diversity of populations, of
+      varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
+      standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for
+      example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an
+      inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (See ante, p.
+      20.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a
+      eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning de jure
+      and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy, the former connotation is
+      almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one by its very nature.
+      The qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy community of
+      purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of sympathy, are
+      emphasized. But when we look at the facts which the term denotes instead
+      of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation, we find not
+      unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. Men banded together in
+      a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public
+      while serving it, political machines held together by the interest of
+      plunder, are included. If it is said that such organizations are not
+      societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion of
+      society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of society is then
+      made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having no reference to facts; and in
+      part, that each of these organizations, no matter how opposed to the
+      interests of other groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of
+      "Society" which hold it together. There is honor among thieves, and a band
+      of robbers has a common interest as respects its members. Gangs are marked
+      by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own
+      codes. Family life may be marked by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy
+      as to those without, and yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within.
+      Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the
+      quality and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of
+      the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any
+      given mode of social life. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two
+      extremes. We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an
+      ideal society. We must base our conception upon societies which actually
+      exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one.
+      But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which
+      are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of
+      forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize
+      undesirable features and suggest improvement. Now in any social group
+      whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in common,
+      and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse
+      with other groups. From these two traits we derive our standard. How
+      numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How
+      full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? If we
+      apply these considerations to, say, a criminal band, we find that the ties
+      which consciously hold the members together are few in number, reducible
+      almost to a common interest in plunder; and that they are of such a nature
+      as to isolate the group from other groups with respect to give and take of
+      the values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is partial
+      and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life
+      which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material,
+      intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the
+      progress of one member has worth for the experience of other members&mdash;it
+      is readily communicable&mdash;and that the family is not an isolated
+      whole, but enters intimately into relationships with business groups, with
+      schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar
+      groups, and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in
+      return receives support from it. In short, there are many interests
+      consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free points
+      of contact with other modes of association.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically
+      governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an
+      organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command
+      must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects, must call
+      some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government could do
+      everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical declaration is
+      at least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of
+      coercive force. It may be said, however, that the activities appealed to
+      are themselves unworthy and degrading&mdash;that such a government calls
+      into functioning activity simply capacity for fear. In a way, this
+      statement is true. But it overlooks the fact that fear need not be an
+      undesirable factor in experience. Caution, circumspection, prudence,
+      desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these
+      desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into
+      play as is cowardice and abject submission. The real difficulty is that
+      the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread and hope of specific
+      tangible reward&mdash;say comfort and ease&mdash;many other capacities are
+      left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to
+      pervert them. Instead of operating on their own account they are reduced
+      to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common
+      interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of the
+      social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. In order
+      to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group
+      must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others. There
+      must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise,
+      the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into
+      slaves. And the experience of each party loses in meaning, when the free
+      interchange of varying modes of life-experience is arrested. A separation
+      into a privileged and a subject-class prevents social endosmosis. The
+      evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less
+      perceptible, but equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be
+      turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and
+      artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their
+      manners fastidious rather than humane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety of
+      shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity of
+      stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought. The
+      more activity is restricted to a few definite lines&mdash;as it is when
+      there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences&mdash;the
+      more action tends to become routine on the part of the class at a
+      disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part of the
+      class having the materially fortunate position. Plato defined a slave as
+      one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This
+      condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is
+      found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable,
+      but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
+      Much is said about scientific management of work. It is a narrow view
+      which restricts the science which secures efficiency of operation to
+      movements of the muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the
+      discovery of the relations of a man to his work&mdash;including his
+      relations to others who take part&mdash;which will enlist his intelligent
+      interest in what he is doing. Efficiency in production often demands
+      division of labor. But it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless
+      workers see the technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved
+      in what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation
+      furnished by such perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as
+      efficiency of activity and scientific management to purely technical
+      externals is evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to
+      those in control of industry&mdash;those who supply its aims. Because of
+      their lack of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not
+      sufficient stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships
+      in industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
+      technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and
+      intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the
+      failure to take into account the significant social factors means none the
+      less an absence of mind, and a corresponding distortion of emotional life.
+      II. This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations
+      lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point. The
+      isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its antisocial
+      spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has
+      interests "of its own" which shut it out from full interaction with other
+      groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has
+      got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships.
+      It marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which
+      seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with a larger
+      life; schools when separated from the interest of home and community; the
+      divisions of rich and poor; learned and unlearned. The essential point is
+      that isolation makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life,
+      for static and selfish ideals within the group. That savage tribes regard
+      aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the
+      fact that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to
+      their past customs. On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear
+      intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom. It would
+      certainly occasion reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and
+      expanding mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the
+      physical environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to
+      the field where we are apt to ignore it&mdash;the sphere of social
+      contacts. Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with
+      the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between
+      peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the
+      alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the fact
+      that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between them and
+      thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another, and thereby to
+      expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at
+      present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and
+      classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. It
+      remains for the most part to secure the intellectual and emotional
+      significance of this physical annihilation of space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point to
+      democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more varied
+      points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon the
+      recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The second
+      means not only freer interaction between social groups (once isolated so
+      far as intention could keep up a separation) but change in social habit&mdash;its
+      continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by
+      varied intercourse. And these two traits are precisely what characterize
+      the democratically constituted society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of
+      social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where
+      progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a
+      democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to
+      be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of democracy to
+      education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a
+      government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those
+      who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic
+      society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a
+      substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created
+      only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more
+      than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of
+      conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of
+      individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his
+      own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give
+      point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of
+      those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from
+      perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more
+      varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an
+      individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in
+      his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as
+      long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group
+      which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a
+      greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy,
+      are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort. On the
+      contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of manufacture and
+      commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the
+      command of science over natural energy. But after greater
+      individualization on one hand, and a broader community of interest on the
+      other have come into existence, it is a matter of deliberate effort to
+      sustain and extend them. Obviously a society to which stratification into
+      separate classes would be fatal, must see to it that intellectual
+      opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms. A society
+      marked off into classes need he specially attentive only to the education
+      of its ruling elements. A society which is mobile, which is full of
+      channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to
+      it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.
+      Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are
+      caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. The
+      result will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves
+      the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be
+      devoted to making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas in
+      education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider
+      the educational theories which have been evolved in three epochs when the
+      social import of education was especially conspicuous. The first one to be
+      considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than did he the
+      fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing that
+      for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be useful to
+      others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs); and that it is
+      the business of education to discover these aptitudes and progressively to
+      train them for social use. Much which has been said so far is borrowed
+      from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But conditions which
+      he could not intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in
+      their application. He never got any conception of the indefinite plurality
+      of activities which may characterize an individual and a social group, and
+      consequently limited his view to a limited number of classes of capacities
+      and of social arrangements. Plato's starting point is that the
+      organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of
+      existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident
+      and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion
+      for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be
+      promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. We shall have no
+      conception of the proper limits and distribution of activities&mdash;what
+      he called justice&mdash;as a trait of both individual and social
+      organization. But how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to
+      be achieved? In dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly
+      insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is not possible save in a just
+      and harmonious social order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted and
+      misled by false valuations and false perspectives. A disorganized and
+      factional society sets up a number of different models and standards.
+      Under such conditions it is impossible for the individual to attain
+      consistency of mind. Only a complete whole is fully self-consistent. A
+      society which rests upon the supremacy of some factor over another
+      irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads
+      thought astray. It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over others,
+      and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and distorted. Education
+      proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs,
+      and laws. Only in a just state will these be such as to give the right
+      education; and only those who have rightly trained minds will be able to
+      recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. We seem to be caught
+      in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out. A few men,
+      philosophers or lovers of wisdom&mdash;or truth&mdash;may by study learn
+      at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence. If a powerful
+      ruler should form a state after these patterns, then its regulations could
+      be preserved. An education could be given which would sift individuals,
+      discovering what they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning
+      each to the work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own
+      part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
+      maintained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a more
+      adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance of social
+      arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those arrangements
+      upon the means used to educate the young. It would be impossible to find a
+      deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and developing
+      personal capacities, and training them so that they would connect with the
+      activities of others. Yet the society in which the theory was propounded
+      was so undemocratic that Plato could not work out a solution for the
+      problem whose terms he clearly saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in
+      society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional
+      status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education,
+      he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall
+      by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.
+      Consequently the testing and sifting function of education only shows to
+      which one of three classes an individual belongs. There being no
+      recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be
+      no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
+      combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable. There were
+      only three types of faculties or powers in the individual's constitution.
+      Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each class, for only
+      diversity makes change and progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned to
+      the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human wants.
+      Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites, they have a
+      generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition. They become the
+      citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its internal
+      guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason,
+      which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are
+      capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time the
+      legislators of the state&mdash;for laws are the universals which control
+      the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in intent, Plato
+      subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that
+      lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his
+      incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a
+      society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and
+      classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of
+      individuality. We cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is
+      happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those
+      activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that
+      it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its
+      possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in knowledge
+      has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals
+      and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has
+      taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable.
+      It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which
+      society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of
+      the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by
+      classes. Although his educational philosophy was revolutionary, it was
+      none the less in bondage to static ideals. He thought that change or
+      alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true reality was
+      unchangeable. Hence while he would radically change the existing state of
+      society, his aim was to construct a state in which change would
+      subsequently have no place. The final end of life is fixed; given a state
+      framed with this end in view, not even minor details are to be altered.
+      Though they might not be inherently important, yet if permitted they would
+      inure the minds of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and
+      anarchic. The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in the fact
+      that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring
+      about a better society which should then improve education, and so on
+      indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an
+      ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to
+      its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust
+      to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to
+      coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In the
+      eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very different circle
+      of ideas. "Nature" still means something antithetical to existing social
+      organization; Plato exercised a great influence upon Rousseau. But the
+      voice of nature now speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for
+      the need of free development of individuality in all its variety.
+      Education in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of
+      instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original endowment was
+      conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even as antisocial. Social
+      arrangements were thought of as mere external expedients by which these
+      nonsocial individuals might secure a greater amount of private happiness
+      for themselves. Nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate
+      idea of the true significance of the movement. In reality its chief
+      interest was in progress and in social progress. The seeming antisocial
+      philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider
+      and freer society&mdash;toward cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was
+      humanity. In membership in humanity, as distinct from a state, man's
+      capacities would be liberated; while in existing political organizations
+      his powers were hampered and distorted to meet the requirements and
+      selfish interests of the rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme
+      individualism was but the counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the
+      indefinite perfectibility of man and of a social organization having a
+      scope as wide as humanity. The emancipated individual was to become the
+      organ and agent of a comprehensive and progressive society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the
+      social estate in which they found themselves. They attributed these evils
+      to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. Such limitation
+      was both distorting and corrupting. Their impassioned devotion to
+      emancipation of life from external restrictions which operated to the
+      exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past feudal system consigned
+      power, found intellectual formulation in a worship of nature. To give
+      "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial, corrupt, and inequitable
+      social order by a new and better kingdom of humanity. Unrestrained faith
+      in Nature as both a model and a working power was strengthened by the
+      advances of natural science. Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial
+      restraints of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of
+      law. The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of natural law,
+      was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force balanced with every
+      other. Natural law would accomplish the same result in human relations, if
+      men would only get rid of the artificial man-imposed coercive
+      restrictions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in
+      insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen that economic and
+      political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of
+      thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external chains
+      was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and
+      ideals. What was called social life, existing institutions, were too false
+      and corrupt to be intrusted with this work. How could it be expected to
+      undertake it when the undertaking meant its own destruction? "Nature" must
+      then be the power to which the enterprise was to be left. Even the extreme
+      sensationalistic theory of knowledge which was current derived itself from
+      this conception. To insist that mind is originally passive and empty was
+      one way of glorifying the possibilities of education. If the mind was a
+      wax tablet to be written upon by objects, there were no limits to the
+      possibility of education by means of the natural environment. And since
+      the natural world of objects is a scene of harmonious "truth," this
+      education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm
+      for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the constructive side
+      became obvious. Merely to leave everything to nature was, after all, but
+      to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the accidents of
+      circumstance. Not only was some method required but also some positive
+      organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the process of
+      instruction. The "complete and harmonious development of all powers,"
+      having as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive humanity,
+      required definite organization for its realization. Private individuals
+      here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the work.
+      A Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined
+      persons having wealth and power to follow his example. But even Pestalozzi
+      saw that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required the
+      support of the state. The realization of the new education destined to
+      produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon the activities of
+      existing states. The movement for the democratic idea inevitably became a
+      movement for publicly conducted and administered schools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the
+      movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement
+      in political life&mdash;a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent
+      movements. Under the influence of German thought in particular, education
+      became a civic function and the civic function was identified with the
+      realization of the ideal of the national state. The "state" was
+      substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To form
+      the citizen, not the "man," became the aim of education. 1 The historic
+      situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of the
+      Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt (and
+      subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that
+      systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and
+      maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they were weak
+      and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen they made this
+      condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and thoroughly
+      grounded system of public education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory. The
+      individualistic theory receded into the background. The state furnished
+      not only the instrumentalities of public education but also its goal. When
+      the actual practice was such that the school system, from the elementary
+      grades through the university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen
+      and soldier and the future state official and administrator and furnished
+      the means for military, industrial, and political defense and expansion,
+      it was impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim of social
+      efficiency. And with the immense importance attached to the nationalistic
+      state, surrounded by other competing and more or less hostile states, it
+      was equally impossible to interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague
+      cosmopolitan humanitarianism. Since the maintenance of a particular
+      national sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior
+      interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles for
+      international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was understood to
+      imply a like subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of
+      disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since, however,
+      the ideal of culture as complete development of personality persisted,
+      educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. The
+      reconciliation took the form of the conception of the "organic" character
+      of the state. The individual in his isolation is nothing; only in and
+      through an absorption of the aims and meaning of organized institutions
+      does he attain true personality. What appears to be his subordination to
+      political authority and the demand for sacrifice of himself to the
+      commands of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective
+      reason manifested in the state&mdash;the only way in which he can become
+      truly rational. The notion of development which we have seen to be
+      characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the Hegelian philosophy)
+      was just such a deliberate effort to combine the two ideas of complete
+      realization of personality and thoroughgoing "disciplinary" subordination
+      to existing institutions. The extent of the transformation of educational
+      philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation occupied by the
+      struggle against Napoleon for national independence, may be gathered from
+      Kant, who well expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his
+      treatise on Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later years of
+      the eighteenth century, he defines education as the process by which man
+      becomes man. Mankind begins its history submerged in nature&mdash;not as
+      Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and
+      appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which education is to develop and
+      perfect. The peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create
+      himself by his own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly
+      moral, rational, and free being. This creative effort is carried on by the
+      educational activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon
+      men consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing
+      state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity. But
+      there is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to educate its
+      young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to
+      the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible
+      realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so
+      that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of
+      their own purposes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must
+      depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity. "All
+      culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them. Simply
+      through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who are capable
+      of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the gradual
+      approximation of human nature to its end possible. Rulers are simply
+      interested in such training as will make their subjects better tools for
+      their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of privately conducted
+      schools must be carefully safeguarded. For the rulers' interest in the
+      welfare of their own nation instead of in what is best for humanity, will
+      make them, if they give money for the schools, wish to draw their plans.
+      We have in this view an express statement of the points characteristic of
+      the eighteenth century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full
+      development of private personality is identified with the aims of humanity
+      as a whole and with the idea of progress. In addition we have an explicit
+      fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated
+      education upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades
+      after this time, Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel,
+      elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational;
+      that in particular the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an
+      education carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
+      individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his
+      appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the
+      educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit,
+      Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and
+      compulsory system of education extending from the primary school through
+      the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and supervision
+      all private educational enterprises. Two results should stand out from
+      this brief historical survey. The first is that such terms as the
+      individual and the social conceptions of education are quite meaningless
+      taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato had the ideal of an
+      education which should equate individual realization and social coherency
+      and stability. His situation forced his ideal into the notion of a society
+      organized in stratified classes, losing the individual in the class. The
+      eighteenth century educational philosophy was highly individualistic in
+      form, but this form was inspired by a noble and generous social ideal:
+      that of a society organized to include humanity, and providing for the
+      indefinite perfectibility of mankind. The idealistic philosophy of Germany
+      in the early nineteenth century endeavored again to equate the ideals of a
+      free and complete development of cultured personality with social
+      discipline and political subordination. It made the national state an
+      intermediary between the realization of private personality on one side
+      and of humanity on the other. Consequently, it is equally possible to
+      state its animating principle with equal truth either in the classic terms
+      of "harmonious development of all the powers of personality" or in the
+      more recent terminology of "social efficiency." All this reinforces the
+      statement which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a
+      social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the
+      kind of society we have in mind. These considerations pave the way for our
+      second conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in and for
+      a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider
+      social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian" conception
+      suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite organs of execution
+      and agencies of administration. In Europe, in the Continental states
+      particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for human
+      welfare and progress was captured by national interests and harnessed to
+      do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. The social
+      aim of education and its national aim were identified, and the result was
+      a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human intercourse.
+      On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend national boundaries.
+      They are largely international in quality and method. They involve
+      interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples inhabiting different
+      countries. At the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has never
+      been as accentuated in politics as it is at the present time. Each nation
+      lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient war with its
+      neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme judge of its own interests,
+      and it is assumed as matter of course that each has interests which are
+      exclusively its own. To question this is to question the very idea of
+      national sovereignty which is assumed to be basic to political practice
+      and political science. This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between
+      the wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and the
+      narrower sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and
+      purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer conception of the meaning
+      of "social" as a function and test of education than has yet been
+      attained. Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a
+      national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not
+      be restricted, constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to
+      face the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split
+      society into classes some of which are made merely tools for the higher
+      culture of others. Externally, the question is concerned with the
+      reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior devotion
+      to the things which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national
+      political boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be worked out by
+      merely negative means. It is not enough to see to it that education is not
+      actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one
+      class by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and
+      efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of
+      economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the nation equality
+      of equipment for their future careers. Accomplishment of this end demands
+      not only adequate administrative provision of school facilities, and such
+      supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take advantage
+      of them, but also such modification of traditional ideals of culture,
+      traditional subjects of study and traditional methods of teaching and
+      discipline as will retain all the youth under educational influences until
+      they are equipped to be masters of their own economic and social careers.
+      The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of
+      education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and
+      more dominates our public system of education. The same principle has
+      application on the side of the considerations which concern the relations
+      of one nation to another. It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and
+      to avoid everything which would stimulate international jealousy and
+      animosity. The emphasis must be put upon whatever binds people together in
+      cooperative human pursuits and results, apart from geographical
+      limitations. The secondary and provisional character of national
+      sovereignty in respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association
+      and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be instilled as
+      a working disposition of mind. If these applications seem to be remote
+      from a consideration of the philosophy of education, the impression shows
+      that the meaning of the idea of education previously developed has not
+      been adequately grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of
+      education as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth
+      directed to social aims. Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can
+      only be inconsistently applied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM7" id="link2H_SUMM7">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction
+      implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to
+      measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the
+      interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and
+      freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable society,
+      in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to
+      free intercourse and communication of experience. A society which makes
+      provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms
+      and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through
+      interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far
+      democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives
+      individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and
+      the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing
+      disorder. Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered
+      from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally
+      quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out
+      by making a class rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called
+      individualism of the eighteenth-century enlightenment was found to involve
+      the notion of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the
+      individual was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the
+      development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature.
+      The institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century
+      supplied this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so
+      doing narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members
+      of the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination
+      of the individual to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain
+      in Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the
+      existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the citizen
+      nor the man. Under existing conditions, he preferred to try for the latter
+      rather than for the former. But there are many sayings of his which point
+      to the formation of the citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate
+      that his own endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was simply the best
+      makeshift the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Nature of an Aim.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
+      anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
+      education in a democratic community. For it assumed that the aim of
+      education is to enable individuals to continue their education&mdash;or
+      that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.
+      Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except
+      where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is
+      adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and
+      institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably
+      distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our search
+      for aims in education, we are not concerned, therefore, with finding an
+      end outside of the educative process to which education is subordinate.
+      Our whole conception forbids. We are rather concerned with the contrast
+      which exists when aims belong within the process in which they operate and
+      when they are set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must
+      obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that
+      case, some portions of the whole social group will find their aims
+      determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise from the
+      free growth of their own experience, and their nominal aims will be means
+      to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls
+      within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. We approach
+      the definition by a contrast of mere results with ends. Any exhibition of
+      energy has results. The wind blows about the sands of the desert; the
+      position of the grains is changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not an
+      end. For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills what
+      went before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One state of affairs
+      is just as good as any other. Consequently there is no basis upon which to
+      select an earlier state of affairs as a beginning, a later as an end, and
+      to consider what intervenes as a process of transformation and
+      realization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes
+      in the sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees'
+      actions may be called ends not because they are designed or consciously
+      intended, but because they are true terminations or completions of what
+      has preceded. When the bees gather pollen and make wax and build cells,
+      each step prepares the way for the next. When cells are built, the queen
+      lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood them
+      and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them. When they are
+      hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of themselves. Now we
+      are so familiar with such facts, that we are apt to dismiss them on the
+      ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing anyway. Thus
+      we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the event is; namely,
+      the significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the way
+      each prior event leads into its successor while the successor takes up
+      what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage, until we arrive at
+      the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the process. Since
+      aims relate always to results, the first thing to look to when it is a
+      question of aims, is whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic
+      continuity. Or is it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one
+      thing and then another? To talk about an educational aim when
+      approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the
+      only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the
+      assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is to talk
+      nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or
+      discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim
+      implies an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order consists
+      in the progressive completing of a process. Given an activity having a
+      time span and cumulative growth within the time succession, an aim means
+      foresight in advance of the end or possible termination. If bees
+      anticipated the consequences of their activity, if they perceived their
+      end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary element in an
+      aim. Hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of education&mdash;or any
+      other undertaking&mdash;where conditions do not permit of foresight of
+      results, and do not stimulate a person to look ahead to see what the
+      outcome of a given activity is to be. In the next place the aim as a
+      foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it is not an idle view of a
+      mere spectator, but influences the steps taken to reach the end. The
+      foresight functions in three ways. In the first place, it involves careful
+      observation of the given conditions to see what are the means available
+      for reaching the end, and to discover the hindrances in the way. In the
+      second place, it suggests the proper order or sequence in the use of
+      means. It facilitates an economical selection and arrangement. In the
+      third place, it makes choice of alternatives possible. If we can predict
+      the outcome of acting this way or that, we can then compare the value of
+      the two courses of action; we can pass judgment upon their relative
+      desirability. If we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes and that
+      they are likely to carry disease, we can, disliking that anticipated
+      result, take steps to avert it. Since we do not anticipate results as mere
+      intellectual onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are
+      partakers in the process which produces the result. We intervene to bring
+      about this result or that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course these three points are closely connected with one another. We
+      can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of present
+      conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the motive for
+      observations. The more adequate our observations, the more varied is the
+      scene of conditions and obstructions that presents itself, and the more
+      numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be made. In turn,
+      the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or
+      alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity possess,
+      and the more flexibly controllable is it. Where only a single outcome has
+      been thought of, the mind has nothing else to think of; the meaning
+      attaching to the act is limited. One only steams ahead toward the mark.
+      Sometimes such a narrow course may be effective. But if unexpected
+      difficulties offer themselves, one has not as many resources at command as
+      if he had chosen the same line of action after a broader survey of the
+      possibilities of the field. He cannot make needed readjustments readily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting
+      intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon
+      which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own capacities.
+      To do these things means to have a mind&mdash;for mind is precisely
+      intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of facts and
+      their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a thing is to
+      foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment;
+      it is to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and the
+      obstructions in the way,&mdash;or, if it is really a mind to do the thing
+      and not a vague aspiration&mdash;it is to have a plan which takes account
+      of resources and difficulties. Mind is capacity to refer present
+      conditions to future results, and future consequences to present
+      conditions. And these traits are just what is meant by having an aim or a
+      purpose. A man is stupid or blind or unintelligent&mdash;lacking in mind&mdash;just
+      in the degree in which in any activity he does not know what he is about,
+      namely, the probable consequences of his acts. A man is imperfectly
+      intelligent when he contents himself with looser guesses about the outcome
+      than is needful, just taking a chance with his luck, or when he forms
+      plans apart from study of the actual conditions, including his own
+      capacities. Such relative absence of mind means to make our feelings the
+      measure of what is to happen. To be intelligent we must "stop, look,
+      listen" in making the plan of an activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to show
+      its value&mdash;its function in experience. We are only too given to
+      making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness." We forget that
+      it comes from the adjective "conscious." To be conscious is to be aware of
+      what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning
+      traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes
+      idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon it by
+      physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of an activity,
+      for the fact that it is directed by an aim. Put the other way about, to
+      have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is
+      to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light
+      of that intent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our discussion
+      to a consideration of the criteria involved in a correct establishing of
+      aims. (1) The aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. It
+      must be based upon a consideration of what is already going on; upon the
+      resources and difficulties of the situation. Theories about the proper end
+      of our activities&mdash;educational and moral theories&mdash;often violate
+      this principle. They assume ends lying outside our activities; ends
+      foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which issue from
+      some outside source. Then the problem is to bring our activities to bear
+      upon the realization of these externally supplied ends. They are something
+      for which we ought to act. In any case such "aims" limit intelligence;
+      they are not the expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice
+      of the better among alternative possibilities. They limit intelligence
+      because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external
+      to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a mechanical choice of
+      means.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the
+      attempt to realize them. This impression must now be qualified. The aim as
+      it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch. The act of striving to
+      realize it tests its worth. If it suffices to direct activity
+      successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole function is to set
+      a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may suffice. But usually&mdash;at
+      least in complicated situations&mdash;acting upon it brings to light
+      conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision of the
+      original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. An aim must,
+      then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances.
+      An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid.
+      Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed to have a
+      working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation. What
+      happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it.
+      Such an end can only be insisted upon. The failure that results from its
+      lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions,
+      not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under the circumstances.
+      The value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary, lies in the fact that we
+      can use it to change conditions. It is a method for dealing with
+      conditions so as to effect desirable alterations in them. A farmer who
+      should passively accept things just as he finds them would make as great a
+      mistake as he who framed his plans in complete disregard of what soil,
+      climate, etc., permit. One of the evils of an abstract or remote external
+      aim in education is that its very inapplicability in practice is likely to
+      react into a haphazard snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim
+      surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative
+      plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it
+      as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence
+      constantly growing as it is tested in action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The term end in
+      view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination or
+      conclusion of some process. The only way in which we can define an
+      activity is by putting before ourselves the objects in which it terminates&mdash;as
+      one's aim in shooting is the target. But we must remember that the object
+      is only a mark or sign by which the mind specifies the activity one
+      desires to carry out. Strictly speaking, not the target but hitting the
+      target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the target, but also
+      by the sight on the gun. The different objects which are thought of are
+      means of directing the activity. Thus one aims at, say, a rabbit; what he
+      wants is to shoot straight: a certain kind of activity. Or, if it is the
+      rabbit he wants, it is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor
+      in activity; he wants to eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence of his
+      marksmanship&mdash;he wants to do something with it. The doing with the
+      thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end. The object is but a phase
+      of the active end,&mdash;continuing the activity successfully. This is
+      what is meant by the phrase, used above, "freeing activity."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go on,
+      stands the static character of an end which is imposed from without the
+      activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be
+      attained and possessed. When one has such a notion, activity is a mere
+      unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important on
+      its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil;
+      something which must be gone through before one can reach the object which
+      is alone worth while. In other words, the external idea of the aim leads
+      to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows up within an
+      activity as plan for its direction is always both ends and means, the
+      distinction being only one of convenience. Every means is a temporary end
+      until we have attained it. Every end becomes a means of carrying activity
+      further as soon as it is achieved. We call it end when it marks off the
+      future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it
+      marks off the present direction. Every divorce of end from means
+      diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to
+      reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could. A farmer
+      has to use plants and animals to carry on his farming activities. It
+      certainly makes a great difference to his life whether he is fond of them,
+      or whether he regards them merely as means which he has to employ to get
+      something else in which alone he is interested. In the former case, his
+      entire course of activity is significant; each phase of it has its own
+      value. He has the experience of realizing his end at every stage; the
+      postponed aim, or end in view, being merely a sight ahead by which to keep
+      his activity going fully and freely. For if he does not look ahead, he is
+      more likely to find himself blocked. The aim is as definitely a means of
+      action as is any other portion of an activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about educational
+      aims. They are just like aims in any directed occupation. The educator,
+      like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain resources with which to
+      do, and certain obstacles with which to contend. The conditions with which
+      the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own
+      structure and operation independently of any purpose of his. Seeds sprout,
+      rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, the seasons
+      change. His aim is simply to utilize these various conditions; to make his
+      activities and their energies work together, instead of against one
+      another. It would be absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming,
+      without any reference to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristic
+      of plant growth, etc. His purpose is simply a foresight of the
+      consequences of his energies connected with those of the things about him,
+      a foresight used to direct his movements from day to day. Foresight of
+      possible consequences leads to more careful and extensive observation of
+      the nature and performances of the things he had to do with, and to laying
+      out a plan&mdash;that is, of a certain order in the acts to be performed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as
+      absurd for the latter to set up his "own" aims as the proper objects of
+      the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an
+      ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Aims mean acceptance of
+      responsibility for the observations, anticipations, and arrangements
+      required in carrying on a function&mdash;whether farming or educating. Any
+      aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and planning in
+      carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it gets in
+      the way of the individual's own common sense (as it will surely do if
+      imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims.
+      Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract idea
+      like education. And consequently their purposes are indefinitely varied,
+      differing with different children, changing as children grow and with the
+      growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even the most
+      valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than
+      good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions
+      to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to choose in
+      liberating and directing the energies of the concrete situations in which
+      they find themselves. As a recent writer has said: "To lead this boy to
+      read Scott's novels instead of old Sleuth's stories; to teach this girl to
+      sew; to root out the habit of bullying from John's make-up; to prepare
+      this class to study medicine,&mdash;these are samples of the millions of
+      aims we have actually before us in the concrete work of education."
+      Bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state some of
+      the characteristics found in all good educational aims. (1) An educational
+      aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs (including
+      original instincts and acquired habits) of the given individual to be
+      educated. The tendency of such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen,
+      to omit existing powers, and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or
+      responsibility. In general, there is a disposition to take considerations
+      which are dear to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends
+      irrespective of the capacities of those educated. There is also an
+      inclination to propound aims which are so uniform as to neglect the
+      specific powers and requirements of an individual, forgetting that all
+      learning is something which happens to an individual at a given time and
+      place. The larger range of perception of the adult is of great value in
+      observing the abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they
+      may amount to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what
+      certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have the
+      adult achievements we should be without assurance as to the significance
+      of the drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring activities of childhood.
+      So if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to see the
+      import of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use
+      adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the doings
+      of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a fixed aim
+      without regard to the concrete activities of those educated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating
+      with the activities of those undergoing instruction. It must suggest the
+      kind of environment needed to liberate and to organize their capacities.
+      Unless it lends itself to the construction of specific procedures, and
+      unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter is
+      worthless. Instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it prevents
+      the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the situation. It
+      operates to exclude recognition of everything except what squares up with
+      the fixed end in view. Every rigid aim just because it is rigidly given
+      seems to render it unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete
+      conditions. Since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting details
+      which do not count?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them
+      from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is
+      current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As a
+      first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is
+      confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is the
+      individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor,
+      textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his
+      mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter.
+      This distrust of the teacher's experience is then reflected in lack of
+      confidence in the responses of pupils. The latter receive their aims
+      through a double or treble external imposition, and are constantly
+      confused by the conflict between the aims which are natural to their own
+      experience at the time and those in which they are taught to acquiesce.
+      Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every
+      growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by
+      the demand for adaptation to external aims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged to
+      be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific, is, of course,
+      general in its ramified connections, for it leads out indefinitely into
+      other things. So far as a general idea makes us more alive to these
+      connections, it cannot be too general. But "general" also means
+      "abstract," or detached from all specific context. And such abstractness
+      means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and
+      learning as mere means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the
+      means. That education is literally and all the time its own reward means
+      that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worth while
+      in its own immediate having. A truly general aim broadens the outlook; it
+      stimulates one to take more consequences (connections) into account. This
+      means a wider and more flexible observation of means. The more interacting
+      forces, for example, the farmer takes into account, the more varied will
+      be his immediate resources. He will see a greater number of possible
+      starting places, and a greater number of ways of getting at what he wants
+      to do. The fuller one's conception of possible future achievements, the
+      less his present activity is tied down to a small number of alternatives.
+      If one knew enough, one could start almost anywhere and sustain his
+      activities continuously and fruitfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the
+      sense of a broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall take
+      up some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational theories
+      of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the immediate concrete
+      and diversified aims which are always the educator's real concern. We
+      premise (as indeed immediately follows from what has been said) that there
+      is no need of making a choice among them or regarding them as competitors.
+      When we come to act in a tangible way we have to select or choose a
+      particular act at a particular time, but any number of comprehensive ends
+      may exist without competition, since they mean simply different ways of
+      looking at the same scene. One cannot climb a number of different
+      mountains simultaneously, but the views had when different mountains are
+      ascended supplement one another: they do not set up incompatible,
+      competing worlds. Or, putting the matter in a slightly different way, one
+      statement of an end may suggest certain questions and observations, and
+      another statement another set of questions, calling for other
+      observations. Then the more general ends we have, the better. One
+      statement will emphasize what another slurs over. What a plurality of
+      hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a plurality of stated
+      aims may do for the instructor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM8" id="link2H_SUMM8">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. An aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      consciousness and made a factor in determining present observation and
+      choice of ways of acting. It signifies that an activity has become
+      intelligent. Specifically it means foresight of the alternative
+      consequences attendant upon acting in a given situation in different ways,
+      and the use of what is anticipated to direct observation and experiment. A
+      true aim is thus opposed at every point to an aim which is imposed upon a
+      process of action from without. The latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a
+      stimulus to intelligence in the given situation, but is an externally
+      dictated order to do such and such things. Instead of connecting directly
+      with present activities, it is remote, divorced from the means by which it
+      is to be reached. Instead of suggesting a freer and better balanced
+      activity, it is a limit set to activity. In education, the currency of
+      these externally imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the
+      notion of preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of
+      both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Nature as Supplying the Aim. We have just pointed out the futility of
+      trying to establish the aim of education&mdash;some one final aim which
+      subordinates all others to itself. We have indicated that since general
+      aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey the existing
+      conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might have any number of
+      them, all consistent with one another. As matter of fact, a large number
+      have been stated at different times, all having great local value. For the
+      statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time. And we do not
+      emphasize things which do not require emphasis&mdash;that is, such things
+      as are taking care of themselves fairly well. We tend rather to frame our
+      statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary
+      situation; we take for granted, without explicit statement which would be
+      of no use, whatever is right or approximately so. We frame our explicit
+      aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about. It is, then, DO
+      paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or generation tends to
+      emphasize in its conscious projections just the things which it has least
+      of in actual fact. A time of domination by authority will call out as
+      response the desirability of great individual freedom; one of disorganized
+      individual activities the need of social control as an educational aim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus
+      balance each other. At different times such aims as complete living,
+      better methods of language study, substitution of things for words, social
+      efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete development of
+      personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, a esthetic contemplation,
+      utility, etc., have served. The following discussion takes up three
+      statements of recent influence; certain others have been incidentally
+      discussed in the previous chapters, and others will be considered later in
+      a discussion of knowledge and of the values of studies. We begin with a
+      consideration that education is a process of development in accordance
+      with nature, taking Rousseau's statement, which opposed natural to social
+      (See ante, p. 91); and then pass over to the antithetical conception of
+      social efficiency, which often opposes social to natural.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and
+      artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone to
+      resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the law and
+      the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her ways. The
+      positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way in which it
+      calls attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have regard to the
+      natural endowment of those educated. Its weakness is the ease with which
+      natural in the sense of normal is confused with the physical. The
+      constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and contriving, is then
+      discounted; we are just to get out of the way and allow nature to do the
+      work. Since no one has stated in the doctrine both its truth and falsity
+      better than Rousseau, we shall turn to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Education," he says, "we receive from three sources&mdash;Nature, men,
+      and things. The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities
+      constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which we are taught to put
+      this development constitutes that education given us by Men. The
+      acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects constitutes
+      that of things. Only when these three kinds of education are consonant and
+      make for the same end, does a man tend towards his true goal. If we are
+      asked what is this end, the answer is that of Nature. For since the
+      concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their
+      completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our control must
+      necessarily regulate us in determining the other two." Then he defines
+      Nature to mean the capacities and dispositions which are inborn, "as they
+      exist prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the
+      influence of the opinion of others."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as
+      fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction
+      with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say better what is said in
+      the first sentences. The three factors of educative development are (a)
+      the native structure of our bodily organs and their functional activities;
+      (b) the uses to which the activities of these organs are put under the
+      influence of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with the
+      environment. This statement certainly covers the ground. His other two
+      propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the three
+      factors of education are consonant and cooperative does adequate
+      development of the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities of
+      the organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But it
+      requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other
+      statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these three
+      things as factors which must work together to some extent in order that
+      any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as separate and
+      independent operations. Especially does he believe that there is an
+      independent and, as he says, "spontaneous" development of the native
+      organs and faculties. He thinks that this development can go on
+      irrespective of the use to which they are put. And it is to this separate
+      development that education coming from social contact is to be
+      subordinated. Now there is an immense difference between a use of native
+      activities in accord with those activities themselves&mdash;as distinct
+      from forcing them and perverting them&mdash;and supposing that they have a
+      normal development apart from any use, which development furnishes the
+      standard and norm of all learning by use. To recur to our previous
+      illustration, the process of acquiring language is a practically perfect
+      model of proper educative growth. The start is from native activities of
+      the vocal apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose
+      that these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself
+      would evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle would
+      mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and noises of
+      children not merely as the beginnings of the development of articulate
+      speech&mdash;which they are&mdash;but as furnishing language itself&mdash;the
+      standard for all teaching of language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right, introducing
+      a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the structure and
+      activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all teaching of the use
+      of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating that they supply not
+      only the conditions but also the ends of their development. As matter of
+      fact, the native activities develop, in contrast with random and
+      capricious exercise, through the uses to which they are put. And the
+      office of the social medium is, as we have seen, to direct growth through
+      putting powers to the best possible use. The instinctive activities may be
+      called, metaphorically, spontaneous, in the sense that the organs give a
+      strong bias for a certain sort of operation,&mdash;a bias so strong that
+      we cannot go contrary to it, though by trying to go contrary we may
+      pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. But the notion of a spontaneous normal
+      development of these activities is pure mythology. The natural, or native,
+      powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces in all education; they
+      do not furnish its ends or aims. There is no learning except from a
+      beginning in unlearned powers, but learning is not a matter of the
+      spontaneous overflow of the unlearned powers. Rousseau's contrary opinion
+      is doubtless due to the fact that he identified God with Nature; to him
+      the original powers are wholly good, coming directly from a wise and good
+      creator. To paraphrase the old saying about the country and the town, God
+      made the original human organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which
+      they are put. Consequently the development of the former furnishes the
+      standard to which the latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to
+      determine the uses to which the original activities shall be put, they
+      interfere with a divine plan. The interference by social arrangements with
+      Nature, God's work, is the primary source of corruption in individuals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all natural
+      tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total
+      depravity of innate human nature, and has had a powerful influence in
+      modifying the attitude towards children's interests. But it is hardly
+      necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good
+      nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects for which
+      they are employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing of
+      some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many
+      avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not to leave them
+      alone to follow their own "spontaneous development," but to provide an
+      environment which shall organize them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's statements, we
+      find that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point the means
+      of correcting many evils in current practices, and to indicate a number of
+      desirable specific aims. (1) Natural development as an aim fixes attention
+      upon the bodily organs and the need of health and vigor. The aim of
+      natural development says to parents and teachers: Make health an aim;
+      normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of the body&mdash;an
+      obvious enough fact and yet one whose due recognition in practice would
+      almost automatically revolutionize many of our educational practices.
+      "Nature" is indeed a vague and metaphorical term, but one thing that
+      "Nature" may be said to utter is that there are conditions of educational
+      efficiency, and that till we have learned what these conditions are and
+      have learned to make our practices accord with them, the noblest and most
+      ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer&mdash;are verbal and sentimental
+      rather than efficacious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect for
+      physical mobility. In Rousseau's words: "Children are always in motion; a
+      sedentary life is injurious." When he says that "Nature's intention is to
+      strengthen the body before exercising the mind" he hardly states the fact
+      fairly. But if he had said that nature's "intention" (to adopt his
+      poetical form of speech) is to develop the mind especially by exercise of
+      the muscles of the body he would have stated a positive fact. In other
+      words, the aim of following nature means, in the concrete, regard for the
+      actual part played by use of the bodily organs in explorations, in
+      handling of materials, in plays and games. (3) The general aim translates
+      into the aim of regard for individual differences among children. Nobody
+      can take the principle of consideration of native powers into account
+      without being struck by the fact that these powers differ in different
+      individuals. The difference applies not merely to their intensity, but
+      even more to their quality and arrangement. As Rouseau said: "Each
+      individual is born with a distinctive temperament. We indiscriminately
+      employ children of different bents on the same exercises; their education
+      destroys the special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we
+      have wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the
+      short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while
+      the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the waxing,
+      and waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and bloom
+      irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. We must strike
+      while the iron is hot. Especially precious are the first dawnings of
+      power. More than we imagine, the ways in which the tendencies of early
+      childhood are treated fix fundamental dispositions and condition the turn
+      taken by powers that show themselves later. Educational concern with the
+      early years of life&mdash;as distinct from inculcation of useful arts&mdash;dates
+      almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi and Froebel,
+      following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth. The irregularity of
+      growth and its significance is indicated in the following passage of a
+      student of the growth of the nervous system. "While growth continues,
+      things bodily and mental are lopsided, for growth is never general, but is
+      accentuated now at one spot, now at another. The methods which shall
+      recognize in the presence of these enormous differences of endowment the
+      dynamic values of natural inequalities of growth, and utilize them,
+      preferring irregularity to the rounding out gained by pruning will most
+      closely follow that which takes place in the body and thus prove most
+      effective." 1 Observation of natural tendencies is difficult under
+      conditions of restraint. They show themselves most readily in a child's
+      spontaneous sayings and doings,&mdash;that is, in those he engages in when
+      not put at set tasks and when not aware of being under observation. It
+      does not follow that these tendencies are all desirable because they are
+      natural; but it does follow that since they are there, they are operative
+      and must be taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones
+      have an environment which keeps them active, and that their activity shall
+      control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of the
+      latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble parents
+      when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much
+      direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them. At all
+      events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes as standards,
+      and regard all deviations of children's impulses as evils to be
+      eliminated. That artificiality against which the conception of following
+      nature is so largely a protest, is the outcome of attempts to force
+      children directly into the mold of grown-up standards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following
+      nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one
+      another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been
+      inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically
+      unlimited power to it. All the differences between peoples and between
+      classes and persons among the same people were said to be due to
+      differences of training, of exercise, and practice. Originally, mind,
+      reason, understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all.
+      This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and
+      the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As a protest
+      against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less
+      formal and abstract view of mind and its powers. It substituted specific
+      instincts and impulses and physiological capacities, differing from
+      individual to individual (just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out,
+      even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment,
+      memory, and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative
+      accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of modern
+      biology, physiology, and psychology. It means, in effect, that great as is
+      the significance of nurture, of modification, and transformation through
+      direct educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities, affords the
+      foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. On the other hand, the
+      doctrine of following nature was a political dogma. It meant a rebellion
+      against existing social institutions, customs, and ideals (See ante, p.
+      91). Rousseau's statement that everything is good as it comes from the
+      hands of the Creator has its signification only in its contrast with the
+      concluding part of the same sentence: "Everything degenerates in the hands
+      of man." And again he says: "Natural man has an absolute value; he is a
+      numerical unit, a complete integer and has no relation save to himself and
+      to his fellow man. Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator of
+      a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its relation to the
+      integral body of society. Good political institutions are those which make
+      a man unnatural." It is upon this conception of the artificial and harmful
+      character of organized social life as it now exists 2 that he rested the
+      notion that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which initiate growth
+      but also its plan and goal. That evil institutions and customs work almost
+      automatically to give a wrong education which the most careful schooling
+      cannot offset is true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart
+      from the environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers
+      will be put to better uses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the end
+      of a true education and society the end of an evil one, could hardly fail
+      to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the form of a doctrine
+      that the business of education is to supply precisely what nature fails to
+      secure; namely, habituation of an individual to social control;
+      subordination of natural powers to social rules. It is not surprising to
+      find that the value in the idea of social efficiency resides largely in
+      its protest against the points at which the doctrine of natural
+      development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is employed to
+      slur over the truth in that conception. It is a fact that we must look to
+      the activities and achievements of associated life to find what the
+      development of power&mdash;that is to say, efficiency&mdash;means. The
+      error is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather
+      than of utilization to secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered adequate
+      when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by negative
+      constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in
+      occupations having a social meaning. (1) Translated into specific aims,
+      social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency.
+      Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these
+      means are employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the
+      relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not able to
+      earn his own living and that of the children dependent upon him, he is a
+      drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He misses for himself one
+      of the most educative experiences of life. If he is not trained in the
+      right use of the products of industry, there is grave danger that he may
+      deprave himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme
+      of education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the
+      name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher
+      education have often not only neglected them, but looked at them with
+      scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from an
+      oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the significance
+      of an education which should have as a result ability to make one's way
+      economically in the world, and to manage economic resources usefully
+      instead of for mere display and luxury, should receive emphasis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing
+      economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A democratic
+      criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of competency to
+      choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the
+      attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial
+      callings, selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on
+      that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact,
+      industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through
+      the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old ones
+      are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train for too specific a
+      mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. When the occupation changes
+      its methods, such individuals are left behind with even less ability to
+      readjust themselves than if they had a less definite training. But, most
+      of all, the present industrial constitution of society is, like every
+      society which has ever existed, full of inequities. It is the aim of
+      progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and
+      unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. Wherever social control means
+      subordination of individual activities to class authority, there is danger
+      that industrial education will be dominated by acceptance of the status
+      quo. Differences of economic opportunity then dictate what the future
+      callings of individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the
+      defects of the Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened
+      method of selection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary to
+      separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. But the
+      latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications which are
+      vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from whatever make an
+      individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political
+      sense: it denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take a
+      determining part in making as well as obeying laws. The aim of civic
+      efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the notion of a
+      training of mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that
+      power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the things
+      which most need to be done are things which involve one's relationships
+      with others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too
+      narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain periods have
+      excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last
+      analysis security of social progress depends upon them. For scientific men
+      would have been thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally lacking
+      in social efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately social
+      efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share in a give
+      and take of experience. It covers all that makes one's own experience more
+      worth while to others, and all that enables one to participate more richly
+      in the worthwhile experiences of others. Ability to produce and to enjoy
+      art, capacity for recreation, the significant utilization of leisure, are
+      more important elements in it than elements conventionally associated
+      oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest sense, social efficiency is
+      nothing less than that socialization of mind which is actively concerned
+      in making experiences more communicable; in breaking down the barriers of
+      social stratification which make individuals impervious to the interests
+      of others. When social efficiency is confined to the service rendered by
+      overt acts, its chief constituent (because its only guarantee) is omitted,&mdash;intelligent
+      sympathy or good will. For sympathy as a desirable quality is something
+      more than mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have
+      in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them. What is
+      sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an unwitting
+      mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall be, instead
+      of an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find the good of
+      their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service, are hard and
+      metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgment of the
+      diversity of goods which life may afford to different persons, and from
+      faith in the social utility of encouraging every individual to make his
+      own choice intelligent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is
+      consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means at
+      least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw
+      and crude. When the "natural" is identified with this rawness, culture is
+      opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is also something
+      personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art
+      and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with a narrow
+      range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture
+      is opposed to efficiency. Whether called culture or complete development
+      of personality, the outcome is identical with the true meaning of social
+      efficiency whenever attention is given to what is unique in an individual&mdash;and
+      he would not be an individual if there were not something incommensurable
+      about him. Its opposite is the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive
+      quality is developed, distinction of personality results, and with it
+      greater promise for a social service which goes beyond the supply in
+      quantity of material commodities. For how can there be a society really
+      worth serving unless it is constituted of individuals of significant
+      personal qualities?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social
+      efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its rigid
+      division of inferior and superior. The latter are supposed to have time
+      and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the former are
+      confined to providing external products. When social efficiency as
+      measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be
+      democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the masses
+      characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried over.
+      But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social return
+      be demanded from all and that opportunity for development of distinctive
+      capacities be afforded all. The separation of the two aims in education is
+      fatal to democracy; the adoption of the narrower meaning of efficiency
+      deprives it of its essential justification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within
+      the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external
+      products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable experience,
+      it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities which may be
+      the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense,
+      by-products of education: by-products which are inevitable and important,
+      but nevertheless by-products. To set up an external aim strengthens by
+      reaction the false conception of culture which identifies it with
+      something purely "inner." And the idea of perfecting an "inner"
+      personality is a sure sign of social divisions. What is called inner is
+      simply that which does not connect with others&mdash;which is not capable
+      of free and full communication. What is termed spiritual culture has
+      usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has
+      been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally&mdash;and
+      therefore exclusively. What one is as a person is what one is as
+      associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse. This
+      transcends both the efficiency which consists in supplying products to
+      others and the culture which is an exclusive refinement and polish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher,
+      student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value to
+      others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently worth
+      while. Why then should it be thought that one must take his choice between
+      sacrificing himself to doing useful things for others, or sacrificing them
+      to pursuit of his own exclusive ends, whether the saving of his own soul
+      or the building of an inner spiritual life and personality? What happens
+      is that since neither of these things is persistently possible, we get a
+      compromise and an alternation. One tries each course by turns. There is no
+      greater tragedy than that so much of the professedly spiritual and
+      religious thought of the world has emphasized the two ideals of
+      self-sacrifice and spiritual self-perfecting instead of throwing its
+      weight against this dualism of life. The dualism is too deeply established
+      to be easily overthrown; for that reason, it is the particular task of
+      education at the present time to struggle in behalf of an aim in which
+      social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead of
+      antagonists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM9" id="link2H_SUMM9">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      the specific problems of education. Consequently it is a test of the value
+      of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it will translate
+      readily and consistently into the procedures which are suggested by
+      another. We have applied this test to three general aims: Development
+      according to nature, social efficiency, and culture or personal mental
+      enrichment. In each case we have seen that the aims when partially stated
+      come into conflict with each other. The partial statement of natural
+      development takes the primitive powers in an alleged spontaneous
+      development as the end-all. From this point of view training which renders
+      them useful to others is an abnormal constraint; one which profoundly
+      modifies them through deliberate nurture is corrupting. But when we
+      recognize that natural activities mean native activities which develop
+      only through the uses in which they are nurtured, the conflict disappears.
+      Similarly a social efficiency which is defined in terms of rendering
+      external service to others is of necessity opposed to the aim of enriching
+      the meaning of experience, while a culture which is taken to consist in an
+      internal refinement of a mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But
+      social efficiency as an educational purpose should mean cultivation of
+      power to join freely and fully in shared or common activities. This is
+      impossible without culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because
+      one cannot share in intercourse with others without learning&mdash;without
+      getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which one would
+      otherwise be ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of
+      culture than that it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range
+      and accuracy of one's perception of meanings.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      1 Donaldson, Growth of Brain, p. 356.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      2 We must not forget that Rousseau had the idea of a radically different
+      sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should be identical with
+      the good of all its members, which he thought to be as much better than
+      existing states as these are worse than the state of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Meaning of the Terms. We have already noticed the difference in the
+      attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former is
+      indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another,
+      since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what
+      is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him. His fortunes are more
+      or less at stake in the issue of events. Consequently he does whatever he
+      can to influence the direction present occurrences take. One is like a man
+      in a prison cell watching the rain out of the window; it is all the same
+      to him. The other is like a man who has planned an outing for the next day
+      which continuing rain will frustrate. He cannot, to be sure, by his
+      present reactions affect to-morrow's weather, but he may take some steps
+      which will influence future happenings, if only to postpone the proposed
+      picnic. If a man sees a carriage coming which may run over him, if he
+      cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the way if he
+      foresees the consequence in time. In many instances, he can intervene even
+      more directly. The attitude of a participant in the course of affairs is
+      thus a double one: there is solicitude, anxiety concerning future
+      consequences, and a tendency to act to assure better, and avert worse,
+      consequences. There are words which denote this attitude: concern,
+      interest. These words suggest that a person is bound up with the
+      possibilities inhering in objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout
+      for what they are likely to do to him; and that, on the basis of his
+      expectation or foresight, he is eager to act so as to give things one turn
+      rather than another. Interest and aims, concern and purpose, are
+      necessarily connected. Such words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the
+      results which are wanted and striven for; they take for granted the
+      personal attitude of solicitude and attentive eagerness. Such words as
+      interest, affection, concern, motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is
+      foreseen upon the individual's fortunes, and his active desire to act to
+      secure a possible result. They take for granted the objective changes. But
+      the difference is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in one
+      set of words is illuminated in the other. What is anticipated is objective
+      and impersonal; to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being run over. But
+      for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of
+      standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response.
+      The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference, which
+      finds expression in solicitude and effort. While such words as affection,
+      concern, and motive indicate an attitude of personal preference, they are
+      always attitudes toward objects&mdash;toward what is foreseen. We may call
+      the phase of objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal
+      concern emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in the facts
+      of the situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran their
+      course in a world by themselves. But they are always responses to what is
+      going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their successful
+      or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction with other
+      changes. Life activities flourish and fail only in connection with changes
+      of the environment. They are literally bound up with these changes; our
+      desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in which our doings
+      are tied up with the doings of things and persons about us. Instead of
+      marking a purely personal or subjective realm, separated from the
+      objective and impersonal, they indicate the non-existence of such a
+      separate world. They afford convincing evidence that changes in things are
+      not alien to the activities of a self, and that the career and welfare of
+      the self are bound up with the movement of persons and things. Interest,
+      concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a
+      developing situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole state of
+      active development, (ii) the objective results that are foreseen and
+      wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional inclination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (I) An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often referred to as
+      an interest. Thus we say that a man's interest is politics, or journalism,
+      or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting Japanese prints, or
+      banking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object touches or
+      engages a man; the point where it influences him. In some legal
+      transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to have a standing at
+      court. He has to show that some proposed step concerns his affairs. A
+      silent partner has an interest in a business, although he takes no active
+      part in its conduct because its prosperity or decline affects his profits
+      and liabilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iii) When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the emphasis
+      falls directly upon his personal attitude. To be interested is to be
+      absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an
+      interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. We say of
+      an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and that
+      he has found himself in it. Both terms express the engrossment of the self
+      in an object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory
+      way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first
+      exaggerated and then isolated. Interest is taken to mean merely the effect
+      of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure.
+      Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are reduced to
+      mere personal states of pleasure or pain. Educationally, it then follows
+      that to attach importance to interest means to attach some feature of
+      seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and
+      effort by offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is properly
+      stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the objection is based upon the fact&mdash;or assumption&mdash;that
+      the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be
+      appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other words, they
+      are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils. The
+      remedy is not in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more
+      than it is to search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the
+      alien material. It is to discover objects and modes of action, which are
+      connected with present powers. The function of this material in engaging
+      activity and carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest.
+      If the material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for
+      devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary,
+      semi-coerced effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,&mdash;that
+      which connects two things otherwise distant. In education, the distance
+      covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a process takes time
+      to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. We
+      overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between an
+      initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is
+      something intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are
+      the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
+      Between the two lie means&mdash;that is middle conditions:&mdash;acts to
+      be performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used. Only
+      through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial activities reach
+      a satisfactory consummation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because the
+      development of existing activities into the foreseen and desired end
+      depends upon them. To be means for the achieving of present tendencies, to
+      be "between" the agent and his end, to be of interest, are different names
+      for the same thing. When material has to be made interesting, it signifies
+      that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present power: or
+      that if the connection be there, it is not perceived. To make it
+      interesting by leading one to realize the connection that exists is simply
+      good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous and artificial
+      inducements deserves all the bad names which have been applied to the
+      doctrine of interest in education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the meaning of the term interest. Now for that of discipline.
+      Where an activity takes time, where many means and obstacles lie between
+      its initiation and completion, deliberation and persistence are required.
+      It is obvious that a very large part of the everyday meaning of will is
+      precisely the deliberate or conscious disposition to persist and endure in
+      a planned course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary
+      solicitations. A man of strong will, in the popular usage of the words, is
+      a man who is neither fickle nor half-hearted in achieving chosen ends. His
+      ability is executive; that is, he persistently and energetically strives
+      to execute or carry out his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clearly there are two factors in will. One has to do with the foresight of
+      results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has upon
+      the person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition. Obstinacy
+      may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps on doing a
+      thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly
+      thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally declines
+      (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to
+      himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed
+      himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while.
+      Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize ends which
+      present themselves than it does in persistence and energy in use of means
+      to achieve the end. The really executive man is a man who ponders his
+      ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as clear and full
+      as possible. The people we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always
+      deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts. They pick out
+      some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances.
+      When they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to
+      show themselves. They are discouraged, or complain of being thwarted in
+      their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action.
+      That the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is
+      intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and fullness
+      with which consequences are thought out, cannot be over-emphasized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of
+      results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of a
+      person. They are something to look at and for curiosity to play with
+      rather than something to achieve. There is no such thing as
+      over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-sided
+      intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as we say in considering the
+      consequences of proposed lines of action. A certain flabbiness of fiber
+      prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in
+      action. And most persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course of
+      action by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of inducements
+      to an action that is directly more agreeable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them
+      deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a power
+      to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of distraction,
+      confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.
+      Discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources available for
+      carrying through the action undertaken. To know what one is to do and to
+      move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means is to be
+      disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind. Discipline is
+      positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to compel obedience,
+      to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an uncongenial task&mdash;these
+      things are or are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to
+      the development of power to recognize what one is about and to persistence
+      in accomplishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline are
+      connected, not opposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (i) Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained power&mdash;apprehension
+      of what one is doing as exhibited in consequences&mdash;is not possible
+      without interest. Deliberation will be perfunctory and superficial where
+      there is no interest. Parents and teachers often complain&mdash;and
+      correctly&mdash;that children "do not want to hear, or want to
+      understand." Their minds are not upon the subject precisely because it
+      does not touch them; it does not enter into their concerns. This is a
+      state of things that needs to be remedied, but the remedy is not in the
+      use of methods which increase indifference and aversion. Even punishing a
+      child for inattention is one way of trying to make him realize that the
+      matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one way of arousing
+      "interest," or bringing about a sense of connection. In the long run, its
+      value is measured by whether it supplies a mere physical excitation to act
+      in the way desired by the adult or whether it leads the child "to think"&mdash;that
+      is, to reflect upon his acts and impregnate them with aims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even more
+      obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who are not interested in
+      what they are doing. If one were engaging a lawyer or a doctor, it would
+      never occur to one to reason that the person engaged would stick to his
+      work more conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he did it
+      merely from a sense of obligation. Interest measures&mdash;or rather is&mdash;the
+      depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one, moving one to act
+      for its realization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education. Interest
+      represents the moving force of objects&mdash;whether perceived or
+      presented in imagination&mdash;in any experience having a purpose. In the
+      concrete, the value of recognizing the dynamic place of interest in an
+      educative development is that it leads to considering individual children
+      in their specific capabilities, needs, and preferences. One who recognizes
+      the importance of interest will not assume that all minds work in the same
+      way because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook. Attitudes
+      and methods of approach and response vary with the specific appeal the
+      same material makes, this appeal itself varying with difference of natural
+      aptitude, of past experience, of plan of life, and so on. But the facts of
+      interest also supply considerations of general value to the philosophy of
+      education. Rightly understood, they put us on our guard against certain
+      conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have had great vogue in
+      philosophic thought in the past, and which exercise a serious hampering
+      influence upon the conduct of instruction and discipline. Too frequently
+      mind is set over the world of things and facts to be known; it is regarded
+      as something existing in isolation, with mental states and operations that
+      exist independently. Knowledge is then regarded as an external application
+      of purely mental existences to the things to be known, or else as a result
+      of the impressions which this outside subject matter makes on mind, or as
+      a combination of the two. Subject matter is then regarded as something
+      complete in itself; it is just something to be learned or known, either by
+      the voluntary application of mind to it or through the impressions it
+      makes on mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind
+      appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the
+      basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view to
+      controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place. The things,
+      the subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a
+      bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether assisting or
+      retarding it. These statements are too formal to be very intelligible. An
+      illustration may clear up their significance. You are engaged in a certain
+      occupation, say writing with a typewriter. If you are an expert, your
+      formed habits take care of the physical movements and leave your thoughts
+      free to consider your topic. Suppose, however, you are not skilled, or
+      that, even if you are, the machine does not work well. You then have to
+      use intelligence. You do not wish to strike the keys at random and let the
+      consequences be what they may; you wish to record certain words in a given
+      order so as to make sense. You attend to the keys, to what you have
+      written, to your movements, to the ribbon or the mechanism of the machine.
+      Your attention is not distributed indifferently and miscellaneously to any
+      and every detail. It is centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the
+      effective pursuit of your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are
+      concerned to note the existing facts because and in so far as they are
+      factors in the achievement of the result intended. You have to find out
+      what your resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the
+      difficulties and obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with
+      reference to what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not
+      involve such a forecast of results and such an examination of means and
+      hindrances is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither
+      case is it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended
+      and careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to be, in
+      that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical
+      manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the
+      case is the same. There is an activity in process; one is taken up with
+      the development of a theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph talks, this
+      means intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various
+      conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending, together
+      with continually renewed observation and recollection to get hold of the
+      subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be reached. The whole
+      attitude is one of concern with what is to be, and with what is so far as
+      the latter enters into the movement toward the end. Leave out the
+      direction which depends upon foresight of possible future results, and
+      there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let there be imaginative
+      forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its attainment
+      depends, and there is self-deception or idle dreaming&mdash;abortive
+      intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something complete
+      by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as that is
+      intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims, ends, enter
+      into it, with selection of means to further the attainment of aims.
+      Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns; but a
+      person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he plays a part
+      have the qualities mentioned. Nor are the activities in which a person
+      engages, whether intelligently or not, exclusive properties of himself;
+      they are something in which he engages and partakes. Other things, the
+      independent changes of other things and persons, cooperate and hinder. The
+      individual's act may be initial in a course of events, but the outcome
+      depends upon the interaction of his response with energies supplied by
+      other agencies. Conceive mind as anything but one factor partaking along
+      with others in the production of consequences, and it becomes meaningless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will
+      engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment
+      or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic appliances
+      but as conditions for the attainment of ends. The remedy for the evils
+      attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously spoken of, is not
+      to be found by substituting a doctrine of specialized disciplines, but by
+      reforming the notion of mind and its training. Discovery of typical modes
+      of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in which individuals are
+      concerned, in whose outcome they recognize they have something at stake,
+      and which cannot be carried through without reflection and use of judgment
+      to select material of observation and recollection, is the remedy. In
+      short, the root of the error long prevalent in the conception of training
+      of mind consists in leaving out of account movements of things to future
+      results in which an individual shares, and in the direction of which
+      observation, imagination, and memory are enlisted. It consists in
+      regarding mind as complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to a
+      present material.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In historic practice the error has cut two ways. On one hand, it has
+      screened and protected traditional studies and methods of teaching from
+      intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say that they are
+      "disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all inquiry. It has not been
+      enough to show that they were of no use in life or that they did not
+      really contribute to the cultivation of the self. That they were
+      "disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed
+      the subject from the realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the
+      allegation could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue as
+      matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and lost
+      power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not with the
+      study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof that he needed
+      more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the old methods.
+      The responsibility was transferred from the educator to the pupil because
+      the material did not have to meet specific tests; it did not have to be
+      shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served any specific end. It
+      was designed to discipline in general, and if it failed, it was because
+      the individual was unwilling to be disciplined. In the other direction,
+      the tendency was towards a negative conception of discipline, instead of
+      an identification of it with growth in constructive power of achievement.
+      As we have already seen, will means an attitude toward the future, toward
+      the production of possible consequences, an attitude involving effort to
+      foresee clearly and comprehensively the probable results of ways of
+      acting, and an active identification with some anticipated consequences.
+      Identification of will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a mind
+      is set up, endowed with powers that are only to be applied to existing
+      material. A person just either will or will not apply himself to the
+      matter in hand. The more indifferent the subject matter, the less concern
+      it has for the habits and preferences of the individual, the more demand
+      there is for an effort to bring the mind to bear upon it&mdash;and hence
+      the more discipline of will. To attend to material because there is
+      something to be done in which the person is concerned is not disciplinary
+      in this view; not even if it results in a desirable increase of
+      constructive power. Application just for the sake of application, for the
+      sake of training, is alone disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if
+      the subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive
+      (so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of
+      discipline. The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the
+      words of an American humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a
+      boy so long as he doesn't like it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing with
+      objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject matter to be
+      learned. In the traditional schemes of education, subject matter means so
+      much material to be studied. Various branches of study represent so many
+      independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement complete
+      within itself. History is one such group of facts; algebra another;
+      geography another, and so on till we have run through the entire
+      curriculum. Having a ready-made existence on their own account, their
+      relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire. This
+      idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program of
+      school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists of
+      "studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be
+      complete by itself&mdash;for educational purposes at least.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the meaning
+      of the subject matter of instruction. At this point, we need only to say
+      that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything which intelligence
+      studies represents things in the part which they play in the carrying
+      forward of active lines of interest. Just as one "studies" his typewriter
+      as part of the operation of putting it to use to effect results, so with
+      any fact or truth. It becomes an object of study&mdash;that is, of inquiry
+      and reflection&mdash;when it figures as a factor to be reckoned with in
+      the completion of a course of events in which one is engaged and by whose
+      outcome one is affected. Numbers are not objects of study just because
+      they are numbers already constituting a branch of learning called
+      mathematics, but because they represent qualities and relations of the
+      world in which our action goes on, because they are factors upon which the
+      accomplishment of our purposes depends. Stated thus broadly, the formula
+      may appear abstract. Translated into details, it means that the act of
+      learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which
+      pupils are merely presented with a lesson to be learned. Study is
+      effectual in the degree in which the pupil realizes the place of the
+      numerical truth he is dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in
+      which he is concerned. This connection of an object and a topic with the
+      promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the last word
+      of a genuine theory of interest in education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Some Social Aspects of the Question. While the theoretical errors of
+      which we have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of
+      schools, they are themselves the outcome of conditions of social life. A
+      change confined to the theoretical conviction of educators will not remove
+      the difficulties, though it should render more effective efforts to modify
+      social conditions. Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed
+      by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake. The
+      ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic attitude. Art is neither
+      merely internal nor merely external; merely mental nor merely physical.
+      Like every mode of action, it brings about changes in the world. The
+      changes made by some actions (those which by contrast may be called
+      mechanical) are external; they are shifting things about. No ideal reward,
+      no enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them. Others
+      contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external adornment and
+      display. Many of our existing social activities, industrial and political,
+      fall in these two classes. Neither the people who engage in them, nor
+      those who are directly affected by them, are capable of full and free
+      interest in their work. Because of the lack of any purpose in the work for
+      the one doing it, or because of the restricted character of its aim,
+      intelligence is not adequately engaged. The same conditions force many
+      people back upon themselves. They take refuge in an inner play of
+      sentiment and fancies. They are aesthetic but not artistic, since their
+      feelings and ideas are turned upon themselves, instead of being methods in
+      acts which modify conditions. Their mental life is sentimental; an
+      enjoyment of an inner landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become an
+      asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life&mdash;not a temporary
+      retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification in future dealings
+      with the world. The very word art may become associated not with specific
+      transformation of things, making them more significant for mind, but with
+      stimulations of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The
+      separation and mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of
+      theory or culture, the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are
+      indications of this situation. Thus interest and mind are either narrowed,
+      or else made perverse. Compare what was said in an earlier chapter about
+      the one-sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of
+      efficiency and of culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a basis
+      of division between laboring classes and leisure classes. The intelligence
+      of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting struggle with
+      things; that of those freed from the discipline of occupation becomes
+      luxurious and effeminate. Moreover, the majority of human beings still
+      lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are fixed by accident and necessity
+      of circumstance; they are not the normal expression of their own powers
+      interacting with the needs and resources of the environment. Our economic
+      conditions still relegate many men to a servile status. As a consequence,
+      the intelligence of those in control of the practical situation is not
+      liberal. Instead of playing freely upon the subjugation of the world for
+      human ends, it is devoted to the manipulation of other men for ends that
+      are non-human in so far as they are exclusive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational
+      traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in different
+      portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian character of most
+      elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character
+      of most higher education. It accounts for the tendency to isolate
+      intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and
+      professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that liberal
+      education is opposed to the requirements of an education which shall count
+      in the vocations of life. But it also helps define the peculiar problem of
+      present education. The school cannot immediately escape from the ideals
+      set by prior social conditions. But it should contribute through the type
+      of intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the
+      improvement of those conditions. And just here the true conceptions of
+      interest and discipline are full of significance. Persons whose interests
+      have been enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with things and
+      facts in active occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work)
+      will be those most likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and
+      aloof knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice. To
+      organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully
+      enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the doing requires
+      observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of a constructive
+      imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve social conditions.
+      To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in
+      outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of
+      knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that
+      education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby
+      takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A
+      reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection
+      with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow
+      work. It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a step at a time. But this is
+      not a reason for nominally accepting one educational philosophy and
+      accommodating ourselves in practice to another. It is a challenge to
+      undertake the task of reorganization courageously and to keep at it
+      persistently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM10" id="link2H_SUMM10">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      having an aim. Interest means that one is identified with the objects
+      which define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to its
+      realization. Any activity with an aim implies a distinction between an
+      earlier incomplete phase and later completing phase; it implies also
+      intermediate steps. To have an interest is to take things as entering into
+      such a continuously developing situation, instead of taking them in
+      isolation. The time difference between the given incomplete state of
+      affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort in transformation, it
+      demands continuity of attention and endurance. This attitude is what is
+      practically meant by will. Discipline or development of power of
+      continuous attention is its fruit. The significance of this doctrine for
+      the theory of education is twofold. On the one hand it protects us from
+      the notion that mind and mental states are something complete in
+      themselves, which then happen to be applied to some ready-made objects and
+      topics so that knowledge results. It shows that mind and intelligent or
+      purposeful engagement in a course of action into which things enter are
+      identical. Hence to develop and train mind is to provide an environment
+      which induces such activity. On the other side, it protects us from the
+      notion that subject matter on its side is something isolated and
+      independent. It shows that subject matter of learning is identical with
+      all the objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or
+      obstacles into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of action.
+      The developing course of action, whose end and conditions are perceived,
+      is the unity which holds together what are often divided into an
+      independent mind on one side and an independent world of objects and facts
+      on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Nature of Experience. The nature of experience can be understood
+      only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element peculiarly
+      combined. On the active hand, experience is trying&mdash;a meaning which
+      is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On the passive, it is
+      undergoing. When we experience something we act upon it, we do something
+      with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. We do something to
+      the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is the peculiar
+      combination. The connection of these two phases of experience measures the
+      fruitfulness or value of the experience. Mere activity does not constitute
+      experience. It is dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating. Experience as
+      trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is
+      consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from
+      it. When an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences,
+      when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made in us,
+      the mere flux is loaded with significance. We learn something. It is not
+      experience when a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is
+      experience when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes
+      in consequence. Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame means a
+      burn. Being burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick
+      of wood, if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action.
+      Blind and capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to
+      another. So far as this happens, everything is writ in water. There is
+      none of that cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital
+      sense of that term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way
+      of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of
+      our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is no
+      before or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and
+      consequently no meaning. We get nothing which may be carried over to
+      foresee what is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust
+      ourselves to what is coming&mdash;no added control. Only by courtesy can
+      such an experience be called experience. To "learn from experience" is to
+      make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and
+      what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions,
+      doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it
+      is like; the undergoing becomes instruction&mdash;discovery of the
+      connection of things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience is
+      primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive. But (2)
+      the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception of
+      relationships or continuities to which it leads up. It includes cognition
+      in the degree in which it is cumulative or amounts to something, or has
+      meaning. In schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked
+      upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which
+      appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect. The very word pupil
+      has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful
+      experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly. Something which is called
+      mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity. The
+      former is then thought to be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter
+      to be an irrelevant and intruding physical factor. The intimate union of
+      activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to recognition of
+      meaning is broken; instead we have two fragments: mere bodily action on
+      one side, and meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity on the
+      other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have
+      flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate them.
+      Some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated. (a) In
+      part bodily activity becomes an intruder. Having nothing, so it is
+      thought, to do with mental activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil to
+      be contended with. For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along
+      with his mind. And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it
+      has to do something. But its activities, not being utilized in occupation
+      with things which yield significant results, have to be frowned upon. They
+      lead the pupil away from the lesson with which his "mind" ought to be
+      occupied; they are sources of mischief. The chief source of the "problem
+      of discipline" in schools is that the teacher has often to spend the
+      larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take
+      the mind away from its material. A premium is put on physical quietude; on
+      silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like
+      simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest. The teachers'
+      business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the
+      inevitable deviations which occur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil
+      are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which
+      bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning. Callous
+      indifference and explosions from strain alternate. The neglected body,
+      having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without
+      knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into
+      equally meaningless fooling&mdash;both very different from the normal play
+      of children. Physically active children become restless and unruly; the
+      more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend what energy they have
+      in the negative task of keeping their instincts and active tendencies
+      suppressed, instead of in a positive one of constructive planning and
+      execution; they are thus educated not into responsibility for the
+      significant and graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty
+      not to give them free play. It may be seriously asserted that a chief
+      cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that it was
+      never misled by false notions into an attempted separation of mind and
+      body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned by
+      the application of "mind," some bodily activities have to be used. The
+      senses&mdash;especially the eye and ear&mdash;have to be employed to take
+      in what the book, the map, the blackboard, and the teacher say. The lips
+      and vocal organs, and the hands, have to be used to reproduce in speech
+      and writing what has been stowed away. The senses are then regarded as a
+      kind of mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from the
+      external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways and avenues
+      of knowledge. To keep the eyes on the book and the ears open to the
+      teacher's words is a mysterious source of intellectual grace. Moreover,
+      reading, writing, and figuring&mdash;important school arts&mdash;demand
+      muscular or motor training. The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs
+      accordingly have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back
+      out of the mind into external action. For it happens that using the
+      muscles repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an automatic tendency to
+      repeat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which (in
+      spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering character of the body in
+      mental action) have to be employed more or less. For the senses and
+      muscles are used not as organic participants in having an instructive
+      experience, but as external inlets and outlets of mind. Before the child
+      goes to school, he learns with his hand, eye, and ear, because they are
+      organs of the process of doing something from which meaning results. The
+      boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite, and has to note the
+      various pressures of the string on his hand. His senses are avenues of
+      knowledge not because external facts are somehow "conveyed" to the brain,
+      but because they are used in doing something with a purpose. The qualities
+      of seen and touched things have a bearing on what is done, and are alertly
+      perceived; they have a meaning. But when pupils are expected to use their
+      eyes to note the form of words, irrespective of their meaning, in order to
+      reproduce them in spelling or reading, the resulting training is simply of
+      isolated sense organs and muscles. It is such isolation of an act from a
+      purpose which makes it mechanical. It is customary for teachers to urge
+      children to read with expression, so as to bring out the meaning. But if
+      they originally learned the sensory-motor technique of reading&mdash;the
+      ability to identify forms and to reproduce the sounds they stand for&mdash;by
+      methods which did not call for attention to meaning, a mechanical habit
+      was established which makes it difficult to read subsequently with
+      intelligence. The vocal organs have been trained to go their own way
+      automatically in isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will.
+      Drawing, singing, and writing may be taught in the same mechanical way;
+      for, we repeat, any way is mechanical which narrows down the bodily
+      activity so that a separation of body from mind&mdash;that is, from
+      recognition of meaning&mdash;is set up. Mathematics, even in its higher
+      branches, when undue emphasis is put upon the technique of calculation,
+      and science, when laboratory exercises are given for their own sake,
+      suffer from the same evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from direct
+      occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the expense of
+      relations or connections. It is altogether too common to separate
+      perceptions and even ideas from judgments. The latter are thought to come
+      after the former in order to compare them. It is alleged that the mind
+      perceives things apart from relations; that it forms ideas of them in
+      isolation from their connections&mdash;with what goes before and comes
+      after. Then judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated
+      items of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection shall
+      be brought out. As matter of fact, every perception and every idea is a
+      sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a thing. We do not really know a
+      chair or have an idea of it by inventorying and enumerating its various
+      isolated qualities, but only by bringing these qualities into connection
+      with something else&mdash;the purpose which makes it a chair and not a
+      table; or its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or
+      the "period" which it represents, and so on. A wagon is not perceived when
+      all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic connection of the
+      parts which makes it a wagon. And these connections are not those of mere
+      physical juxtaposition; they involve connection with the animals that draw
+      it, the things that are carried on it, and so on. Judgment is employed in
+      the perception; otherwise the perception is mere sensory excitation or
+      else a recognition of the result of a prior judgment, as in the case of
+      familiar objects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for ideas. And
+      in just the degree in which mental activity is separated from active
+      concern with the world, from doing something and connecting the doing with
+      what is undergone, words, symbols, come to take the place of ideas. The
+      substitution is the more subtle because some meaning is recognized. But we
+      are very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning, and to
+      fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations which
+      confer significance. We get so thoroughly used to a kind of pseudo-idea, a
+      half perception, that we are not aware how half-dead our mental action is,
+      and how much keener and more extensive our observations and ideas would be
+      if we formed them under conditions of a vital experience which required us
+      to use judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with.
+      There is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter. All
+      authorities agree that that discernment of relationships is the genuinely
+      intellectual matter; hence, the educative matter. The failure arises in
+      supposing that relationships can become perceptible without experience&mdash;without
+      that conjoint trying and undergoing of which we have spoken. It is assumed
+      that "mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that this
+      attention may be given at will irrespective of the situation. Hence the
+      deluge of half-observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated
+      "knowledge" which afflicts the world. An ounce of experience is better
+      than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any
+      theory has vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble
+      experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or
+      intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be
+      definitely grasped even as theory. It tends to become a mere verbal
+      formula, a set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine
+      theorizing, unnecessary and impossible. Because of our education we use
+      words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal
+      being in reality simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us
+      from seeing any longer the difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Reflection in Experience. Thought or reflection, as we have already
+      seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation
+      between what we try to do and what happens in consequence. No experience
+      having a meaning is possible without some element of thought. But we may
+      contrast two types of experience according to the proportion of reflection
+      found in them. All our experiences have a phase of "cut and try" in them&mdash;what
+      psychologists call the method of trial and error. We simply do something,
+      and when it fails, we do something else, and keep on trying till we hit
+      upon something which works, and then we adopt that method as a rule of
+      thumb measure in subsequent procedure. Some experiences have very little
+      else in them than this hit and miss or succeed process. We see that a
+      certain way of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do
+      not see how they are. We do not see the details of the connection; the
+      links are missing. Our discernment is very gross. In other cases we push
+      our observation farther. We analyze to see just what lies between so as to
+      bind together cause and effect, activity and consequence. This extension
+      of our insight makes foresight more accurate and comprehensive. The action
+      which rests simply upon the trial and error method is at the mercy of
+      circumstances; they may change so that the act performed does not operate
+      in the way it was expected to. But if we know in detail upon what the
+      result depends, we can look to see whether the required conditions are
+      there. The method extends our practical control. For if some of the
+      conditions are missing, we may, if we know what the needed antecedents for
+      an effect are, set to work to supply them; or, if they are such as to
+      produce undesirable effects as well, we may eliminate some of the
+      superfluous causes and economize effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what
+      happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience is
+      made explicit. Its quantity increases so that its proportionate value is
+      very different. Hence the quality of the experience changes; the change is
+      so significant that we may call this type of experience reflective&mdash;that
+      is, reflective par excellence. The deliberate cultivation of this phase of
+      thought constitutes thinking as a distinctive experience. Thinking, in
+      other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections
+      between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that
+      the two become continuous. Their isolation, and consequently their purely
+      arbitrary going together, is canceled; a unified developing situation
+      takes its place. The occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is
+      reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the intelligent
+      element in our experience. It makes it possible to act with an end in
+      view. It is the condition of our having aims. As soon as an infant begins
+      to expect he begins to use something which is now going on as a sign of
+      something to follow; he is, in however simple a fashion, judging. For he
+      takes one thing as evidence of something else, and so recognizes a
+      relationship. Any future development, however elaborate it may be, is only
+      an extending and a refining of this simple act of inference. All that the
+      wisest man can do is to observe what is going on more widely and more
+      minutely and then select more carefully from what is noted just those
+      factors which point to something to happen. The opposites, once more, to
+      thoughtful action are routine and capricious behavior. The former accepts
+      what has been customary as a full measure of possibility and omits to take
+      into account the connections of the particular things done. The latter
+      makes the momentary act a measure of value, and ignores the connections of
+      our personal action with the energies of the environment. It says,
+      virtually, "things are to be just as I happen to like them at this
+      instant," as routine says in effect "let things continue just as I have
+      found them in the past." Both refuse to acknowledge responsibility for the
+      future consequences which flow from present action. Reflection is the
+      acceptance of such responsibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on,
+      something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled. Its point,
+      its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it is going
+      to turn out. As this is written, the world is filled with the clang of
+      contending armies. For an active participant in the war, it is clear that
+      the momentous thing is the issue, the future consequences, of this and
+      that happening. He is identified, for the time at least, with the issue;
+      his fate hangs upon the course things are taking. But even for an onlooker
+      in a neutral country, the significance of every move made, of every
+      advance here and retreat there, lies in what it portends. To think upon
+      the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is indicated as
+      probable or possible regarding an outcome. To fill our heads, like a
+      scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is
+      not to think. It is to turn ourselves into a piece of registering
+      apparatus. To consider the bearing of the occurrence upon what may be, but
+      is not yet, is to think. Nor will the reflective experience be different
+      in kind if we substitute distance in time for separation in space. Imagine
+      the war done with, and a future historian giving an account of it. The
+      episode is, by assumption, past. But he cannot give a thoughtful account
+      of the war save as he preserves the time sequence; the meaning of each
+      occurrence, as he deals with it, lies in what was future for it, though
+      not for the historian. To take it by itself as a complete existence is to
+      take it unreflectively. Reflection also implies concern with the issue&mdash;a
+      certain sympathetic identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic,
+      with the outcome of the course of events. For the general in the war, or a
+      common soldier, or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the
+      stimulus to thinking is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is indirect
+      and dependent upon imagination. But the flagrant partisanship of human
+      nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves
+      with one possible course of events, and to reject the other as foreign. If
+      we cannot take sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to
+      help determine the final balance, we take sides emotionally and
+      imaginatively. We desire this or that outcome. One wholly indifferent to
+      the outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all. From
+      this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the
+      consequences of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought.
+      Born in partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a
+      certain detached impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and
+      desires to affect his observations and interpretations of the existing
+      situation will surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes and fears
+      may be the chief motive for a thoughtful following of the war on the part
+      of an onlooker in a neutral country, he too will think ineffectively in
+      the degree in which his preferences modify the stuff of his observations
+      and reasonings. There is, however, no incompatibility between the fact
+      that the occasion of reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is
+      going on and the fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping
+      one's self out of the data. The almost insurmountable difficulty of
+      achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in
+      situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of
+      events and is designed to influence the result. Only gradually and with a
+      widening of the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does
+      thinking develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact
+      of great significance for education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which are still
+      going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking occurs when things are
+      uncertain or doubtful or problematic. Only what is finished, completed, is
+      wholly assured. Where there is reflection there is suspense. The object of
+      thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to project a possible termination
+      on the basis of what is already given. Certain other facts about thinking
+      accompany this feature. Since the situation in which thinking occurs is a
+      doubtful one, thinking is a process of inquiry, of looking into things, of
+      investigating. Acquiring is always secondary, and instrumental to the act
+      of inquiring. It is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand.
+      We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of
+      scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research,
+      and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if
+      everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking
+      for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be
+      guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an
+      adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. The conclusions of thinking, till
+      confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or
+      hypothetical. Their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of
+      the issue, in fact. The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we
+      learn? For either we know already what we are after, or else we do not
+      know. In neither case is learning possible; on the first alternative
+      because we know already; on the second, because we do not know what to
+      look for, nor if, by chance, we find it can we tell that it is what we
+      were after. The dilemma makes no provision for coming to know, for
+      learning; it assumes either complete knowledge or complete ignorance.
+      Nevertheless the twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists. The
+      possibility of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact
+      which the Greek dilemma overlooked. The perplexities of the situation
+      suggest certain ways out. We try these ways, and either push our way out,
+      in which case we know we have found what we were looking for, or the
+      situation gets darker and more confused&mdash;in which case, we know we
+      are still ignorant. Tentative means trying out, feeling one's way along
+      provisionally. Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice piece of
+      formal logic. But it is also true that as long as men kept a sharp
+      disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science made only slow and
+      accidental advance. Systematic advance in invention and discovery began
+      when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry
+      by forming conjectures to guide action in tentative explorations, whose
+      development would confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture. While
+      the Greeks made knowledge more than learning, modern science makes
+      conserved knowledge only a means to learning, to discovery. To recur to
+      our illustration. A commanding general cannot base his actions upon either
+      absolute certainty or absolute ignorance. He has a certain amount of
+      information at hand which is, we will assume, reasonably trustworthy. He
+      then infers certain prospective movements, thus assigning meaning to the
+      bare facts of the given situation. His inference is more or less dubious
+      and hypothetical. But he acts upon it. He develops a plan of procedure, a
+      method of dealing with the situation. The consequences which directly
+      follow from his acting this way rather than that test and reveal the worth
+      of his reflections. What he already knows functions and has value in what
+      he learns. But will this account apply in the case of the one in a neutral
+      country who is thoughtfully following as best he can the progress of
+      events? In form, yes, though not of course in content. It is self-evident
+      that his guesses about the future indicated by present facts, guesses by
+      which he attempts to supply meaning to a multitude of disconnected data,
+      cannot be the basis of a method which shall take effect in the campaign.
+      That is not his problem. But in the degree in which he is actively
+      thinking, and not merely passively following the course of events, his
+      tentative inferences will take effect in a method of procedure appropriate
+      to his situation. He will anticipate certain future moves, and will be on
+      the alert to see whether they happen or not. In the degree in which he is
+      intellectually concerned, or thoughtful, he will be actively on the
+      lookout; he will take steps which although they do not affect the
+      campaign, modify in some degree his subsequent actions. Otherwise his
+      later "I told you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does not mark
+      any testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a coincidence that
+      yields emotional satisfaction&mdash;and includes a large factor of
+      self-deception. The case is comparable to that of an astronomer who from
+      given data has been led to foresee (infer) a future eclipse. No matter how
+      great the mathematical probability, the inference is hypothetical&mdash;a
+      matter of probability. 1 The hypothesis as to the date and position of the
+      anticipated eclipse becomes the material of forming a method of future
+      conduct. Apparatus is arranged; possibly an expedition is made to some far
+      part of the globe. In any case, some active steps are taken which actually
+      change some physical conditions. And apart from such steps and the
+      consequent modification of the situation, there is no completion of the
+      act of thinking. It remains suspended. Knowledge, already attained
+      knowledge, controls thinking and makes it fruitful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the general features of a reflective experience. They are (i)
+      perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in an
+      incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined; (ii) a
+      conjectural anticipation&mdash;a tentative interpretation of the given
+      elements, attributing to them a tendency to effect certain consequences;
+      (iii) a careful survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of
+      all attainable consideration which will define and clarify the problem in
+      hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it
+      more precise and more consistent, because squaring with a wider range of
+      facts; (v) taking one stand upon the projected hypothesis as a plan of
+      action which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing something
+      overtly to bring about the anticipated result, and thereby testing the
+      hypothesis. It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which
+      mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and
+      error plane. They make thinking itself into an experience. Nevertheless,
+      we never get wholly beyond the trial and error situation. Our most
+      elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be tried in the world
+      and thereby tried out. And since it can never take into account all the
+      connections, it can never cover with perfect accuracy all the
+      consequences. Yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is so careful, and the
+      guessing at results so controlled, that we have a right to mark off the
+      reflective experience from the grosser trial and error forms of action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM11" id="link2H_SUMM11">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. In determining the place of thinking in experience we first
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with
+      something which is undergone in consequence. A separation of the active
+      doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning
+      of an experience. Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of
+      connections between what is done and its consequences. It notes not only
+      that they are connected, but the details of the connection. It makes
+      connecting links explicit in the form of relationships. The stimulus to
+      thinking is found when we wish to determine the significance of some act,
+      performed or to be performed. Then we anticipate consequences. This
+      implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us,
+      incomplete and hence indeterminate. The projection of consequences means a
+      proposed or tentative solution. To perfect this hypothesis, existing
+      conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of the
+      hypothesis developed&mdash;an operation called reasoning. Then the
+      suggested solution&mdash;the idea or theory&mdash;has to be tested by
+      acting upon it. If it brings about certain consequences, certain
+      determinate changes, in the world, it is accepted as valid. Otherwise it
+      is modified, and another trial made. Thinking includes all of these steps,&mdash;the
+      sense of a problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and
+      rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active
+      experimental testing. While all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately
+      the value of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking. For we live
+      not in a settled and finished world, but in one which is going on, and
+      where our main task is prospective, and where retrospect&mdash;and all
+      knowledge as distinct from thought is retrospect&mdash;is of value in the
+      solidity, security, and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 It is most important for the practice of science that men in many cases
+      can calculate the degree of probability and the amount of probable error
+      involved, but that does alter the features of the situation as described.
+      It refines them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Essentials of Method. No one doubts, theoretically, the importance
+      of fostering in school good habits of thinking. But apart from the fact
+      that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as in theory, there is
+      not adequate theoretical recognition that all which the school can or need
+      do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned (that is, leaving out
+      certain specialized muscular abilities), is to develop their ability to
+      think. The parceling out of instruction among various ends such as
+      acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling, writing, drawing, reciting);
+      acquiring information (in history and geography), and training of thinking
+      is a measure of the ineffective way in which we accomplish all three.
+      Thinking which is not connected with increase of efficiency in action, and
+      with learning more about ourselves and the world in which we live, has
+      something the matter with it just as thought (See ante, p. 147). And skill
+      obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of the
+      purposes for which it is to be used. It consequently leaves a man at the
+      mercy of his routine habits and of the authoritative control of others,
+      who know what they are about and who are not especially scrupulous as to
+      their means of achievement. And information severed from thoughtful action
+      is dead, a mind-crushing load. Since it simulates knowledge and thereby
+      develops the poison of conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to further
+      growth in the grace of intelligence. The sole direct path to enduring
+      improvement in the methods of instruction and learning consists in
+      centering upon the conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking.
+      Thinking is the method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs
+      and rewards mind. We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of
+      thinking, but the important thing to bear in mind about method is that
+      thinking is method, the method of intelligent experience in the course
+      which it takes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. The initial stage of that developing experience which is called
+      thinking is experience. This remark may sound like a silly truism. It
+      ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not. On the contrary, thinking is
+      often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice as
+      something cut off from experience, and capable of being cultivated in
+      isolation. In fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often urged
+      as the sufficient ground for attention to thinking. Experience is then
+      thought to be confined to the senses and appetites; to a mere material
+      world, while thinking proceeds from a higher faculty (of reason), and is
+      occupied with spiritual or at least literary things. So, oftentimes, a
+      sharp distinction is made between pure mathematics as a peculiarly fit
+      subject matter of thought (since it has nothing to do with physical
+      existences) and applied mathematics, which has utilitarian but not mental
+      value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Speaking generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of instruction lies
+      in supposing that experience on the part of pupils may be assumed. What is
+      here insisted upon is the necessity of an actual empirical situation as
+      the initiating phase of thought. Experience is here taken as previously
+      defined: trying to do something and having the thing perceptibly do
+      something to one in return. The fallacy consists in supposing that we can
+      begin with ready-made subject matter of arithmetic, or geography, or
+      whatever, irrespective of some direct personal experience of a situation.
+      Even the kindergarten and Montessori techniques are so anxious to get at
+      intellectual distinctions, without "waste of time," that they tend to
+      ignore&mdash;or reduce&mdash;the immediate crude handling of the familiar
+      material of experience, and to introduce pupils at once to material which
+      expresses the intellectual distinctions which adults have made. But the
+      first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever age of maturity,
+      must inevitably be of the trial and error sort. An individual must
+      actually try, in play or work, to do something with material in carrying
+      out his own impulsive activity, and then note the interaction of his
+      energy and that of the material employed. This is what happens when a
+      child at first begins to build with blocks, and it is equally what happens
+      when a scientific man in his laboratory begins to experiment with
+      unfamiliar objects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be
+      aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible. To
+      realize what an experience, or empirical situation, means, we have to call
+      to mind the sort of situation that presents itself outside of school; the
+      sort of occupations that interest and engage activity in ordinary life.
+      And careful inspection of methods which are permanently successful in
+      formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to read, or studying
+      geography, or learning physics or a foreign language, will reveal that
+      they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go back to the
+      type of the situation which causes reflection out of school in ordinary
+      life. They give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and
+      the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional
+      noting of connections; learning naturally results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse thinking means
+      of course that it should suggest something to do which is not either
+      routine or capricious&mdash;something, in other words, presenting what is
+      new (and hence uncertain or problematic) and yet sufficiently connected
+      with existing habits to call out an effective response. An effective
+      response means one which accomplishes a perceptible result, in distinction
+      from a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences cannot be
+      mentally connected with what is done. The most significant question which
+      can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or experience proposed to
+      induce learning is what quality of problem it involves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods measured well
+      up to the standard here set. The giving of problems, the putting of
+      questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is a
+      large part of school work. But it is indispensable to discriminate between
+      genuine and simulated or mock problems. The following questions may aid in
+      making such discrimination. (a) Is there anything but a problem? Does the
+      question naturally suggest itself within some situation or personal
+      experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem only for the purposes of
+      conveying instruction in some school topic? Is it the sort of trying that
+      would arouse observation and engage experimentation outside of school? (b)
+      Is it the pupil's own problem, or is it the teacher's or textbook's
+      problem, made a problem for the pupil only because he cannot get the
+      required mark or be promoted or win the teacher's approval, unless he
+      deals with it? Obviously, these two questions overlap. They are two ways
+      of getting at the same point: Is the experience a personal thing of such a
+      nature as inherently to stimulate and direct observation of the
+      connections involved, and to lead to inference and its testing? Or is it
+      imposed from without, and is the pupil's problem simply to meet the
+      external requirement? Such questions may give us pause in deciding upon
+      the extent to which current practices are adapted to develop reflective
+      habits. The physical equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom
+      are hostile to the existence of real situations of experience. What is
+      there similar to the conditions of everyday life which will generate
+      difficulties? Almost everything testifies to the great premium put upon
+      listening, reading, and the reproduction of what is told and read. It is
+      hardly possible to overstate the contrast between such conditions and the
+      situations of active contact with things and persons in the home, on the
+      playground, in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life. Much of it
+      is not even comparable with the questions which may arise in the mind of a
+      boy or girl in conversing with others or in reading books outside of the
+      school. No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions
+      outside of the school (so that they pester grown-up persons if they get
+      any encouragement), and the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity
+      about the subject matter of school lessons. Reflection on this striking
+      contrast will throw light upon the question of how far customary school
+      conditions supply a context of experience in which problems naturally
+      suggest themselves. No amount of improvement in the personal technique of
+      the instructor will wholly remedy this state of things. There must be more
+      actual material, more stuff, more appliances, and more opportunities for
+      doing things, before the gap can be overcome. And where children are
+      engaged in doing things and in discussing what arises in the course of
+      their doing, it is found, even with comparatively indifferent modes of
+      instruction, that children's inquiries are spontaneous and numerous, and
+      the proposals of solution advanced, varied, and ingenious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which
+      generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his; or, rather, they
+      are his only as a pupil, not as a human being. Hence the lamentable waste
+      in carrying over such expertness as is achieved in dealing with them to
+      the affairs of life beyond the schoolroom. A pupil has a problem, but it
+      is the problem of meeting the peculiar requirements set by the teacher.
+      His problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher wants, what will
+      satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and outward deportment.
+      Relationship to subject matter is no longer direct. The occasions and
+      material of thought are not found in the arithmetic or the history or
+      geography itself, but in skillfully adapting that material to the
+      teacher's requirements. The pupil studies, but unconsciously to himself
+      the objects of his study are the conventions and standards of the school
+      system and school authority, not the nominal "studies." The thinking thus
+      evoked is artificially one-sided at the best. At its worst, the problem of
+      the pupil is not how to meet the requirements of school life, but how to
+      seem to meet them&mdash;or, how to come near enough to meeting them to
+      slide along without an undue amount of friction. The type of judgment
+      formed by these devices is not a desirable addition to character. If these
+      statements give too highly colored a picture of usual school methods, the
+      exaggeration may at least serve to illustrate the point: the need of
+      active pursuits, involving the use of material to accomplish purposes, if
+      there are to be situations which normally generate problems occasioning
+      thoughtful inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II. There must be data at command to supply the considerations required in
+      dealing with the specific difficulty which has presented itself. Teachers
+      following a "developing" method sometimes tell children to think things
+      out for themselves as if they could spin them out of their own heads. The
+      material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the
+      relations of things. In other words, to think effectively one must have
+      had, or now have, experiences which will furnish him resources for coping
+      with the difficulty at hand. A difficulty is an indispensable stimulus to
+      thinking, but not all difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they
+      overwhelm and submerge and discourage. The perplexing situation must be
+      sufficiently like situations which have already been dealt with so that
+      pupils will have some control of the meanings of handling it. A large part
+      of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems
+      large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition
+      to the confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be
+      luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what psychological means
+      the subject matter for reflection is provided. Memory, observation,
+      reading, communication, are all avenues for supplying data. The relative
+      proportion to be obtained from each is a matter of the specific features
+      of the particular problem in hand. It is foolish to insist upon
+      observation of objects presented to the senses if the student is so
+      familiar with the objects that he could just as well recall the facts
+      independently. It is possible to induce undue and crippling dependence
+      upon sense-presentations. No one can carry around with him a museum of all
+      the things whose properties will assist the conduct of thought. A
+      well-trained mind is one that has a maximum of resources behind it, so to
+      speak, and that is accustomed to go over its past experiences to see what
+      they yield. On the other hand, a quality or relation of even a familiar
+      object may previously have been passed over, and be just the fact that is
+      helpful in dealing with the question. In this case direct observation is
+      called for. The same principle applies to the use to be made of
+      observation on one hand and of reading and "telling" on the other. Direct
+      observation is naturally more vivid and vital. But it has its limitations;
+      and in any case it is a necessary part of education that one should
+      acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his immediately
+      personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of others. Excessive
+      reliance upon others for data (whether got from reading or listening) is
+      to be depreciated. Most objectionable of all is the probability that
+      others, the book or the teacher, will supply solutions ready-made, instead
+      of giving material that the student has to adapt and apply to the question
+      in hand for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is usually both
+      too much and too little information supplied by others. The accumulation
+      and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction in recitation
+      and examination is made too much of. "Knowledge," in the sense of
+      information, means the working capital, the indispensable resources, of
+      further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things. Frequently it
+      is treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and
+      display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge
+      is inimical to educative development. It not only lets occasions for
+      thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one could construct a house
+      on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk. Pupils who have stored their
+      "minds" with all kinds of material which they have never put to
+      intellectual uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think. They
+      have no practice in selecting what is appropriate, and no criterion to go
+      by; everything is on the same dead static level. On the other hand, it is
+      quite open to question whether, if information actually functioned in
+      experience through use in application to the student's own purposes, there
+      would not be need of more varied resources in books, pictures, and talks
+      than are usually at command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III. The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already acquired,
+      is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings, suppositions, tentative
+      explanations:&mdash;ideas, in short. Careful observation and recollection
+      determine what is given, what is already there, and hence assured. They
+      cannot furnish what is lacking. They define, clarify, and locate the
+      question; they cannot supply its answer. Projection, invention, ingenuity,
+      devising come in for that purpose. The data arouse suggestions, and only
+      by reference to the specific data can we pass upon the appropriateness of
+      the suggestions. But the suggestions run beyond what is, as yet, actually
+      given in experience. They forecast possible results, things to do, not
+      facts (things already done). Inference is always an invasion of the
+      unknown, a leap from the known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is
+      presented) is creative,&mdash;an incursion into the novel. It involves
+      some inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some
+      context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light in
+      which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton
+      thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his thought
+      was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of them
+      commonplaces&mdash;sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of
+      numbers. These were not original ideas; they were established facts. His
+      originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances were put
+      by introduction into an unfamiliar context. The same is true of every
+      striking scientific discovery, every great invention, every admirable
+      artistic production. Only silly folk identify creative originality with
+      the extraordinary and fanciful; others recognize that its measure lies in
+      putting everyday things to uses which had not occurred to others. The
+      operation is novel, not the materials out of which it is constructed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is original
+      in a projection of considerations which have not been previously
+      apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be done with
+      blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and
+      five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though everybody else in
+      the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of experience; not
+      another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a new quality. The
+      charm which the spontaneity of little children has for sympathetic
+      observers is due to perception of this intellectual originality. The joy
+      which children themselves experience is the joy of intellectual
+      constructiveness&mdash;of creativeness, if the word may be used without
+      misunderstanding. The educational moral I am chiefly concerned to draw is
+      not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of a grind and
+      strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense of discovery and
+      not in that of storing away what others pour into them; nor that it would
+      be possible to give even children and youth the delights of personal
+      intellectual productiveness&mdash;true and important as are these things.
+      It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from
+      one person to another. When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is
+      told, another given fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the
+      other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like
+      idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning
+      effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by
+      wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and
+      finding his own way out, does he think. When the parent or teacher has
+      provided the conditions which stimulate thinking and has taken a
+      sympathetic attitude toward the activities of the learner by entering into
+      a common or conjoint experience, all has been done which a second party
+      can do to instigate learning. The rest lies with the one directly
+      concerned. If he cannot devise his own solution (not of course in
+      isolation, but in correspondence with the teacher and other pupils) and
+      find his own way out he will not learn, not even if he can recite some
+      correct answer with one hundred per cent accuracy. We can and do supply
+      ready-made "ideas" by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to
+      see that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own
+      activities generate, support, and clinch ideas&mdash;that is, perceived
+      meanings or connections. This does not mean that the teacher is to stand
+      off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject matter
+      and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not
+      quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared
+      activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing
+      it, a teacher&mdash;and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is,
+      on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better. IV.
+      Ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble guesses or dignified
+      theories, are anticipations of possible solutions. They are anticipations
+      of some continuity or connection of an activity and a consequence which
+      has not as yet shown itself. They are therefore tested by the operation of
+      acting upon them. They are to guide and organize further observations,
+      recollections, and experiments. They are intermediate in learning, not
+      final. All educational reformers, as we have had occasion to remark, are
+      given to attacking the passivity of traditional education. They have
+      opposed pouring in from without, and absorbing like a sponge; they have
+      attacked drilling in material as into hard and resisting rock. But it is
+      not easy to secure conditions which will make the getting of an idea
+      identical with having an experience which widens and makes more precise
+      our contact with the environment. Activity, even self-activity, is too
+      easily thought of as something merely mental, cooped up within the head,
+      or finding expression only through the vocal organs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the need of application of ideas gained in study is acknowledged by
+      all the more successful methods of instruction, the exercises in
+      application are sometimes treated as devices for fixing what has already
+      been learned and for getting greater practical skill in its manipulation.
+      These results are genuine and not to be despised. But practice in applying
+      what has been gained in study ought primarily to have an intellectual
+      quality. As we have already seen, thoughts just as thoughts are
+      incomplete. At best they are tentative; they are suggestions, indications.
+      They are standpoints and methods for dealing with situations of
+      experience. Till they are applied in these situations they lack full point
+      and reality. Only application tests them, and only testing confers full
+      meaning and a sense of their reality. Short of use made of them, they tend
+      to segregate into a peculiar world of their own. It may be seriously
+      questioned whether the philosophies (to which reference has been made in
+      section 2 of chapter X) which isolate mind and set it over against the
+      world did not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or
+      theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social
+      conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. Consequently men were
+      thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar artificiality
+      attaches to much of what is learned in schools. It can hardly be said that
+      many students consciously think of the subject matter as unreal; but it
+      assuredly does not possess for them the kind of reality which the subject
+      matter of their vital experiences possesses. They learn not to expect that
+      sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating it as having
+      reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and examinations. That
+      it should remain inert for the experiences of daily life is more or less a
+      matter of course. The bad effects are twofold. Ordinary experience does
+      not receive the enrichment which it should; it is not fertilized by school
+      learning. And the attitudes which spring from getting used to and
+      accepting half-understood and ill-digested material weaken vigor and
+      efficiency of thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the sake of
+      suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual development of
+      thought. Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops, and gardens,
+      where dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used, opportunities
+      exist for reproducing situations of life, and for acquiring and applying
+      information and ideas in the carrying forward of progressive experiences.
+      Ideas are not segregated, they do not form an isolated island. They
+      animate and enrich the ordinary course of life. Information is vitalized
+      by its function; by the place it occupies in direction of action. The
+      phrase "opportunities exist" is used purposely. They may not be taken
+      advantage of; it is possible to employ manual and constructive activities
+      in a physical way, as means of getting just bodily skill; or they may be
+      used almost exclusively for "utilitarian," i.e., pecuniary, ends. But the
+      disposition on the part of upholders of "cultural" education to assume
+      that such activities are merely physical or professional in quality, is
+      itself a product of the philosophies which isolate mind from direction of
+      the course of experience and hence from action upon and with things. When
+      the "mental" is regarded as a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart
+      fate befalls bodily activity and movements. They are regarded as at the
+      best mere external annexes to mind. They may be necessary for the
+      satisfaction of bodily needs and the attainment of external decency and
+      comfort, but they do not occupy a necessary place in mind nor enact an
+      indispensable role in the completion of thought. Hence they have no place
+      in a liberal education&mdash;i.e., one which is concerned with the
+      interests of intelligence. If they come in at all, it is as a concession
+      to the material needs of the masses. That they should be allowed to invade
+      the education of the elite is unspeakable. This conclusion follows
+      irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind, but by the same logic
+      it disappears when we perceive what mind really is&mdash;namely, the
+      purposive and directive factor in the development of experience. While it
+      is desirable that all educational institutions should be equipped so as to
+      give students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and
+      information in active pursuits typifying important social situations, it
+      will, doubtless, be a long time before all of them are thus furnished. But
+      this state of affairs does not afford instructors an excuse for folding
+      their hands and persisting in methods which segregate school knowledge.
+      Every recitation in every subject gives an opportunity for establishing
+      cross connections between the subject matter of the lesson and the wider
+      and more direct experiences of everyday life. Classroom instruction falls
+      into three kinds. The least desirable treats each lesson as an independent
+      whole. It does not put upon the student the responsibility of finding
+      points of contact between it and other lessons in the same subject, or
+      other subjects of study. Wiser teachers see to it that the student is
+      systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons to help understand the
+      present one, and also to use the present to throw additional light upon
+      what has already been acquired. Results are better, but school subject
+      matter is still isolated. Save by accident, out-of-school experience is
+      left in its crude and comparatively irreflective state. It is not subject
+      to the refining and expanding influences of the more accurate and
+      comprehensive material of direct instruction. The latter is not motivated
+      and impregnated with a sense of reality by being intermingled with the
+      realities of everyday life. The best type of teaching bears in mind the
+      desirability of affecting this interconnection. It puts the student in the
+      habitual attitude of finding points of contact and mutual bearings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM12" id="link2H_SUMM12">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      they center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may
+      speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is
+      that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials of
+      method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection. They are
+      first that the pupil have a genuine situation of experience&mdash;that
+      there be a continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake;
+      secondly, that a genuine problem develop within this situation as a
+      stimulus to thought; third, that he possess the information and make the
+      observations needed to deal with it; fourth, that suggested solutions
+      occur to him which he shall be responsible for developing in an orderly
+      way; fifth, that he have opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by
+      application, to make their meaning clear and to discover for himself their
+      validity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Unity of Subject Matter and Method.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The trinity of school topics is subject matter, methods, and
+      administration or government. We have been concerned with the two former
+      in recent chapters. It remains to disentangle them from the context in
+      which they have been referred to, and discuss explicitly their nature. We
+      shall begin with the topic of method, since that lies closest to the
+      considerations of the last chapter. Before taking it up, it may be well,
+      however, to call express attention to one implication of our theory; the
+      connection of subject matter and method with each other. The idea that
+      mind and the world of things and persons are two separate and independent
+      realms&mdash;a theory which philosophically is known as dualism&mdash;carries
+      with it the conclusion that method and subject matter of instruction are
+      separate affairs. Subject matter then becomes a ready-made systematized
+      classification of the facts and principles of the world of nature and man.
+      Method then has for its province a consideration of the ways in which this
+      antecedent subject matter may be best presented to and impressed upon the
+      mind; or, a consideration of the ways in which the mind may be externally
+      brought to bear upon the matter so as to facilitate its acquisition and
+      possession. In theory, at least, one might deduce from a science of the
+      mind as something existing by itself a complete theory of methods of
+      learning, with no knowledge of the subjects to which the methods are to be
+      applied. Since many who are actually most proficient in various branches
+      of subject matter are wholly innocent of these methods, this state of
+      affairs gives opportunity for the retort that pedagogy, as an alleged
+      science of methods of the mind in learning, is futile;&mdash;a mere screen
+      for concealing the necessity a teacher is under of profound and accurate
+      acquaintance with the subject in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But since thinking is a directed movement of subject matter to a
+      completing issue, and since mind is the deliberate and intentional phase
+      of the process, the notion of any such split is radically false. The fact
+      that the material of a science is organized is evidence that it has
+      already been subjected to intelligence; it has been methodized, so to say.
+      Zoology as a systematic branch of knowledge represents crude, scattered
+      facts of our ordinary acquaintance with animals after they have been
+      subjected to careful examination, to deliberate supplementation, and to
+      arrangement to bring out connections which assist observation, memory, and
+      further inquiry. Instead of furnishing a starting point for learning, they
+      mark out a consummation. Method means that arrangement of subject matter
+      which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of
+      the material.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How about method from the standpoint of an individual who is dealing with
+      subject matter? Again, it is not something external. It is simply an
+      effective treatment of material&mdash;efficiency meaning such treatment as
+      utilizes the material (puts it to a purpose) with a minimum of waste of
+      time and energy. We can distinguish a way of acting, and discuss it by
+      itself; but the way exists only as way-of-dealing-with-material. Method is
+      not antithetical to subject matter; it is the effective direction of
+      subject matter to desired results. It is antithetical to random and
+      ill-considered action,&mdash;ill-considered signifying ill-adapted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The statement that method means directed movement of subject matter
+      towards ends is formal. An illustration may give it content. Every artist
+      must have a method, a technique, in doing his work. Piano playing is not
+      hitting the keys at random. It is an orderly way of using them, and the
+      order is not something which exists ready-made in the musician's hands or
+      brain prior to an activity dealing with the piano. Order is found in the
+      disposition of acts which use the piano and the hands and brain so as to
+      achieve the result intended. It is the action of the piano directed to
+      accomplish the purpose of the piano as a musical instrument. It is the
+      same with "pedagogical" method. The only difference is that the piano is a
+      mechanism constructed in advance for a single end; while the material of
+      study is capable of indefinite uses. But even in this regard the
+      illustration may apply if we consider the infinite variety of kinds of
+      music which a piano may produce, and the variations in technique required
+      in the different musical results secured. Method in any case is but an
+      effective way of employing some material for some end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These considerations may be generalized by going back to the conception of
+      experience. Experience as the perception of the connection between
+      something tried and something undergone in consequence is a process. Apart
+      from effort to control the course which the process takes, there is no
+      distinction of subject matter and method. There is simply an activity
+      which includes both what an individual does and what the environment does.
+      A piano player who had perfect mastery of his instrument would have no
+      occasion to distinguish between his contribution and that of the piano. In
+      well-formed, smooth-running functions of any sort,&mdash;skating,
+      conversing, hearing music, enjoying a landscape,&mdash;there is no
+      consciousness of separation of the method of the person and of the subject
+      matter. In whole-hearted play and work there is the same phenomenon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we reflect upon an experience instead of just having it, we
+      inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects toward
+      which we sustain the attitude. When a man is eating, he is eating food. He
+      does not divide his act into eating and food. But if he makes a scientific
+      investigation of the act, such a discrimination is the first thing he
+      would effect. He would examine on the one hand the properties of the
+      nutritive material, and on the other hand the acts of the organism in
+      appropriating and digesting. Such reflection upon experience gives rise to
+      a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and the experiencing&mdash;the
+      how. When we give names to this distinction we have subject matter and
+      method as our terms. There is the thing seen, heard, loved, hated,
+      imagined, and there is the act of seeing, hearing, loving, hating,
+      imagining, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This distinction is so natural and so important for certain purposes, that
+      we are only too apt to regard it as a separation in existence and not as a
+      distinction in thought. Then we make a division between a self and the
+      environment or world. This separation is the root of the dualism of method
+      and subject matter. That is, we assume that knowing, feeling, willing,
+      etc., are things which belong to the self or mind in its isolation, and
+      which then may be brought to bear upon an independent subject matter. We
+      assume that the things which belong in isolation to the self or mind have
+      their own laws of operation irrespective of the modes of active energy of
+      the object. These laws are supposed to furnish method. It would be no less
+      absurd to suppose that men can eat without eating something, or that the
+      structure and movements of the jaws, throat muscles, the digestive
+      activities of stomach, etc., are not what they are because of the material
+      with which their activity is engaged. Just as the organs of the organism
+      are a continuous part of the very world in which food materials exist, so
+      the capacities of seeing, hearing, loving, imagining are intrinsically
+      connected with the subject matter of the world. They are more truly ways
+      in which the environment enters into experience and functions there than
+      they are independent acts brought to bear upon things. Experience, in
+      short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method
+      and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great
+      diversity (literally countless in number) of energies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the purpose of controlling the course or direction which the moving
+      unity of experience takes we draw a mental distinction between the how and
+      the what. While there is no way of walking or of eating or of learning
+      over and above the actual walking, eating, and studying, there are certain
+      elements in the act which give the key to its more effective control.
+      Special attention to these elements makes them more obvious to perception
+      (letting other factors recede for the time being from conspicuous
+      recognition). Getting an idea of how the experience proceeds indicates to
+      us what factors must be secured or modified in order that it may go on
+      more successfully. This is only a somewhat elaborate way of saying that if
+      a man watches carefully the growth of several plants, some of which do
+      well and some of which amount to little or nothing, he may be able to
+      detect the special conditions upon which the prosperous development of a
+      plant depends. These conditions, stated in an orderly sequence, would
+      constitute the method or way or manner of its growth. There is no
+      difference between the growth of a plant and the prosperous development of
+      an experience. It is not easy, in either case, to seize upon just the
+      factors which make for its best movement. But study of cases of success
+      and failure and minute and extensive comparison, helps to seize upon
+      causes. When we have arranged these causes in order, we have a method of
+      procedure or a technique.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A consideration of some evils in education that flow from the isolation of
+      method from subject matter will make the point more definite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (I) In the first place, there is the neglect (of which we have spoken) of
+      concrete situations of experience. There can be no discovery of a method
+      without cases to be studied. The method is derived from observation of
+      what actually happens, with a view to seeing that it happen better next
+      time. But in instruction and discipline, there is rarely sufficient
+      opportunity for children and youth to have the direct normal experiences
+      from which educators might derive an idea of method or order of best
+      development. Experiences are had under conditions of such constraint that
+      they throw little or no light upon the normal course of an experience to
+      its fruition. "Methods" have then to be authoritatively recommended to
+      teachers, instead of being an expression of their own intelligent
+      observations. Under such circumstances, they have a mechanical uniformity,
+      assumed to be alike for all minds. Where flexible personal experiences are
+      promoted by providing an environment which calls out directed occupations
+      in work and play, the methods ascertained will vary with individuals&mdash;for
+      it is certain that each individual has something characteristic in his way
+      of going at things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) In the second place, the notion of methods isolated from subject
+      matter is responsible for the false conceptions of discipline and interest
+      already noted. When the effective way of managing material is treated as
+      something ready-made apart from material, there are just three possible
+      ways in which to establish a relationship lacking by assumption. One is to
+      utilize excitement, shock of pleasure, tickling the palate. Another is to
+      make the consequences of not attending painful; we may use the menace of
+      harm to motivate concern with the alien subject matter. Or a direct appeal
+      may be made to the person to put forth effort without any reason. We may
+      rely upon immediate strain of "will." In practice, however, the latter
+      method is effectual only when instigated by fear of unpleasant results.
+      (iii) In the third place, the act of learning is made a direct and
+      conscious end in itself. Under normal conditions, learning is a product
+      and reward of occupation with subject matter. Children do not set out,
+      consciously, to learn walking or talking. One sets out to give his
+      impulses for communication and for fuller intercourse with others a show.
+      He learns in consequence of his direct activities. The better methods of
+      teaching a child, say, to read, follow the same road. They do not fix his
+      attention upon the fact that he has to learn something and so make his
+      attitude self-conscious and constrained. They engage his activities, and
+      in the process of engagement he learns: the same is true of the more
+      successful methods in dealing with number or whatever. But when the
+      subject matter is not used in carrying forward impulses and habits to
+      significant results, it is just something to be learned. The pupil's
+      attitude to it is just that of having to learn it. Conditions more
+      unfavorable to an alert and concentrated response would be hard to devise.
+      Frontal attacks are even more wasteful in learning than in war. This does
+      not mean, however, that students are to be seduced unaware into
+      preoccupation with lessons. It means that they shall be occupied with them
+      for real reasons or ends, and not just as something to be learned. This is
+      accomplished whenever the pupil perceives the place occupied by the
+      subject matter in the fulfilling of some experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iv) In the fourth place, under the influence of the conception of the
+      separation of mind and material, method tends to be reduced to a cut and
+      dried routine, to following mechanically prescribed steps. No one can tell
+      in how many schoolrooms children reciting in arithmetic or grammar are
+      compelled to go through, under the alleged sanction of method, certain
+      preordained verbal formulae. Instead of being encouraged to attack their
+      topics directly, experimenting with methods that seem promising and
+      learning to discriminate by the consequences that accrue, it is assumed
+      that there is one fixed method to be followed. It is also naively assumed
+      that if the pupils make their statements and explanations in a certain
+      form of "analysis," their mental habits will in time conform. Nothing has
+      brought pedagogical theory into greater disrepute than the belief that it
+      is identified with handing out to teachers recipes and models to be
+      followed in teaching. Flexibility and initiative in dealing with problems
+      are characteristic of any conception to which method is a way of managing
+      material to develop a conclusion. Mechanical rigid woodenness is an
+      inevitable corollary of any theory which separates mind from activity
+      motivated by a purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Method as General and as Individual. In brief, the method of teaching
+      is the method of an art, of action intelligently directed by ends. But the
+      practice of a fine art is far from being a matter of extemporized
+      inspirations. Study of the operations and results of those in the past who
+      have greatly succeeded is essential. There is always a tradition, or
+      schools of art, definite enough to impress beginners, and often to take
+      them captive. Methods of artists in every branch depend upon thorough
+      acquaintance with materials and tools; the painter must know canvas,
+      pigments, brushes, and the technique of manipulation of all his
+      appliances. Attainment of this knowledge requires persistent and
+      concentrated attention to objective materials. The artist studies the
+      progress of his own attempts to see what succeeds and what fails. The
+      assumption that there are no alternatives between following ready-made
+      rules and trusting to native gifts, the inspiration of the moment and
+      undirected "hard work," is contradicted by the procedures of every art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such matters as knowledge of the past, of current technique, of materials,
+      of the ways in which one's own best results are assured, supply the
+      material for what may be called general method. There exists a cumulative
+      body of fairly stable methods for reaching results, a body authorized by
+      past experience and by intellectual analysis, which an individual ignores
+      at his peril. As was pointed out in the discussion of habit-forming (ante,
+      p. 49), there is always a danger that these methods will become mechanized
+      and rigid, mastering an agent instead of being powers at command for his
+      own ends. But it is also true that the innovator who achieves anything
+      enduring, whose work is more than a passing sensation, utilizes classic
+      methods more than may appear to himself or to his critics. He devotes them
+      to new uses, and in so far transforms them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Education also has its general methods. And if the application of this
+      remark is more obvious in the case of the teacher than of the pupil, it is
+      equally real in the case of the latter. Part of his learning, a very
+      important part, consists in becoming master of the methods which the
+      experience of others has shown to be more efficient in like cases of
+      getting knowledge. 1 These general methods are in no way opposed to
+      individual initiative and originality&mdash;to personal ways of doing
+      things. On the contrary they are reinforcements of them. For there is
+      radical difference between even the most general method and a prescribed
+      rule. The latter is a direct guide to action; the former operates
+      indirectly through the enlightenment it supplies as to ends and means. It
+      operates, that is to say, through intelligence, and not through conformity
+      to orders externally imposed. Ability to use even in a masterly way an
+      established technique gives no warranty of artistic work, for the latter
+      also depends upon an animating idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If knowledge of methods used by others does not directly tell us what to
+      do, or furnish ready-made models, how does it operate? What is meant by
+      calling a method intellectual? Take the case of a physician. No mode of
+      behavior more imperiously demands knowledge of established modes of
+      diagnosis and treatment than does his. But after all, cases are like, not
+      identical. To be used intelligently, existing practices, however
+      authorized they may be, have to be adapted to the exigencies of particular
+      cases. Accordingly, recognized procedures indicate to the physician what
+      inquiries to set on foot for himself, what measures to try. They are
+      standpoints from which to carry on investigations; they economize a survey
+      of the features of the particular case by suggesting the things to be
+      especially looked into. The physician's own personal attitudes, his own
+      ways (individual methods) of dealing with the situation in which he is
+      concerned, are not subordinated to the general principles of procedure,
+      but are facilitated and directed by the latter. The instance may serve to
+      point out the value to the teacher of a knowledge of the psychological
+      methods and the empirical devices found useful in the past. When they get
+      in the way of his own common sense, when they come between him and the
+      situation in which he has to act, they are worse than useless. But if he
+      has acquired them as intellectual aids in sizing up the needs, resources,
+      and difficulties of the unique experiences in which he engages, they are
+      of constructive value. In the last resort, just because everything depends
+      upon his own methods of response, much depends upon how far he can
+      utilize, in making his own response, the knowledge which has accrued in
+      the experience of others. As already intimated, every word of this account
+      is directly applicable also to the method of the pupil, the way of
+      learning. To suppose that students, whether in the primary school or in
+      the university, can be supplied with models of method to be followed in
+      acquiring and expounding a subject is to fall into a self-deception that
+      has lamentable consequences. (See ante, p. 169.) One must make his own
+      reaction in any case. Indications of the standardized or general methods
+      used in like cases by others&mdash;particularly by those who are already
+      experts&mdash;are of worth or of harm according as they make his personal
+      reaction more intelligent or as they induce a person to dispense with
+      exercise of his own judgment. If what was said earlier (See p. 159) about
+      originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding more of education
+      than the capacities of average human nature permit, the difficulty is that
+      we lie under the incubus of a superstition. We have set up the notion of
+      mind at large, of intellectual method that is the same for all. Then we
+      regard individuals as differing in the quantity of mind with which they
+      are charged. Ordinary persons are then expected to be ordinary. Only the
+      exceptional are allowed to have originality. The measure of difference
+      between the average student and the genius is a measure of the absence of
+      originality in the former. But this notion of mind in general is a
+      fiction. How one person's abilities compare in quantity with those of
+      another is none of the teacher's business. It is irrelevant to his work.
+      What is required is that every individual shall have opportunities to
+      employ his own powers in activities that have meaning. Mind, individual
+      method, originality (these are convertible terms) signify the quality of
+      purposive or directed action. If we act upon this conviction, we shall
+      secure more originality even by the conventional standard than now
+      develops. Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds
+      mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by
+      deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them. Thus we stifle the
+      distinctive quality of the many, and save in rare instances (like, say,
+      that of Darwin) infect the rare geniuses with an unwholesome quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Traits of Individual Method. The most general features of the
+      method of knowing have been given in our chapter on thinking. They are the
+      features of the reflective situation: Problem, collection and analysis of
+      data, projection and elaboration of suggestions or ideas, experimental
+      application and testing; the resulting conclusion or judgment. The
+      specific elements of an individual's method or way of attack upon a
+      problem are found ultimately in his native tendencies and his acquired
+      habits and interests. The method of one will vary from that of another
+      (and properly vary) as his original instinctive capacities vary, as his
+      past experiences and his preferences vary. Those who have already studied
+      these matters are in possession of information which will help teachers in
+      understanding the responses different pupils make, and help them in
+      guiding these responses to greater efficiency. Child-study, psychology,
+      and a knowledge of social environment supplement the personal acquaintance
+      gained by the teacher. But methods remain the personal concern, approach,
+      and attack of an individual, and no catalogue can ever exhaust their
+      diversity of form and tint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some attitudes may be named, however,-which are central in effective
+      intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter. Among the most important
+      are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or whole-heartedness),
+      and responsibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. It is easier to indicate what is meant by directness through negative
+      terms than in positive ones. Self-consciousness, embarrassment, and
+      constraint are its menacing foes. They indicate that a person is not
+      immediately concerned with subject matter. Something has come between
+      which deflects concern to side issues. A self-conscious person is partly
+      thinking about his problem and partly about what others think of his
+      performances. Diverted energy means loss of power and confusion of ideas.
+      Taking an attitude is by no means identical with being conscious of one's
+      attitude. The former is spontaneous, naive, and simple. It is a sign of
+      whole-souled relationship between a person and what he is dealing with.
+      The latter is not of necessity abnormal. It is sometimes the easiest way
+      of correcting a false method of approach, and of improving the
+      effectiveness of the means one is employing,&mdash;as golf players, piano
+      players, public speakers, etc., have occasionally to give especial
+      attention to their position and movements. But this need is occasional and
+      temporary. When it is effectual a person thinks of himself in terms of
+      what is to be done, as one means among others of the realization of an end&mdash;as
+      in the case of a tennis player practicing to get the "feel" of a stroke.
+      In abnormal cases, one thinks of himself not as part of the agencies of
+      execution, but as a separate object&mdash;as when the player strikes an
+      attitude thinking of the impression it will make upon spectators, or is
+      worried because of the impression he fears his movements give rise to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Confidence is a good name for what is intended by the term directness. It
+      should not be confused, however, with self-confidence which may be a form
+      of self-consciousness&mdash;or of "cheek." Confidence is not a name for
+      what one thinks or feels about his attitude it is not reflex. It denotes
+      the straightforwardness with which one goes at what he has to do. It
+      denotes not conscious trust in the efficacy of one's powers but
+      unconscious faith in the possibilities of the situation. It signifies
+      rising to the needs of the situation. We have already pointed out (See p.
+      169) the objections to making students emphatically aware of the fact that
+      they are studying or learning. Just in the degree in which they are
+      induced by the conditions to be so aware, they are not studying and
+      learning. They are in a divided and complicated attitude. Whatever methods
+      of a teacher call a pupil's attention off from what he has to do and
+      transfer it to his own attitude towards what he is doing impair directness
+      of concern and action. Persisted in, the pupil acquires a permanent
+      tendency to fumble, to gaze about aimlessly, to look for some clew of
+      action beside that which the subject matter supplies. Dependence upon
+      extraneous suggestions and directions, a state of foggy confusion, take
+      the place of that sureness with which children (and grown-up people who
+      have not been sophisticated by "education") confront the situations of
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Open-mindedness. Partiality is, as we have seen, an accompaniment of
+      the existence of interest, since this means sharing, partaking, taking
+      sides in some movement. All the more reason, therefore, for an attitude of
+      mind which actively welcomes suggestions and relevant information from all
+      sides. In the chapter on Aims it was shown that foreseen ends are factors
+      in the development of a changing situation. They are the means by which
+      the direction of action is controlled. They are subordinate to the
+      situation, therefore, not the situation to them. They are not ends in the
+      sense of finalities to which everything must be bent and sacrificed. They
+      are, as foreseen, means of guiding the development of a situation. A
+      target is not the future goal of shooting; it is the centering factor in a
+      present shooting. Openness of mind means accessibility of mind to any and
+      every consideration that will throw light upon the situation that needs to
+      be cleared up, and that will help determine the consequences of acting
+      this way or that. Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled
+      upon as unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But
+      intellectual growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent
+      formation of new purposes and new responses. These are impossible without
+      an active disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active
+      desire to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes.
+      Retention of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual
+      hospitality. The worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices,
+      is that they arrest development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli.
+      Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude;
+      closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external
+      results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in school.
+      The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of operation in
+      dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils&mdash;restricting
+      their vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens to approve.
+      Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however,
+      that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable, correct results.
+      The zeal for "answers" is the explanation of much of the zeal for rigid
+      and mechanical methods. Forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and
+      the same result upon alert and varied intellectual interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign
+      saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent of
+      hospitality. But there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let
+      experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which is an essential of
+      development. Results (external answers or solutions) may be hurried;
+      processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were all
+      instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the
+      production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth
+      something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Single-mindedness. So far as the word is concerned, much that was said
+      under the head of "directness" is applicable. But what the word is here
+      intended to convey is completeness of interest, unity of purpose; the
+      absence of suppressed but effectual ulterior aims for which the professed
+      aim is but a mask. It is equivalent to mental integrity. Absorption,
+      engrossment, full concern with subject matter for its own sake, nurture
+      it. Divided interest and evasion destroy it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intellectual integrity, honesty, and sincerity are at bottom not matters
+      of conscious purpose but of quality of active response. Their acquisition
+      is fostered of course by conscious intent, but self-deception is very
+      easy. Desires are urgent. When the demands and wishes of others forbid
+      their direct expression they are easily driven into subterranean and deep
+      channels. Entire surrender, and wholehearted adoption of the course of
+      action demanded by others are almost impossible. Deliberate revolt or
+      deliberate attempts to deceive others may result. But the more frequent
+      outcome is a confused and divided state of interest in which one is fooled
+      as to one's own real intent. One tries to serve two masters at once.
+      Social instincts, the strong desire to please others and get their
+      approval, social training, the general sense of duty and of authority,
+      apprehension of penalty, all lead to a half-hearted effort to conform, to
+      "pay attention to the lesson," or whatever the requirement is. Amiable
+      individuals want to do what they are expected to do. Consciously the pupil
+      thinks he is doing this. But his own desires are not abolished. Only their
+      evident exhibition is suppressed. Strain of attention to what is hostile
+      to desire is irksome; in spite of one's conscious wish, the underlying
+      desires determine the main course of thought, the deeper emotional
+      responses. The mind wanders from the nominal subject and devotes itself to
+      what is intrinsically more desirable. A systematized divided attention
+      expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result. One has
+      only to recall his own experiences in school or at the present time when
+      outwardly employed in actions which do not engage one's desires and
+      purposes, to realize how prevalent is this attitude of divided attention&mdash;double-mindedness.
+      We are so used to it that we take it for granted that a considerable
+      amount of it is necessary. It may be; if so, it is the more important to
+      face its bad intellectual effects. Obvious is the loss of energy of
+      thought immediately available when one is consciously trying (or trying to
+      seem to try) to attend to one matter, while unconsciously one's
+      imagination is spontaneously going out to more congenial affairs. More
+      subtle and more permanently crippling to efficiency of intellectual
+      activity is a fostering of habitual self-deception, with the confused
+      sense of reality which accompanies it. A double standard of reality, one
+      for our own private and more or less concealed interests, and another for
+      public and acknowledged concerns, hampers, in most of us, integrity and
+      completeness of mental action. Equally serious is the fact that a split is
+      set up between conscious thought and attention and impulsive blind
+      affection and desire. Reflective dealings with the material of instruction
+      is constrained and half-hearted; attention wanders. The topics to which it
+      wanders are unavowed and hence intellectually illicit; transactions with
+      them are furtive. The discipline that comes from regulating response by
+      deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails; worse than that, the deepest
+      concern and most congenial enterprises of the imagination (since they
+      center about the things dearest to desire) are casual, concealed. They
+      enter into action in ways which are unacknowledged. Not subject to
+      rectification by consideration of consequences, they are demoralizing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      School conditions favorable to this division of mind between avowed,
+      public, and socially responsible undertakings, and private, ill-regulated,
+      and suppressed indulgences of thought are not hard to find. What is
+      sometimes called "stern discipline," i.e., external coercive pressure, has
+      this tendency. Motivation through rewards extraneous to the thing to be
+      done has a like effect. Everything that makes schooling merely preparatory
+      (See ante, p. 55) works in this direction. Ends being beyond the pupil's
+      present grasp, other agencies have to be found to procure immediate
+      attention to assigned tasks. Some responses are secured, but desires and
+      affections not enlisted must find other outlets. Not less serious is
+      exaggerated emphasis upon drill exercises designed to produce skill in
+      action, independent of any engagement of thought&mdash;exercises have no
+      purpose but the production of automatic skill. Nature abhors a mental
+      vacuum. What do teachers imagine is happening to thought and emotion when
+      the latter get no outlet in the things of immediate activity? Were they
+      merely kept in temporary abeyance, or even only calloused, it would not be
+      a matter of so much moment. But they are not abolished; they are not
+      suspended; they are not suppressed&mdash;save with reference to the task
+      in question. They follow their own chaotic and undisciplined course. What
+      is native, spontaneous, and vital in mental reaction goes unused and
+      untested, and the habits formed are such that these qualities become less
+      and less available for public and avowed ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. Responsibility. By responsibility as an element in intellectual
+      attitude is meant the disposition to consider in advance the probable
+      consequences of any projected step and deliberately to accept them: to
+      accept them in the sense of taking them into account, acknowledging them
+      in action, not yielding a mere verbal assent. Ideas, as we have seen, are
+      intrinsically standpoints and methods for bringing about a solution of a
+      perplexing situation; forecasts calculated to influence responses. It is
+      only too easy to think that one accepts a statement or believes a
+      suggested truth when one has not considered its implications; when one has
+      made but a cursory and superficial survey of what further things one is
+      committed to by acceptance. Observation and recognition, belief and
+      assent, then become names for lazy acquiescence in what is externally
+      presented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be much better to have fewer facts and truths in instruction&mdash;that
+      is, fewer things supposedly accepted,&mdash;if a smaller number of
+      situations could be intellectually worked out to the point where
+      conviction meant something real&mdash;some identification of the self with
+      the type of conduct demanded by facts and foresight of results. The most
+      permanent bad results of undue complication of school subjects and
+      congestion of school studies and lessons are not the worry, nervous
+      strain, and superficial acquaintance that follow (serious as these are),
+      but the failure to make clear what is involved in really knowing and
+      believing a thing. Intellectual responsibility means severe standards in
+      this regard. These standards can be built up only through practice in
+      following up and acting upon the meaning of what is acquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Intellectual thoroughness is thus another name for the attitude we are
+      considering. There is a kind of thoroughness which is almost purely
+      physical: the kind that signifies mechanical and exhausting drill upon all
+      the details of a subject. Intellectual thoroughness is seeing a thing
+      through. It depends upon a unity of purpose to which details are
+      subordinated, not upon presenting a multitude of disconnected details. It
+      is manifested in the firmness with which the full meaning of the purpose
+      is developed, not in attention, however "conscientious" it may be, to the
+      steps of action externally imposed and directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM13" id="link2H_SUMM13">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Method is a statement of the way the subject matter of an
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      experience develops most effectively and fruitfully. It is derived,
+      accordingly, from observation of the course of experiences where there is
+      no conscious distinction of personal attitude and manner from material
+      dealt with. The assumption that method is something separate is connected
+      with the notion of the isolation of mind and self from the world of
+      things. It makes instruction and learning formal, mechanical, constrained.
+      While methods are individualized, certain features of the normal course of
+      an experience to its fruition may be discriminated, because of the fund of
+      wisdom derived from prior experiences and because of general similarities
+      in the materials dealt with from time to time. Expressed in terms of the
+      attitude of the individual the traits of good method are
+      straightforwardness, flexible intellectual interest or open-minded will to
+      learn, integrity of purpose, and acceptance of responsibility for the
+      consequences of one's activity including thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 This point is developed below in a discussion of what are termed
+      psychological and logical methods respectively. See p. 219.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Subject Matter of Educator and of Learner. So far as the nature of
+      subject matter in principle is concerned, there is nothing to add to what
+      has been said (See ante, p. 134). It consists of the facts observed,
+      recalled, read, and talked about, and the ideas suggested, in course of a
+      development of a situation having a purpose. This statement needs to be
+      rendered more specific by connecting it with the materials of school
+      instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. What is the
+      significance of our definition in application to reading, writing,
+      mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing, physics, chemistry,
+      modern and foreign languages, and so on? Let us recur to two of the points
+      made earlier in our discussion. The educator's part in the enterprise of
+      education is to furnish the environment which stimulates responses and
+      directs the learner's course. In last analysis, all that the educator can
+      do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely as is possible result
+      in the formation of desirable intellectual and emotional dispositions.
+      Obviously studies or the subject matter of the curriculum have intimately
+      to do with this business of supplying an environment. The other point is
+      the necessity of a social environment to give meaning to habits formed. In
+      what we have termed informal education, subject matter is carried directly
+      in the matrix of social intercourse. It is what the persons with whom an
+      individual associates do and say. This fact gives a clew to the
+      understanding of the subject matter of formal or deliberate instruction. A
+      connecting link is found in the stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies
+      which accompany the doings and rites of a primitive social group. They
+      represent the stock of meanings which have been precipitated out of
+      previous experience, which are so prized by the group as to be identified
+      with their conception of their own collective life. Not being obviously a
+      part of the skill exhibited in the daily occupations of eating, hunting,
+      making war and peace, constructing rugs, pottery, and baskets, etc., they
+      are consciously impressed upon the young; often, as in the initiation
+      ceremonies, with intense emotional fervor. Even more pains are consciously
+      taken to perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal formulae of the
+      group than to transmit the directly useful customs of the group just
+      because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in the ordinary
+      processes of association.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the social group grows more complex, involving a greater number of
+      acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or in the belief of
+      the group, upon standard ideas deposited from past experience, the content
+      of social life gets more definitely formulated for purposes of
+      instruction. As we have previously noted, probably the chief motive for
+      consciously dwelling upon the group life, extracting the meanings which
+      are regarded as most important and systematizing them in a coherent
+      arrangement, is just the need of instructing the young so as to perpetuate
+      group life. Once started on this road of selection, formulation, and
+      organization, no definite limit exists. The invention of writing and of
+      printing gives the operation an immense impetus. Finally, the bonds which
+      connect the subject matter of school study with the habits and ideals of
+      the social group are disguised and covered up. The ties are so loosened
+      that it often appears as if there were none; as if subject matter existed
+      simply as knowledge on its own independent behoof, and as if study were
+      the mere act of mastering it for its own sake, irrespective of any social
+      values. Since it is highly important for practical reasons to counter-act
+      this tendency (See ante, p. 8) the chief purposes of our theoretical
+      discussion are to make clear the connection which is so readily lost from
+      sight, and to show in some detail the social content and function of the
+      chief constituents of the course of study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The points need to be considered from the standpoint of instructor and of
+      student. To the former, the significance of a knowledge of subject matter,
+      going far beyond the present knowledge of pupils, is to supply definite
+      standards and to reveal to him the possibilities of the crude activities
+      of the immature. (i) The material of school studies translates into
+      concrete and detailed terms the meanings of current social life which it
+      is desirable to transmit. It puts clearly before the instructor the
+      essential ingredients of the culture to be perpetuated, in such an
+      organized form as to protect him from the haphazard efforts he would be
+      likely to indulge in if the meanings had not been standardized. (ii) A
+      knowledge of the ideas which have been achieved in the past as the outcome
+      of activity places the educator in a position to perceive the meaning of
+      the seeming impulsive and aimless reactions of the young, and to provide
+      the stimuli needed to direct them so that they will amount to something.
+      The more the educator knows of music the more he can perceive the
+      possibilities of the inchoate musical impulses of a child. Organized
+      subject matter represents the ripe fruitage of experiences like theirs,
+      experiences involving the same world, and powers and needs similar to
+      theirs. It does not represent perfection or infallible wisdom; but it is
+      the best at command to further new experiences which may, in some respects
+      at least, surpass the achievements embodied in existing knowledge and
+      works of art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various studies
+      represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness from the
+      experience of the young is not, however, seeming; it is real. The subject
+      matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical with the
+      formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter of the
+      adult; the material as found in books and in works of art, etc. The latter
+      represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing state. It
+      enters directly into the activities of the expert and the educator, not
+      into that of the beginner, the learner. Failure to bear in mind the
+      difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of teacher
+      and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the use of
+      texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The need for a knowledge of the constitution and functions, in the
+      concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's attitude to
+      subject matter is so different from that of the pupil. The teacher
+      presents in actuality what the pupil represents only in posse. That is,
+      the teacher already knows the things which the student is only learning.
+      Hence the problem of the two is radically unlike. When engaged in the
+      direct act of teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter at his
+      fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and response of
+      the pupil. To understand the latter in its interplay with subject matter
+      is his task, while the pupil's mind, naturally, should be not on itself
+      but on the topic in hand. Or to state the same point in a somewhat
+      different manner: the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter
+      in itself but in its interaction with the pupils' present needs and
+      capacities. Hence simple scholarship is not enough. In fact, there are
+      certain features of scholarship or mastered subject matter&mdash;taken by
+      itself&mdash;which get in the way of effective teaching unless the
+      instructor's habitual attitude is one of concern with its interplay in the
+      pupil's own experience. In the first place, his knowledge extends
+      indefinitely beyond the range of the pupil's acquaintance. It involves
+      principles which are beyond the immature pupil's understanding and
+      interest. In and of itself, it may no more represent the living world of
+      the pupil's experience than the astronomer's knowledge of Mars represents
+      a baby's acquaintance with the room in which he stays. In the second
+      place, the method of organization of the material of achieved scholarship
+      differs from that of the beginner. It is not true that the experience of
+      the young is unorganized&mdash;that it consists of isolated scraps. But it
+      is organized in connection with direct practical centers of interest. The
+      child's home is, for example, the organizing center of his geographical
+      knowledge. His own movements about the locality, his journeys abroad, the
+      tales of his friends, give the ties which hold his items of information
+      together. But the geography of the geographer, of the one who has already
+      developed the implications of these smaller experiences, is organized on
+      the basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to one another&mdash;not
+      the relations which they bear to his house, bodily movements, and friends.
+      To the one who is learned, subject matter is extensive, accurately
+      defined, and logically interrelated. To the one who is learning, it is
+      fluid, partial, and connected through his personal occupations. 1 The
+      problem of teaching is to keep the experience of the student moving in the
+      direction of what the expert already knows. Hence the need that the
+      teacher know both subject matter and the characteristic needs and
+      capacities of the student.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Development of Subject Matter in the Learner. It is possible,
+      without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three fairly typical
+      stages in the growth of subject matter in the experience of the learner.
+      In its first estate, knowledge exists as the content of intelligent
+      ability&mdash;power to do. This kind of subject matter, or known material,
+      is expressed in familiarity or acquaintance with things. Then this
+      material gradually is surcharged and deepened through communicated
+      knowledge or information. Finally, it is enlarged and worked over into
+      rationally or logically organized material&mdash;that of the one who,
+      relatively speaking, is expert in the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains most
+      deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read,
+      write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine, calculate, drive a horse,
+      sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely. The popular tendency to
+      regard instinctive acts which are adapted to an end as a sort of
+      miraculous knowledge, while unjustifiable, is evidence of the strong
+      tendency to identify intelligent control of the means of action with
+      knowledge. When education, under the influence of a scholastic conception
+      of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically formulated facts
+      and truths, fails to recognize that primary or initial subject matter
+      always exists as matter of an active doing, involving the use of the body
+      and the handling of material, the subject matter of instruction is
+      isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and so becomes just a
+      something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand. Recognition of the
+      natural course of development, on the contrary, always sets out with
+      situations which involve learning by doing. Arts and occupations form the
+      initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding as they do to knowing how
+      to go about the accomplishment of ends. Popular terms denoting knowledge
+      have always retained the connection with ability in action lost by
+      academic philosophies. Ken and can are allied words. Attention means
+      caring for a thing, in the sense of both affection and of looking out for
+      its welfare. Mind means carrying out instructions in action&mdash;as a
+      child minds his mother&mdash;and taking care of something&mdash;as a nurse
+      minds the baby. To be thoughtful, considerate, means to heed the claims of
+      others. Apprehension means dread of undesirable consequences, as well as
+      intellectual grasp. To have good sense or judgment is to know the conduct
+      a situation calls for; discernment is not making distinctions for the sake
+      of making them, an exercise reprobated as hair splitting, but is insight
+      into an affair with reference to acting. Wisdom has never lost its
+      association with the proper direction of life. Only in education, never in
+      the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory
+      experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof
+      from doing. Having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in
+      acquaintance or familiarity. The things we are best acquainted with are
+      the things we put to frequent use&mdash;such things as chairs, tables,
+      pen, paper, clothes, food, knives and forks on the commonplace level,
+      differentiating into more special objects according to a person's
+      occupations in life. Knowledge of things in that intimate and emotional
+      sense suggested by the word acquaintance is a precipitate from our
+      employing them with a purpose. We have acted with or upon the thing so
+      frequently that we can anticipate how it will act and react&mdash;such is
+      the meaning of familiar acquaintance. We are ready for a familiar thing;
+      it does not catch us napping, or play unexpected tricks with us. This
+      attitude carries with it a sense of congeniality or friendliness, of ease
+      and illumination; while the things with which we are not accustomed to
+      deal are strange, foreign, cold, remote, "abstract."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II. But it is likely that elaborate statements regarding this primary
+      stage of knowledge will darken understanding. It includes practically all
+      of our knowledge which is not the result of deliberate technical study.
+      Modes of purposeful doing include dealings with persons as well as things.
+      Impulses of communication and habits of intercourse have to be adapted to
+      maintaining successful connections with others; a large fund of social
+      knowledge accrues. As a part of this intercommunication one learns much
+      from others. They tell of their experiences and of the experiences which,
+      in turn, have been told them. In so far as one is interested or concerned
+      in these communications, their matter becomes a part of one's own
+      experience. Active connections with others are such an intimate and vital
+      part of our own concerns that it is impossible to draw sharp lines, such
+      as would enable us to say, "Here my experience ends; there yours begins."
+      In so far as we are partners in common undertakings, the things which
+      others communicate to us as the consequences of their particular share in
+      the enterprise blend at once into the experience resulting from our own
+      special doings. The ear is as much an organ of experience as the eye or
+      hand; the eye is available for reading reports of what happens beyond its
+      horizon. Things remote in space and time affect the issue of our actions
+      quite as much as things which we can smell and handle. They really concern
+      us, and, consequently, any account of them which assists us in dealing
+      with things at hand falls within personal experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Information is the name usually given to this kind of subject matter. The
+      place of communication in personal doing supplies us with a criterion for
+      estimating the value of informational material in school. Does it grow
+      naturally out of some question with which the student is concerned? Does
+      it fit into his more direct acquaintance so as to increase its efficacy
+      and deepen its meaning? If it meets these two requirements, it is
+      educative. The amount heard or read is of no importance&mdash;the more the
+      better, provided the student has a need for it and can apply it in some
+      situation of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is not so easy to fulfill these requirements in actual practice as
+      it is to lay them down in theory. The extension in modern times of the
+      area of intercommunication; the invention of appliances for securing
+      acquaintance with remote parts of the heavens and bygone events of
+      history; the cheapening of devices, like printing, for recording and
+      distributing information&mdash;genuine and alleged&mdash;have created an
+      immense bulk of communicated subject matter. It is much easier to swamp a
+      pupil with this than to work it into his direct experiences. All too
+      frequently it forms another strange world which just overlies the world of
+      personal acquaintance. The sole problem of the student is to learn, for
+      school purposes, for purposes of recitations and promotions, the
+      constituent parts of this strange world. Probably the most conspicuous
+      connotation of the word knowledge for most persons to-day is just the body
+      of facts and truths ascertained by others; the material found in the rows
+      and rows of atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books of travel,
+      scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously influenced
+      men's notions of the nature of knowledge itself. The statements, the
+      propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active concern with
+      problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves knowledge. The record
+      of knowledge, independent of its place as an outcome of inquiry and a
+      resource in further inquiry, is taken to be knowledge. The mind of man is
+      taken captive by the spoils of its prior victories; the spoils, not the
+      weapons and the acts of waging the battle against the unknown, are used to
+      fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact, and truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If this identification of knowledge with propositions stating information
+      has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers, it is not surprising
+      that the same ideal has almost dominated instruction. The "course of
+      study" consists largely of information distributed into various branches
+      of study, each study being subdivided into lessons presenting in serial
+      cutoff portions of the total store. In the seventeenth century, the store
+      was still small enough so that men set up the ideal of a complete
+      encyclopedic mastery of it. It is now so bulky that the impossibility of
+      any one man's coming into possession of it all is obvious. But the
+      educational ideal has not been much affected. Acquisition of a modicum of
+      information in each branch of learning, or at least in a selected group,
+      remains the principle by which the curriculum, from elementary school
+      through college, is formed; the easier portions being assigned to the
+      earlier years, the more difficult to the later. The complaints of
+      educators that learning does not enter into character and affect conduct;
+      the protests against memoriter work, against cramming, against gradgrind
+      preoccupation with "facts," against devotion to wire-drawn distinctions
+      and ill-understood rules and principles, all follow from this state of
+      affairs. Knowledge which is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge,
+      tends to become merely verbal. It is no objection to information that it
+      is clothed in words; communication necessarily takes place through words.
+      But in the degree in which what is communicated cannot be organized into
+      the existing experience of the learner, it becomes mere words: that is,
+      pure sense-stimuli, lacking in meaning. Then it operates to call out
+      mechanical reactions, ability to use the vocal organs to repeat
+      statements, or the hand to write or to do "sums."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the subject
+      matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem, and for giving
+      added significance to the search for solution and to the solution itself.
+      Informational knowledge is the material which can be fallen back upon as
+      given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation. It is a kind
+      of bridge for mind in its passage from doubt to discovery. It has the
+      office of an intellectual middleman. It condenses and records in available
+      form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as an agency of
+      enhancing the meaning of new experiences. When one is told that Brutus
+      assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the year is three hundred
+      sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the ratio of the diameter of the
+      circle to its circumference is 3.1415. . . one receives what is indeed
+      knowledge for others, but for him it is a stimulus to knowing. His
+      acquisition of knowledge depends upon his response to what is
+      communicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Science or Rationalized Knowledge. Science is a name for knowledge in
+      its most characteristic form. It represents in its degree, the perfected
+      outcome of learning,&mdash;its consummation. What is known, in a given
+      case, is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think
+      with rather than that which we think about. In its honorable sense,
+      knowledge is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere
+      tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and not
+      dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is
+      difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our
+      certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is natural. The
+      undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual hesitation; it
+      is prone to assertion. It likes things undisturbed, settled, and treats
+      them as such without due warrant. Familiarity, common repute, and
+      congeniality to desire are readily made measuring rods of truth. Ignorance
+      gives way to opinionated and current error,&mdash;a greater foe to
+      learning than ignorance itself. A Socrates is thus led to declare that
+      consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective love of wisdom,
+      and a Descartes to say that science is born of doubting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data, and
+      ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in themselves
+      they are tentative and provisional. Our predilection for premature
+      acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs
+      that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are
+      satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. If
+      these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose
+      that our assumptions have been confirmed. Even in the case of failure, we
+      are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness of
+      our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of
+      circumstance. We charge the evil consequence not to the error of our
+      schemes and our incomplete inquiry into conditions (thereby getting
+      material for revising the former and stimulus for extending the latter)
+      but to untoward fate. We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in
+      clinging to our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science represents the safeguard of the race against these natural
+      propensities and the evils which flow from them. It consists of the
+      special appliances and methods which the race has slowly worked out in
+      order to conduct reflection under conditions whereby its procedures and
+      results are tested. It is artificial (an acquired art), not spontaneous;
+      learned, not native. To this fact is due the unique, the invaluable place
+      of science in education, and also the dangers which threaten its right
+      use. Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not in
+      possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for
+      effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts
+      inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails to
+      understand the full meaning of knowledge. For he does not become
+      acquainted with the traits that mark off opinion and assent from
+      authorized conviction. On the other hand, the fact that science marks the
+      perfecting of knowing in highly specialized conditions of technique
+      renders its results, taken by themselves, remote from ordinary experience&mdash;a
+      quality of aloofness that is popularly designated by the term abstract.
+      When this isolation appears in instruction, scientific information is even
+      more exposed to the dangers attendant upon presenting ready-made subject
+      matter than are other forms of information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science has been defined in terms of method of inquiry and testing. At
+      first sight, this definition may seem opposed to the current conception
+      that science is organized or systematized knowledge. The opposition,
+      however, is only seeming, and disappears when the ordinary definition is
+      completed. Not organization but the kind of organization effected by
+      adequate methods of tested discovery marks off science. The knowledge of a
+      farmer is systematized in the degree in which he is competent. It is
+      organized on the basis of relation of means to ends&mdash;practically
+      organized. Its organization as knowledge (that is, in the eulogistic sense
+      of adequately tested and confirmed) is incidental to its organization with
+      reference to securing crops, live-stock, etc. But scientific subject
+      matter is organized with specific reference to the successful conduct of
+      the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a specialized undertaking.
+      Reference to the kind of assurance attending science will shed light upon
+      this statement. It is rational assurance,&mdash;logical warranty. The
+      ideal of scientific organization is, therefore, that every conception and
+      statement shall be of such a kind as to follow from others and to lead to
+      others. Conceptions and propositions mutually imply and support one
+      another. This double relation of "leading to and confirming" is what is
+      meant by the terms logical and rational. The everyday conception of water
+      is more available for ordinary uses of drinking, washing, irrigation,
+      etc., than the chemist's notion of it. The latter's description of it as
+      H20 is superior from the standpoint of place and use in inquiry. It states
+      the nature of water in a way which connects it with knowledge of other
+      things, indicating to one who understands it how the knowledge is arrived
+      at and its bearings upon other portions of knowledge of the structure of
+      things. Strictly speaking, it does not indicate the objective relations of
+      water any more than does a statement that water is transparent, fluid,
+      without taste or odor, satisfying to thirst, etc. It is just as true that
+      water has these relations as that it is constituted by two molecules of
+      hydrogen in combination with one of oxygen. But for the particular purpose
+      of conducting discovery with a view to ascertainment of fact, the latter
+      relations are fundamental. The more one emphasizes organization as a mark
+      of science, then, the more he is committed to a recognition of the primacy
+      of method in the definition of science. For method defines the kind of
+      organization in virtue of which science is science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. Subject Matter as Social. Our next chapters will take up various school
+      activities and studies and discuss them as successive stages in that
+      evolution of knowledge which we have just been discussing. It remains to
+      say a few words upon subject matter as social, since our prior remarks
+      have been mainly concerned with its intellectual aspect. A difference in
+      breadth and depth exists even in vital knowledge; even in the data and
+      ideas which are relevant to real problems and which are motivated by
+      purposes. For there is a difference in the social scope of purposes and
+      the social importance of problems. With the wide range of possible
+      material to select from, it is important that education (especially in all
+      its phases short of the most specialized) should use a criterion of social
+      worth. All information and systematized scientific subject matter have
+      been worked out under the conditions of social life and have been
+      transmitted by social means. But this does not prove that all is of equal
+      value for the purposes of forming the disposition and supplying the
+      equipment of members of present society. The scheme of a curriculum must
+      take account of the adaptation of studies to the needs of the existing
+      community life; it must select with the intention of improving the life we
+      live in common so that the future shall be better than the past. Moreover,
+      the curriculum must be planned with reference to placing essentials first,
+      and refinements second. The things which are socially most fundamental,
+      that is, which have to do with the experiences in which the widest groups
+      share, are the essentials. The things which represent the needs of
+      specialized groups and technical pursuits are secondary. There is truth in
+      the saying that education must first be human and only after that
+      professional. But those who utter the saying frequently have in mind in
+      the term human only a highly specialized class: the class of learned men
+      who preserve the classic traditions of the past. They forget that material
+      is humanized in the degree in which it connects with the common interests
+      of men as men. Democratic society is peculiarly dependent for its
+      maintenance upon the use in forming a course of study of criteria which
+      are broadly human. Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in
+      selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly
+      conceived for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the
+      traditions of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the
+      "essentials" of elementary education are the three R's mechanically
+      treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization
+      of democratic ideals. Unconsciously it assumes that these ideals are
+      unrealizable; it assumes that in the future, as in the past, getting a
+      livelihood, "making a living," must signify for most men and women doing
+      things which are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those
+      who do them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged
+      in them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of
+      pecuniary reward. For preparation of large numbers for a life of this
+      sort, and only for this purpose, are mechanical efficiency in reading,
+      writing, spelling and figuring, together with attainment of a certain
+      amount of muscular dexterity, "essentials." Such conditions also infect
+      the education called liberal, with illiberality. They imply a somewhat
+      parasitic cultivation bought at the expense of not having the
+      enlightenment and discipline which come from concern with the deepest
+      problems of common humanity. A curriculum which acknowledges the social
+      responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are
+      relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and
+      information are calculated to develop social insight and interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM14" id="link2H_SUMM14">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The subject matter of education consists primarily of the
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      meanings which supply content to existing social life. The continuity of
+      social life means that many of these meanings are contributed to present
+      activity by past collective experience. As social life grows more complex,
+      these factors increase in number and import. There is need of special
+      selection, formulation, and organization in order that they may be
+      adequately transmitted to the new generation. But this very process tends
+      to set up subject matter as something of value just by itself, apart from
+      its function in promoting the realization of the meanings implied in the
+      present experience of the immature. Especially is the educator exposed to
+      the temptation to conceive his task in terms of the pupil's ability to
+      appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set statements,
+      irrespective of its organization into his activities as a developing
+      social member. The positive principle is maintained when the young begin
+      with active occupations having a social origin and use, and proceed to a
+      scientific insight in the materials and laws involved, through
+      assimilating into their more direct experience the ideas and facts
+      communicated by others who have had a larger experience. 1 Since the
+      learned man should also still be a learner, it will be understood that
+      these contrasts are relative, not absolute. But in the earlier stages of
+      learning at least they are practically all-important.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Place of Active Occupations in Education. In consequence partly of
+      the efforts of educational reformers, partly of increased interest in
+      child-psychology, and partly of the direct experience of the schoolroom,
+      the course of study has in the past generation undergone considerable
+      modification. The desirability of starting from and with the experience
+      and capacities of learners, a lesson enforced from all three quarters, has
+      led to the introduction of forms of activity, in play and work, similar to
+      those in which children and youth engage outside of school. Modern
+      psychology has substituted for the general, ready-made faculties of older
+      theory a complex group of instinctive and impulsive tendencies. Experience
+      has shown that when children have a chance at physical activities which
+      bring their natural impulses into play, going to school is a joy,
+      management is less of a burden, and learning is easier. Sometimes,
+      perhaps, plays, games, and constructive occupations are resorted to only
+      for these reasons, with emphasis upon relief from the tedium and strain of
+      "regular" school work. There is no reason, however, for using them merely
+      as agreeable diversions. Study of mental life has made evident the
+      fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and
+      materials, to construct, to give expression to joyous emotion, etc. When
+      exercises which are prompted by these instincts are a part of the regular
+      school program, the whole pupil is engaged, the artificial gap between
+      life in school and out is reduced, motives are afforded for attention to a
+      large variety of materials and processes distinctly educative in effect,
+      and cooperative associations which give information in a social setting
+      are provided. In short, the grounds for assigning to play and active work
+      a definite place in the curriculum are intellectual and social, not
+      matters of temporary expediency and momentary agreeableness. Without
+      something of the kind, it is not possible to secure the normal estate of
+      effective learning; namely, that knowledge-getting be an outgrowth of
+      activities having their own end, instead of a school task. More
+      specifically, play and work correspond, point for point, with the traits
+      of the initial stage of knowing, which consists, as we saw in the last
+      chapter, in learning how to do things and in acquaintance with things and
+      processes gained in the doing. It is suggestive that among the Greeks,
+      till the rise of conscious philosophy, the same word, techne, was used for
+      art and science. Plato gave his account of knowledge on the basis of an
+      analysis of the knowledge of cobblers, carpenters, players of musical
+      instruments, etc., pointing out that their art (so far as it was not mere
+      routine) involved an end, mastery of material or stuff worked upon,
+      control of appliances, and a definite order of procedure&mdash;all of
+      which had to be known in order that there be intelligent skill or art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubtless the fact that children normally engage in play and work out of
+      school has seemed to many educators a reason why they should concern
+      themselves in school with things radically different. School time seemed
+      too precious to spend in doing over again what children were sure to do
+      any way. In some social conditions, this reason has weight. In pioneer
+      times, for example, outside occupations gave a definite and valuable
+      intellectual and moral training. Books and everything concerned with them
+      were, on the other hand, rare and difficult of access; they were the only
+      means of outlet from a narrow and crude environment. Wherever such
+      conditions obtain, much may be said in favor of concentrating school
+      activity upon books. The situation is very different, however, in most
+      communities to-day. The kinds of work in which the young can engage,
+      especially in cities, are largely anti-educational. That prevention of
+      child labor is a social duty is evidence on this point. On the other hand,
+      printed matter has been so cheapened and is in such universal circulation,
+      and all the opportunities of intellectual culture have been so multiplied,
+      that the older type of book work is far from having the force it used to
+      possess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it must not be forgotten that an educational result is a by-product of
+      play and work in most out-of-school conditions. It is incidental, not
+      primary. Consequently the educative growth secured is more or less
+      accidental. Much work shares in the defects of existing industrial society&mdash;defects
+      next to fatal to right development. Play tends to reproduce and affirm the
+      crudities, as well as the excellencies, of surrounding adult life. It is
+      the business of the school to set up an environment in which play and work
+      shall be conducted with reference to facilitating desirable mental and
+      moral growth. It is not enough just to introduce plays and games, hand
+      work and manual exercises. Everything depends upon the way in which they
+      are employed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Available Occupations. A bare catalogue of the list of activities which
+      have already found their way into schools indicates what a rich field is
+      at hand. There is work with paper, cardboard, wood, leather, cloth, yarns,
+      clay and sand, and the metals, with and without tools. Processes employed
+      are folding, cutting, pricking, measuring, molding, modeling,
+      pattern-making, heating and cooling, and the operations characteristic of
+      such tools as the hammer, saw, file, etc. Outdoor excursions, gardening,
+      cooking, sewing, printing, book-binding, weaving, painting, drawing,
+      singing, dramatization, story-telling, reading and writing as active
+      pursuits with social aims (not as mere exercises for acquiring skill for
+      future use), in addition to a countless variety of plays and games,
+      designate some of the modes of occupation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The problem of the educator is to engage pupils in these activities in
+      such ways that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained and
+      immediate satisfaction found in the work, together with preparation for
+      later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated to education&mdash;that
+      is, to intellectual results and the forming of a socialized disposition.
+      What does this principle signify? In the first place, the principle rules
+      out certain practices. Activities which follow definite prescription and
+      dictation or which reproduce without modification ready-made models, may
+      give muscular dexterity, but they do not require the perception and
+      elaboration of ends, nor (what is the same thing in other words) do they
+      permit the use of judgment in selecting and adapting means. Not merely
+      manual training specifically so called but many traditional kindergarten
+      exercises have erred here. Moreover, opportunity for making mistakes is an
+      incidental requirement. Not because mistakes are ever desirable, but
+      because overzeal to select material and appliances which forbid a chance
+      for mistakes to occur, restricts initiative, reduces judgment to a
+      minimum, and compels the use of methods which are so remote from the
+      complex situations of life that the power gained is of little
+      availability. It is quite true that children tend to exaggerate their
+      powers of execution and to select projects that are beyond them. But
+      limitation of capacity is one of the things which has to be learned; like
+      other things, it is learned through the experience of consequences. The
+      danger that children undertaking too complex projects will simply muddle
+      and mess, and produce not merely crude results (which is a minor matter)
+      but acquire crude standards (which is an important matter) is great. But
+      it is the fault of the teacher if the pupil does not perceive in due
+      season the inadequacy of his performances, and thereby receive a stimulus
+      to attempt exercises which will perfect his powers. Meantime it is more
+      important to keep alive a creative and constructive attitude than to
+      secure an external perfection by engaging the pupil's action in too minute
+      and too closely regulated pieces of work. Accuracy and finish of detail
+      can be insisted upon in such portions of a complex work as are within the
+      pupil's capacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unconscious suspicion of native experience and consequent overdoing of
+      external control are shown quite as much in the material supplied as in
+      the matter of the teacher's orders. The fear of raw material is shown in
+      laboratory, manual training shop, Froebelian kindergarten, and Montessori
+      house of childhood. The demand is for materials which have already been
+      subjected to the perfecting work of mind: a demand which shows itself in
+      the subject matter of active occupations quite as well as in academic book
+      learning. That such material will control the pupil's operations so as to
+      prevent errors is true. The notion that a pupil operating with such
+      material will somehow absorb the intelligence that went originally to its
+      shaping is fallacious. Only by starting with crude material and subjecting
+      it to purposeful handling will he gain the intelligence embodied in
+      finished material. In practice, overemphasis upon formed material leads to
+      an exaggeration of mathematical qualities, since intellect finds its
+      profit in physical things from matters of size, form, and proportion and
+      the relations that flow from them. But these are known only when their
+      perception is a fruit of acting upon purposes which require attention to
+      them. The more human the purpose, or the more it approximates the ends
+      which appeal in daily experience, the more real the knowledge. When the
+      purpose of the activity is restricted to ascertaining these qualities, the
+      resulting knowledge is only technical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say that active occupations should be concerned primarily with wholes
+      is another statement of the same principle. Wholes for purposes of
+      education are not, however, physical affairs. Intellectually the existence
+      of a whole depends upon a concern or interest; it is qualitative, the
+      completeness of appeal made by a situation. Exaggerated devotion to
+      formation of efficient skill irrespective of present purpose always shows
+      itself in devising exercises isolated from a purpose. Laboratory work is
+      made to consist of tasks of accurate measurement with a view to acquiring
+      knowledge of the fundamental units of physics, irrespective of contact
+      with the problems which make these units important; or of operations
+      designed to afford facility in the manipulation of experimental apparatus.
+      The technique is acquired independently of the purposes of discovery and
+      testing which alone give it meaning. Kindergarten employments are
+      calculated to give information regarding cubes, spheres, etc., and to form
+      certain habits of manipulation of material (for everything must always be
+      done "just so"), the absence of more vital purposes being supposedly
+      compensated for by the alleged symbolism of the material used. Manual
+      training is reduced to a series of ordered assignments calculated to
+      secure the mastery of one tool after another and technical ability in the
+      various elements of construction&mdash;like the different joints. It is
+      argued that pupils must know how to use tools before they attack actual
+      making,&mdash;assuming that pupils cannot learn how in the process of
+      making. Pestalozzi's just insistence upon the active use of the senses, as
+      a substitute for memorizing words, left behind it in practice schemes for
+      "object lessons" intended to acquaint pupils with all the qualities of
+      selected objects. The error is the same: in all these cases it is assumed
+      that before objects can be intelligently used, their properties must be
+      known. In fact, the senses are normally used in the course of intelligent
+      (that is, purposeful) use of things, since the qualities perceived are
+      factors to be reckoned with in accomplishment. Witness the different
+      attitude of a boy in making, say, a kite, with respect to the grain and
+      other properties of wood, the matter of size, angles, and proportion of
+      parts, to the attitude of a pupil who has an object-lesson on a piece of
+      wood, where the sole function of wood and its properties is to serve as
+      subject matter for the lesson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The failure to realize that the functional development of a situation
+      alone constitutes a "whole" for the purpose of mind is the cause of the
+      false notions which have prevailed in instruction concerning the simple
+      and the complex. For the person approaching a subject, the simple thing is
+      his purpose&mdash;the use he desires to make of material, tool, or
+      technical process, no matter how complicated the process of execution may
+      be. The unity of the purpose, with the concentration upon details which it
+      entails, confers simplicity upon the elements which have to be reckoned
+      with in the course of action. It furnishes each with a single meaning
+      according to its service in carrying on the whole enterprise. After one
+      has gone through the process, the constituent qualities and relations are
+      elements, each possessed with a definite meaning of its own. The false
+      notion referred to takes the standpoint of the expert, the one for whom
+      elements exist; isolates them from purposeful action, and presents them to
+      beginners as the "simple" things. But it is time for a positive statement.
+      Aside from the fact that active occupations represent things to do, not
+      studies, their educational significance consists in the fact that they may
+      typify social situations. Men's fundamental common concerns center about
+      food, shelter, clothing, household furnishings, and the appliances
+      connected with production, exchange, and consumption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Representing both the necessities of life and the adornments with which
+      the necessities have been clothed, they tap instincts at a deep level;
+      they are saturated with facts and principles having a social quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving, construction
+      in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc., which carry over these
+      fundamental human concerns into school resources, have a merely bread and
+      butter value is to miss their point. If the mass of mankind has usually
+      found in its industrial occupations nothing but evils which had to be
+      endured for the sake of maintaining existence, the fault is not in the
+      occupations, but in the conditions under which they are carried on. The
+      continually increasing importance of economic factors in contemporary life
+      makes it the more needed that education should reveal their scientific
+      content and their social value. For in schools, occupations are not
+      carried on for pecuniary gain but for their own content. Freed from
+      extraneous associations and from the pressure of wage-earning, they supply
+      modes of experience which are intrinsically valuable; they are truly
+      liberalizing in quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of
+      preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time. It
+      affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place farming and
+      horticulture have had in the history of the race and which they occupy in
+      present social organization. Carried on in an environment educationally
+      controlled, they are means for making a study of the facts of growth, the
+      chemistry of soil, the role of light, air, and moisture, injurious and
+      helpful animal life, etc. There is nothing in the elementary study of
+      botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in connection with caring
+      for the growth of seeds. Instead of the subject matter belonging to a
+      peculiar study called botany, it will then belong to life, and will find,
+      moreover, its natural correlations with the facts of soil, animal life,
+      and human relations. As students grow mature, they will perceive problems
+      of interest which may be pursued for the sake of discovery, independent of
+      the original direct interest in gardening&mdash;problems connected with
+      the germination and nutrition of plants, the reproduction of fruits, etc.,
+      thus making a transition to deliberate intellectual investigations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The illustration is intended to apply, of course, to other school
+      occupations,&mdash;wood-working, cooking, and on through the list. It is
+      pertinent to note that in the history of the race the sciences grew
+      gradually out from useful social occupations. Physics developed slowly out
+      of the use of tools and machines; the important branch of physics known as
+      mechanics testifies in its name to its original associations. The lever,
+      wheel, inclined plane, etc., were among the first great intellectual
+      discoveries of mankind, and they are none the less intellectual because
+      they occurred in the course of seeking for means of accomplishing
+      practical ends. The great advance of electrical science in the last
+      generation was closely associated, as effect and as cause, with
+      application of electric agencies to means of communication,
+      transportation, lighting of cities and houses, and more economical
+      production of goods. These are social ends, moreover, and if they are too
+      closely associated with notions of private profit, it is not because of
+      anything in them, but because they have been deflected to private uses:&mdash;a
+      fact which puts upon the school the responsibility of restoring their
+      connection, in the mind of the coming generation, with public scientific
+      and social interests. In like ways, chemistry grew out of processes of
+      dying, bleaching, metal working, etc., and in recent times has found
+      innumerable new uses in industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mathematics is now a highly abstract science; geometry, however, means
+      literally earth-measuring: the practical use of number in counting to keep
+      track of things and in measuring is even more important to-day than in the
+      times when it was invented for these purposes. Such considerations (which
+      could be duplicated in the history of any science) are not arguments for a
+      recapitulation of the history of the race or for dwelling long in the
+      early rule of thumb stage. But they indicate the possibilities&mdash;greater
+      to-day than ever before&mdash;of using active occupations as opportunities
+      for scientific study. The opportunities are just as great on the social
+      side, whether we look at the life of collective humanity in its past or in
+      its future. The most direct road for elementary students into civics and
+      economics is found in consideration of the place and office of industrial
+      occupations in social life. Even for older students, the social sciences
+      would be less abstract and formal if they were dealt with less as sciences
+      (less as formulated bodies of knowledge) and more in their direct
+      subject-matter as that is found in the daily life of the social groups in
+      which the student shares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Connection of occupations with the method of science is at least as close
+      as with its subject matter. The ages when scientific progress was slow
+      were the ages when learned men had contempt for the material and processes
+      of everyday life, especially for those concerned with manual pursuits.
+      Consequently they strove to develop knowledge out of general principles&mdash;almost
+      out of their heads&mdash;by logical reasons. It seems as absurd that
+      learning should come from action on and with physical things, like
+      dropping acid on a stone to see what would happen, as that it should come
+      from sticking an awl with waxed thread through a piece of leather. But the
+      rise of experimental methods proved that, given control of conditions, the
+      latter operation is more typical of the right way of knowledge than
+      isolated logical reasonings. Experiment developed in the seventeenth and
+      succeeding centuries and became the authorized way of knowing when men's
+      interests were centered in the question of control of nature for human
+      uses. The active occupations in which appliances are brought to bear upon
+      physical things with the intention of effecting useful changes is the most
+      vital introduction to the experimental method.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Work and Play. What has been termed active occupation includes both
+      play and work. In their intrinsic meaning, play and industry are by no
+      means so antithetical to one another as is often assumed, any sharp
+      contrast being due to undesirable social conditions. Both involve ends
+      consciously entertained and the selection and adaptations of materials and
+      processes designed to effect the desired ends. The difference between them
+      is largely one of time-span, influencing the directness of the connection
+      of means and ends. In play, the interest is more direct&mdash;a fact
+      frequently indicated by saying that in play the activity is its own end,
+      instead of its having an ulterior result. The statement is correct, but it
+      is falsely taken, if supposed to mean that play activity is momentary,
+      having no element of looking ahead and none of pursuit. Hunting, for
+      example, is one of the commonest forms of adult play, but the existence of
+      foresight and the direction of present activity by what one is watching
+      for are obvious. When an activity is its own end in the sense that the
+      action of the moment is complete in itself, it is purely physical; it has
+      no meaning (See p. 77). The person is either going through motions quite
+      blindly, perhaps purely imitatively, or else is in a state of excitement
+      which is exhausting to mind and nerves. Both results may be seen in some
+      types of kindergarten games where the idea of play is so highly symbolic
+      that only the adult is conscious of it. Unless the children succeed in
+      reading in some quite different idea of their own, they move about either
+      as if in a hypnotic daze, or they respond to a direct excitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The point of these remarks is that play has an end in the sense of a
+      directing idea which gives point to the successive acts. Persons who play
+      are not just doing something (pure physical movement); they are trying to
+      do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts
+      which stimulate their present responses. The anticipated result, however,
+      is rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific change in
+      things. Consequently play is free, plastic. Where some definite external
+      outcome is wanted, the end has to be held to with some persistence, which
+      increases as the contemplated result is complex and requires a fairly long
+      series of intermediate adaptations. When the intended act is another
+      activity, it is not necessary to look far ahead and it is possible to
+      alter it easily and frequently. If a child is making a toy boat, he must
+      hold on to a single end and direct a considerable number of acts by that
+      one idea. If he is just "playing boat" he may change the material that
+      serves as a boat almost at will, and introduce new factors as fancy
+      suggests. The imagination makes what it will of chairs, blocks, leaves,
+      chips, if they serve the purpose of carrying activity forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From a very early age, however, there is no distinction of exclusive
+      periods of play activity and work activity, but only one of emphasis.
+      There are definite results which even young children desire, and try to
+      bring to pass. Their eager interest in sharing the occupations of others,
+      if nothing else, accomplishes this. Children want to "help"; they are
+      anxious to engage in the pursuits of adults which effect external changes:
+      setting the table, washing dishes, helping care for animals, etc. In their
+      plays, they like to construct their own toys and appliances. With
+      increasing maturity, activity which does not give back results of tangible
+      and visible achievement loses its interest. Play then changes to fooling
+      and if habitually indulged in is demoralizing. Observable results are
+      necessary to enable persons to get a sense and a measure of their own
+      powers. When make-believe is recognized to be make-believe, the device of
+      making objects in fancy alone is too easy to stimulate intense action. One
+      has only to observe the countenance of children really playing to note
+      that their attitude is one of serious absorption; this attitude cannot be
+      maintained when things cease to afford adequate stimulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When fairly remote results of a definite character are foreseen and enlist
+      persistent effort for their accomplishment, play passes into work. Like
+      play, it signifies purposeful activity and differs not in that activity is
+      subordinated to an external result, but in the fact that a longer course
+      of activity is occasioned by the idea of a result. The demand for
+      continuous attention is greater, and more intelligence must be shown in
+      selecting and shaping means. To extend this account would be to repeat
+      what has been said under the caption of aim, interest, and thinking. It is
+      pertinent, however, to inquire why the idea is so current that work
+      involves subordination of an activity to an ulterior material result. The
+      extreme form of this subordination, namely drudgery, offers a clew.
+      Activity carried on under conditions of external pressure or coercion is
+      not carried on for any significance attached to the doing. The course of
+      action is not intrinsically satisfying; it is a mere means for avoiding
+      some penalty, or for gaining some reward at its conclusion. What is
+      inherently repulsive is endured for the sake of averting something still
+      more repulsive or of securing a gain hitched on by others. Under unfree
+      economic conditions, this state of affairs is bound to exist. Work or
+      industry offers little to engage the emotions and the imagination; it is a
+      more or less mechanical series of strains. Only the hold which the
+      completion of the work has upon a person will keep him going. But the end
+      should be intrinsic to the action; it should be its end&mdash;a part of
+      its own course. Then it affords a stimulus to effort very different from
+      that arising from the thought of results which have nothing to do with the
+      intervening action. As already mentioned, the absence of economic pressure
+      in schools supplies an opportunity for reproducing industrial situations
+      of mature life under conditions where the occupation can be carried on for
+      its own sake. If in some cases, pecuniary recognition is also a result of
+      an action, though not the chief motive for it, that fact may well increase
+      the significance of the occupation. Where something approaching drudgery
+      or the need of fulfilling externally imposed tasks exists, the demand for
+      play persists, but tends to be perverted. The ordinary course of action
+      fails to give adequate stimulus to emotion and imagination. So in leisure
+      time, there is an imperious demand for their stimulation by any kind of
+      means; gambling, drink, etc., may be resorted to. Or, in less extreme
+      cases, there is recourse to idle amusement; to anything which passes time
+      with immediate agreeableness. Recreation, as the word indicates, is
+      recuperation of energy. No demand of human nature is more urgent or less
+      to be escaped. The idea that the need can be suppressed is absolutely
+      fallacious, and the Puritanic tradition which disallows the need has
+      entailed an enormous crop of evils. If education does not afford
+      opportunity for wholesome recreation and train capacity for seeking and
+      finding it, the suppressed instincts find all sorts of illicit outlets,
+      sometimes overt, sometimes confined to indulgence of the imagination.
+      Education has no more serious responsibility than making adequate
+      provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure; not only for the sake of
+      immediate health, but still more if possible for the sake of its lasting
+      effect upon habits of mind. Art is again the answer to this demand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM15" id="link2H_SUMM15">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. In the previous chapter we found that the primary subject
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      matter of knowing is that contained in learning how to do things of a
+      fairly direct sort. The educational equivalent of this principle is the
+      consistent use of simple occupations which appeal to the powers of youth
+      and which typify general modes of social activity. Skill and information
+      about materials, tools, and laws of energy are acquired while activities
+      are carried on for their own sake. The fact that they are socially
+      representative gives a quality to the skill and knowledge gained which
+      makes them transferable to out-of-school situations. It is important not
+      to confuse the psychological distinction between play and work with the
+      economic distinction. Psychologically, the defining characteristic of play
+      is not amusement nor aimlessness. It is the fact that the aim is thought
+      of as more activity in the same line, without defining continuity of
+      action in reference to results produced. Activities as they grow more
+      complicated gain added meaning by greater attention to specific results
+      achieved. Thus they pass gradually into work. Both are equally free and
+      intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend
+      to make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into
+      uncongenial labor for the poor. Work is psychologically simply an activity
+      which consciously includes regard for consequences as a part of itself; it
+      becomes constrained labor when the consequences are outside of the
+      activity as an end to which activity is merely a means. Work which remains
+      permeated with the play attitude is art&mdash;in quality if not in
+      conventional designation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Extension of Meaning of Primary Activities. Nothing is more striking
+      than the difference between an activity as merely physical and the wealth
+      of meanings which the same activity may assume. From the outside, an
+      astronomer gazing through a telescope is like a small boy looking through
+      the same tube. In each case, there is an arrangement of glass and metal,
+      an eye, and a little speck of light in the distance. Yet at a critical
+      moment, the activity of an astronomer might be concerned with the birth of
+      a world, and have whatever is known about the starry heavens as its
+      significant content. Physically speaking, what man has effected on this
+      globe in his progress from savagery is a mere scratch on its surface, not
+      perceptible at a distance which is slight in comparison with the reaches
+      even of the solar system. Yet in meaning what has been accomplished
+      measures just the difference of civilization from savagery. Although the
+      activities, physically viewed, have changed somewhat, this change is
+      slight in comparison with the development of the meanings attaching to the
+      activities. There is no limit to the meaning which an action may come to
+      possess. It all depends upon the context of perceived connections in which
+      it is placed; the reach of imagination in realizing connections is
+      inexhaustible. The advantage which the activity of man has in
+      appropriating and finding meanings makes his education something else than
+      the manufacture of a tool or the training of an animal. The latter
+      increase efficiency; they do not develop significance. The final
+      educational importance of such occupations in play and work as were
+      considered in the last chapter is that they afford the most direct
+      instrumentalities for such extension of meaning. Set going under adequate
+      conditions they are magnets for gathering and retaining an indefinitely
+      wide scope of intellectual considerations. They provide vital centers for
+      the reception and assimilation of information. When information is
+      purveyed in chunks simply as information to be retained for its own sake,
+      it tends to stratify over vital experience. Entering as a factor into an
+      activity pursued for its own sake&mdash;whether as a means or as a
+      widening of the content of the aim&mdash;it is informing. The insight
+      directly gained fuses with what is told. Individual experience is then
+      capable of taking up and holding in solution the net results of the
+      experience of the group to which he belongs&mdash;including the results of
+      sufferings and trials over long stretches of time. And such media have no
+      fixed saturation point where further absorption is impossible. The more
+      that is taken in, the greater capacity there is for further assimilation.
+      New receptiveness follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon
+      information gained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature and man.
+      This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning when translated
+      into educational equivalents. So translated, it signifies that geography
+      and history supply subject matter which gives background and outlook,
+      intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow personal
+      actions or mere forms of technical skill. With every increase of ability
+      to place our own doings in their time and space connections, our doings
+      gain in significant content. We realize that we are citizens of no mean
+      city in discovering the scene in space of which we are denizens, and the
+      continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which we are heirs and
+      continuers. Thus our ordinary daily experiences cease to be things of the
+      moment and gain enduring substance. Of course if geography and history are
+      taught as ready-made studies which a person studies simply because he is
+      sent to school, it easily happens that a large number of statements about
+      things remote and alien to everyday experience are learned. Activity is
+      divided, and two separate worlds are built up, occupying activity at
+      divided periods. No transmutation takes place; ordinary experience is not
+      enlarged in meaning by getting its connections; what is studied is not
+      animated and made real by entering into immediate activity. Ordinary
+      experience is not even left as it was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses
+      something of its mobility and sensitiveness to suggestions. It is weighed
+      down and pushed into a corner by a load of unassimilated information. It
+      parts with its flexible responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional
+      meaning. Mere amassing of information apart from the direct interests of
+      life makes mind wooden; elasticity disappears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out beyond its
+      immediate self. It does not passively wait for information to be bestowed
+      which will increase its meaning; it seeks it out. Curiosity is not an
+      accidental isolated possession; it is a necessary consequence of the fact
+      that an experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all kinds of
+      connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency to make these
+      conditions perceptible. It is the business of educators to supply an
+      environment so that this reaching out of an experience may be fruitfully
+      rewarded and kept continuously active. Within a certain kind of
+      environment, an activity may be checked so that the only meaning which
+      accrues is of its direct and tangible isolated outcome. One may cook, or
+      hammer, or walk, and the resulting consequences may not take the mind any
+      farther than the consequences of cooking, hammering, and walking in the
+      literal&mdash;or physical&mdash;sense. But nevertheless the consequences
+      of the act remain far-reaching. To walk involves a displacement and
+      reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is felt wherever there is
+      matter. It involves the structure of the limbs and the nervous system; the
+      principles of mechanics. To cook is to utilize heat and moisture to change
+      the chemical relations of food materials; it has a bearing upon the
+      assimilation of food and the growth of the body. The utmost that the most
+      learned men of science know in physics, chemistry, physiology is not
+      enough to make all these consequences and connections perceptible. The
+      task of education, once more, is to see to it that such activities are
+      performed in such ways and under such conditions as render these
+      conditions as perceptible as possible. To "learn geography" is to gain in
+      power to perceive the spatial, the natural, connections of an ordinary
+      act; to "learn history" is essentially to gain in power to recognize its
+      human connections. For what is called geography as a formulated study is
+      simply the body of facts and principles which have been discovered in
+      other men's experience about the natural medium in which we live, and in
+      connection with which the particular acts of our life have an explanation.
+      So history as a formulated study is but the body of known facts about the
+      activities and sufferings of the social groups with which our own lives
+      are continuous, and through reference to which our own customs and
+      institutions are illuminated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Complementary Nature of History and Geography. History and
+      geography&mdash;including in the latter, for reasons about to be
+      mentioned, nature study&mdash;are the information studies par excellence
+      of the schools. Examination of the materials and the method of their use
+      will make clear that the difference between penetration of this
+      information into living experience and its mere piling up in isolated
+      heaps depends upon whether these studies are faithful to the
+      interdependence of man and nature which affords these studies their
+      justification. Nowhere, however, is there greater danger that subject
+      matter will be accepted as appropriate educational material simply because
+      it has become customary to teach and learn it. The idea of a philosophic
+      reason for it, because of the function of the material in a worthy
+      transformation of experience, is looked upon as a vain fancy, or as
+      supplying a high-sounding phraseology in support of what is already done.
+      The words "history" and "geography" suggest simply the matter which has
+      been traditionally sanctioned in the schools. The mass and variety of this
+      matter discourage an attempt to see what it really stands for, and how it
+      can be so taught as to fulfill its mission in the experience of pupils.
+      But unless the idea that there is a unifying and social direction in
+      education is a farcical pretense, subjects that bulk as large in the
+      curriculum as history and geography, must represent a general function in
+      the development of a truly socialized and intellectualized experience. The
+      discovery of this function must be employed as a criterion for trying and
+      sifting the facts taught and the methods used.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The function of historical and geographical subject matter has been
+      stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal contacts
+      of life by furnishing their context, their background and outlook. While
+      geography emphasizes the physical side and history the social, these are
+      only emphases in a common topic, namely, the associated life of men. For
+      this associated life, with its experiments, its ways and means, its
+      achievements and failures, does not go on in the sky nor yet in a vacuum.
+      It takes place on the earth. This setting of nature does not bear to
+      social activities the relation that the scenery of a theatrical
+      performance bears to a dramatic representation; it enters into the very
+      make-up of the social happenings that form history. Nature is the medium
+      of social occurrences. It furnishes original stimuli; it supplies
+      obstacles and resources. Civilization is the progressive mastery of its
+      varied energies. When this interdependence of the study of history,
+      representing the human emphasis, with the study of geography, representing
+      the natural, is ignored, history sinks to a listing of dates with an
+      appended inventory of events, labeled "important"; or else it becomes a
+      literary phantasy&mdash;for in purely literary history the natural
+      environment is but stage scenery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Geography, of course, has its educative influence in a counterpart
+      connection of natural facts with social events and their consequences. The
+      classic definition of geography as an account of the earth as the home of
+      man expresses the educational reality. But it is easier to give this
+      definition than it is to present specific geographical subject matter in
+      its vital human bearings. The residence, pursuits, successes, and failures
+      of men are the things that give the geographic data their reason for
+      inclusion in the material of instruction. But to hold the two together
+      requires an informed and cultivated imagination. When the ties are broken,
+      geography presents itself as that hodge-podge of unrelated fragments too
+      often found. It appears as a veritable rag-bag of intellectual odds and
+      ends: the height of a mountain here, the course of a river there, the
+      quantity of shingles produced in this town, the tonnage of the shipping in
+      that, the boundary of a county, the capital of a state. The earth as the
+      home of man is humanizing and unified; the earth viewed as a miscellany of
+      facts is scattering and imaginatively inert. Geography is a topic that
+      originally appeals to imagination&mdash;even to the romantic imagination.
+      It shares in the wonder and glory that attach to adventure, travel, and
+      exploration. The variety of peoples and environments, their contrast with
+      familiar scenes, furnishes infinite stimulation. The mind is moved from
+      the monotony of the customary. And while local or home geography is the
+      natural starting point in the reconstructive development of the natural
+      environment, it is an intellectual starting point for moving out into the
+      unknown, not an end in itself. When not treated as a basis for getting at
+      the large world beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as deadly
+      as do object lessons which simply summarize the properties of familiar
+      objects. The reason is the same. The imagination is not fed, but is held
+      down to recapitulating, cataloguing, and refining what is already known.
+      But when the familiar fences that mark the limits of the village
+      proprietors are signs that introduce an understanding of the boundaries of
+      great nations, even fences are lighted with meaning. Sunlight, air,
+      running water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil
+      officers and their duties&mdash;all these things are found in the local
+      environment. Treated as if their meaning began and ended in those
+      confines, they are curious facts to be laboriously learned. As instruments
+      for extending the limits of experience, bringing within its scope peoples
+      and things otherwise strange and unknown, they are transfigured by the use
+      to which they are put. Sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political
+      relations come from afar and lead the thoughts afar. To follow their
+      course is to enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional
+      information, but by remaking the meaning of what was previously a matter
+      of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of geographical study
+      which tend to become specialized and separate. Mathematical or
+      astronomical, physiographic, topographic, political, commercial,
+      geography, all make their claims. How are they to be adjusted? By an
+      external compromise that crowds in so much of each? No other method is to
+      be found unless it be constantly borne in mind that the educational center
+      of gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject. From this
+      center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is needed to help
+      appreciate the significance of human activities and relations. The
+      differences of civilization in cold and tropical regions, the special
+      inventions, industrial and political, of peoples in the temperate regions,
+      cannot be understood without appeal to the earth as a member of the solar
+      system. Economic activities deeply influence social intercourse and
+      political organization on one side, and reflect physical conditions on the
+      other. The specializations of these topics are for the specialists; their
+      interaction concerns man as a being whose experience is social.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced; verbally,
+      it is. But in educational idea there is but one reality, and it is pity
+      that in practice we have two names: for the diversity of names tends to
+      conceal the identity of meaning. Nature and the earth should be equivalent
+      terms, and so should earth study and nature study. Everybody knows that
+      nature study has suffered in schools from scrappiness of subject matter,
+      due to dealing with a large number of isolated points. The parts of a
+      flower have been studied, for example, apart from the flower as an organ;
+      the flower apart from the plant; the plant apart from the soil, air, and
+      light in which and through which it lives. The result is an inevitable
+      deadness of topics to which attention is invited, but which are so
+      isolated that they do not feed imagination. The lack of interest is so
+      great that it was seriously proposed to revive animism, to clothe natural
+      facts and events with myths in order that they might attract and hold the
+      mind. In numberless cases, more or less silly personifications were
+      resorted to. The method was silly, but it expressed a real need for a
+      human atmosphere. The facts had been torn to pieces by being taken out of
+      their context. They no longer belonged to the earth; they had no abiding
+      place anywhere. To compensate, recourse was had to artificial and
+      sentimental associations. The real remedy is to make nature study a study
+      of nature, not of fragments made meaningless through complete removal from
+      the situations in which they are produced and in which they operate. When
+      nature is treated as a whole, like the earth in its relations, its
+      phenomena fall into their natural relations of sympathy and association
+      with human life, and artificial substitutes are not needed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. History and Present Social Life. The segregation which kills the
+      vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social
+      life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly
+      gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward it.
+      Let the dead bury their dead. But knowledge of the past is the key to
+      understanding the present. History deals with the past, but this past is
+      the history of the present. An intelligent study of the discovery,
+      explorations, colonization of America, of the pioneer movement westward,
+      of immigration, etc., should be a study of the United States as it is
+      to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying it in process of formation
+      makes much that is too complex to be directly grasped open to
+      comprehension. Genetic method was perhaps the chief scientific achievement
+      of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its principle is that the
+      way to get insight into any complex product is to trace the process of its
+      making,&mdash;to follow it through the successive stages of its growth. To
+      apply this method to history as if it meant only the truism that the
+      present social state cannot be separated from its past, is one-sided. It
+      means equally that past events cannot be separated from the living present
+      and retain meaning. The true starting point of history is always some
+      present situation with its problems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration of its
+      bearing upon a number of points. The biographical method is generally
+      recommended as the natural mode of approach to historical study. The lives
+      of great men, of heroes and leaders, make concrete and vital historic
+      episodes otherwise abstract and incomprehensible. They condense into vivid
+      pictures complicated and tangled series of events spread over so much
+      space and time that only a highly trained mind can follow and unravel
+      them. There can be no doubt of the psychological soundness of this
+      principle. But it is misused when employed to throw into exaggerated
+      relief the doings of a few individuals without reference to the social
+      situations which they represent. When a biography is related just as an
+      account of the doings of a man isolated from the conditions that aroused
+      him and to which his activities were a response, we do not have a study of
+      history, for we have no study of social life, which is an affair of
+      individuals in association. We get only a sugar coating which makes it
+      easier to swallow certain fragments of information. Much attention has
+      been given of late to primitive life as an introduction to learning
+      history. Here also there is a right and a wrong way of conceiving its
+      value. The seemingly ready-made character and the complexity of present
+      conditions, their apparently hard and fast character, is an almost
+      insuperable obstacle to gaining insight into their nature. Recourse to the
+      primitive may furnish the fundamental elements of the present situation in
+      immensely simplified form. It is like unraveling a cloth so complex and so
+      close to the eyes that its scheme cannot be seen, until the larger coarser
+      features of the pattern appear. We cannot simplify the present situations
+      by deliberate experiment, but resort to primitive life presents us with
+      the sort of results we should desire from an experiment. Social
+      relationships and modes of organized action are reduced to their lowest
+      terms. When this social aim is overlooked, however, the study of primitive
+      life becomes simply a rehearsing of sensational and exciting features of
+      savagery. Primitive history suggests industrial history. For one of the
+      chief reasons for going to more primitive conditions to resolve the
+      present into more easily perceived factors is that we may realize how the
+      fundamental problems of procuring subsistence, shelter, and protection
+      have been met; and by seeing how these were solved in the earlier days of
+      the human race, form some conception of the long road which has had to be
+      traveled, and of the successive inventions by which the race has been
+      brought forward in culture. We do not need to go into disputes regarding
+      the economic interpretation of history to realize that the industrial
+      history of mankind gives insight into two important phases of social life
+      in a way which no other phase of history can possibly do. It presents us
+      with knowledge of the successive inventions by which theoretical science
+      has been applied to the control of nature in the interests of security and
+      prosperity of social life. It thus reveals the successive causes of social
+      progress. Its other service is to put before us the things that
+      fundamentally concern all men in common&mdash;the occupations and values
+      connected with getting a living. Economic history deals with the
+      activities, the career, and fortunes of the common man as does no other
+      branch of history. The one thing every individual must do is to live; the
+      one thing that society must do is to secure from each individual his fair
+      contribution to the general well being and see to it that a just return is
+      made to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more
+      liberalizing than political history. It deals not with the rise and fall
+      of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the effective
+      liberties, through command of nature, of the common man for whom powers
+      and principalities exist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Industrial history also offers a more direct avenue of approach to the
+      realization of the intimate connection of man's struggles, successes, and
+      failures with nature than does political history&mdash;to say nothing of
+      the military history into which political history so easily runs when
+      reduced to the level of youthful comprehension. For industrial history is
+      essentially an account of the way in which man has learned to utilize
+      natural energy from the time when men mostly exploited the muscular
+      energies of other men to the time when, in promise if not in actuality,
+      the resources of nature are so under command as to enable men to extend a
+      common dominion over her. When the history of work, when the conditions of
+      using the soil, forest, mine, of domesticating and cultivating grains and
+      animals, of manufacture and distribution, are left out of account, history
+      tends to become merely literary&mdash;a systematized romance of a mythical
+      humanity living upon itself instead of upon the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education is
+      intellectual history. We are only just beginning to realize that the great
+      heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its politicians, generals,
+      and diplomatists, but the scientific discoverers and inventors who have
+      put into man's hands the instrumentalities of an expanding and controlled
+      experience, and the artists and poets who have celebrated his struggles,
+      triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic, or written,
+      that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to others. One of
+      the advantages of industrial history as a history of man's progressive
+      adaptation of natural forces to social uses is the opportunity which it
+      affords for consideration of advance in the methods and results of
+      knowledge. At present men are accustomed to eulogize intelligence and
+      reason in general terms; their fundamental importance is urged. But pupils
+      often come away from the conventional study of history, and think either
+      that the human intellect is a static quantity which has not progressed by
+      the invention of better methods, or else that intelligence, save as a
+      display of personal shrewdness, is a negligible historic factor. Surely no
+      better way could be devised of instilling a genuine sense of the part
+      which mind has to play in life than a study of history which makes plain
+      how the entire advance of humanity from savagery to civilization has been
+      dependent upon intellectual discoveries and inventions, and the extent to
+      which the things which ordinarily figure most largely in historical
+      writings have been side issues, or even obstructions for intelligence to
+      overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pursued in this fashion, history would most naturally become of ethical
+      value in teaching. Intelligent insight into present forms of associated
+      life is necessary for a character whose morality is more than colorless
+      innocence. Historical knowledge helps provide such insight. It is an organ
+      for analysis of the warp and woof of the present social fabric, of making
+      known the forces which have woven the pattern. The use of history for
+      cultivating a socialized intelligence constitutes its moral significance.
+      It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of anecdotes to be
+      drawn on to inculcate special moral lessons on this virtue or that vice.
+      But such teaching is not so much an ethical use of history as it is an
+      effort to create moral impressions by means of more or less authentic
+      material. At best, it produces a temporary emotional glow; at worst,
+      callous indifference to moralizing. The assistance which may be given by
+      history to a more intelligent sympathetic understanding of the social
+      situations of the present in which individuals share is a permanent and
+      constructive moral asset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM16" id="link2H_SUMM16">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. It is the nature of an experience to have implications which
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. Bringing these
+      connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the
+      experience. Any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is
+      capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending
+      its range of perceived connections. Normal communication with others is
+      the readiest way of effecting this development, for it links up the net
+      results of the experience of the group and even the race with the
+      immediate experience of an individual. By normal communication is meant
+      that in which there is a joint interest, a common interest, so that one is
+      eager to give and the other to take. It contrasts with telling or stating
+      things simply for the sake of impressing them upon another, merely in
+      order to test him to see how much he has retained and can literally
+      reproduce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Geography and history are the two great school resources for bringing
+      about the enlargement of the significance of a direct personal experience.
+      The active occupations described in the previous chapter reach out in
+      space and time with respect to both nature and man. Unless they are taught
+      for external reasons or as mere modes of skill their chief educational
+      value is that they provide the most direct and interesting roads out into
+      the larger world of meanings stated in history and geography. While
+      history makes human implications explicit and geography natural
+      connections, these subjects are two phases of the same living whole, since
+      the life of men in association goes on in nature, not as an accidental
+      setting, but as the material and medium of development.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Logical and the Psychological. By science is meant, as already
+      stated, that knowledge which is the outcome of methods of observation,
+      reflection, and testing which are deliberately adopted to secure a
+      settled, assured subject matter. It involves an intelligent and persistent
+      endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to
+      add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the
+      dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as
+      possible. It is, like all knowledge, an outcome of activity bringing about
+      certain changes in the environment. But in its case, the quality of the
+      resulting knowledge is the controlling factor and not an incident of the
+      activity. Both logically and educationally, science is the perfecting of
+      knowing, its last stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science, in short, signifies a realization of the logical implications of
+      any knowledge. Logical order is not a form imposed upon what is known; it
+      is the proper form of knowledge as perfected. For it means that the
+      statement of subject matter is of a nature to exhibit to one who
+      understands it the premises from which it follows and the conclusions to
+      which it points (See ante, p. 190). As from a few bones the competent
+      zoologist reconstructs an animal; so from the form of a statement in
+      mathematics or physics the specialist in the subject can form an idea of
+      the system of truths in which it has its place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the non-expert, however, this perfected form is a stumbling block. Just
+      because the material is stated with reference to the furtherance of
+      knowledge as an end in itself, its connections with the material of
+      everyday life are hidden. To the layman the bones are a mere curiosity.
+      Until he had mastered the principles of zoology, his efforts to make
+      anything out of them would be random and blind. From the standpoint of the
+      learner scientific form is an ideal to be achieved, not a starting point
+      from which to set out. It is, nevertheless, a frequent practice to start
+      in instruction with the rudiments of science somewhat simplified. The
+      necessary consequence is an isolation of science from significant
+      experience. The pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning. He
+      acquires a technical body of information without ability to trace its
+      connections with the objects and operations with which he is familiar&mdash;often
+      he acquires simply a peculiar vocabulary. There is a strong temptation to
+      assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a
+      royal road to learning. What more natural than to suppose that the
+      immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless
+      error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? The outcome
+      is written large in the history of education. Pupils begin their study of
+      science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according
+      to the order of the specialist. Technical concepts, with their
+      definitions, are introduced at the outset. Laws are introduced at a very
+      early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were
+      arrived at. The pupils learn a "science" instead of learning the
+      scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience.
+      The method of the advanced student dominates college teaching; the
+      approach of the college is transferred into the high school, and so down
+      the line, with such omissions as may make the subject easier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chronological method which begins with the experience of the learner
+      and develops from that the proper modes of scientific treatment is often
+      called the "psychological" method in distinction from the logical method
+      of the expert or specialist. The apparent loss of time involved is more
+      than made up for by the superior understanding and vital interest secured.
+      What the pupil learns he at least understands. Moreover by following, in
+      connection with problems selected from the material of ordinary
+      acquaintance, the methods by which scientific men have reached their
+      perfected knowledge, he gains independent power to deal with material
+      within his range, and avoids the mental confusion and intellectual
+      distaste attendant upon studying matter whose meaning is only symbolic.
+      Since the mass of pupils are never going to become scientific specialists,
+      it is much more important that they should get some insight into what
+      scientific method means than that they should copy at long range and
+      second hand the results which scientific men have reached. Students will
+      not go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered," but they will be sure and
+      intelligent as far as they do go. And it is safe to say that the few who
+      go on to be scientific experts will have a better preparation than if they
+      had been swamped with a large mass of purely technical and symbolically
+      stated information. In fact, those who do become successful men of science
+      are those who by their own power manage to avoid the pitfalls of a
+      traditional scholastic introduction into it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The contrast between the expectations of the men who a generation or two
+      ago strove, against great odds, to secure a place for science in
+      education, and the result generally achieved is painful. Herbert Spencer,
+      inquiring what knowledge is of most worth, concluded that from all points
+      of view scientific knowledge is most valuable. But his argument
+      unconsciously assumed that scientific knowledge could be communicated in a
+      ready-made form. Passing over the methods by which the subject matter of
+      our ordinary activities is transmuted into scientific form, it ignored the
+      method by which alone science is science. Instruction has too often
+      proceeded upon an analogous plan. But there is no magic attached to
+      material stated in technically correct scientific form. When learned in
+      this condition it remains a body of inert information. Moreover its form
+      of statement removes it further from fruitful contact with everyday
+      experiences than does the mode of statement proper to literature.
+      Nevertheless that the claims made for instruction in science were
+      unjustifiable does not follow. For material so taught is not science to
+      the pupil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Contact with things and laboratory exercises, while a great improvement
+      upon textbooks arranged upon the deductive plan, do not of themselves
+      suffice to meet the need. While they are an indispensable portion of
+      scientific method, they do not as a matter of course constitute scientific
+      method. Physical materials may be manipulated with scientific apparatus,
+      but the materials may be disassociated in themselves and in the ways in
+      which they are handled, from the materials and processes used out of
+      school. The problems dealt with may be only problems of science: problems,
+      that is, which would occur to one already initiated in the science of the
+      subject. Our attention may be devoted to getting skill in technical
+      manipulation without reference to the connection of laboratory exercises
+      with a problem belonging to subject matter. There is sometimes a ritual of
+      laboratory instruction as well as of heathen religion. 1 It has been
+      mentioned, incidentally, that scientific statements, or logical form,
+      implies the use of signs or symbols. The statement applies, of course, to
+      all use of language. But in the vernacular, the mind proceeds directly
+      from the symbol to the thing signified. Association with familiar material
+      is so close that the mind does not pause upon the sign. The signs are
+      intended only to stand for things and acts. But scientific terminology has
+      an additional use. It is designed, as we have seen, not to stand for the
+      things directly in their practical use in experience, but for the things
+      placed in a cognitive system. Ultimately, of course, they denote the
+      things of our common sense acquaintance. But immediately they do not
+      designate them in their common context, but translated into terms of
+      scientific inquiry. Atoms, molecules, chemical formulae, the mathematical
+      propositions in the study of physics&mdash;all these have primarily an
+      intellectual value and only indirectly an empirical value. They represent
+      instruments for the carrying on of science. As in the case of other tools,
+      their significance can be learned only by use. We cannot procure
+      understanding of their meaning by pointing to things, but only by pointing
+      to their work when they are employed as part of the technique of
+      knowledge. Even the circle, square, etc., of geometry exhibit a difference
+      from the squares and circles of familiar acquaintance, and the further one
+      proceeds in mathematical science the greater the remoteness from the
+      everyday empirical thing. Qualities which do not count for the pursuit of
+      knowledge about spatial relations are left out; those which are important
+      for this purpose are accentuated. If one carries his study far enough, he
+      will find even the properties which are significant for spatial knowledge
+      giving way to those which facilitate knowledge of other things&mdash;perhaps
+      a knowledge of the general relations of number. There will be nothing in
+      the conceptual definitions even to suggest spatial form, size, or
+      direction. This does not mean that they are unreal mental inventions, but
+      it indicates that direct physical qualities have been transmuted into
+      tools for a special end&mdash;the end of intellectual organization. In
+      every machine the primary state of material has been modified by
+      subordinating it to use for a purpose. Not the stuff in its original form
+      but in its adaptation to an end is important. No one would have a
+      knowledge of a machine who could enumerate all the materials entering into
+      its structure, but only he who knew their uses and could tell why they are
+      employed as they are. In like fashion one has a knowledge of mathematical
+      conceptions only when he sees the problems in which they function and
+      their specific utility in dealing with these problems. "Knowing" the
+      definitions, rules, formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of
+      a machine without knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the
+      meaning, or intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the
+      system of which it is a member.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the
+      direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried to a
+      perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in experience.
+      In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation of mind from
+      devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the systematic pursuit
+      of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action. Progress is sometimes
+      thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends already sought. But
+      this is a minor form of progress, for it requires only improvement of the
+      means of action or technical advance. More important modes of progress
+      consist in enriching prior purposes and in forming new ones. Desires are
+      not a fixed quantity, nor does progress mean only an increased amount of
+      satisfaction. With increased culture and new mastery of nature, new
+      desires, demands for new qualities of satisfaction, show themselves, for
+      intelligence perceives new possibilities of action. This projection of new
+      possibilities leads to search for new means of execution, and progress
+      takes place; while the discovery of objects not already used leads to
+      suggestion of new ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action
+      is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual
+      command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of
+      production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the
+      fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors,
+      telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are
+      conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none of
+      them would be of much importance without the thousands of less sensational
+      inventions by means of which natural science has been rendered tributary
+      to our daily life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus
+      procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means for
+      satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of human
+      purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is the equal
+      of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent to have been
+      absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men move more swiftly
+      and surely to the realization of their ends, but their ends too largely
+      remain what they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact places
+      upon education the responsibility of using science in a way to modify the
+      habitual attitude of imagination and feeling, not leave it just an
+      extension of our physical arms and legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the purposes
+      and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of the nature
+      of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science taking effect
+      in human activity has broken down physical barriers which formerly
+      separated men; it has immensely widened the area of intercourse. It has
+      brought about interdependence of interests on an enormous scale. It has
+      brought with it an established conviction of the possibility of control of
+      nature in the interests of mankind and thus has led men to look to the
+      future, instead of the past. The coincidence of the ideal of progress with
+      the advance of science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men
+      placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a
+      firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once
+      thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream;
+      the hope of abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized
+      men with the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent
+      gradual amelioration of the estate of our common humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an
+      intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction of
+      human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through education
+      in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the routine
+      generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its ordinary
+      use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather crude and
+      unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the non-existence
+      of experimental science, experience was opposed in all the ruling
+      philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational. Empirical
+      knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of past instances
+      without intelligent insight into the principles of any of them. To say
+      that medicine was empirical meant that it was not scientific, but a mode
+      of practice based upon accumulated observations of diseases and of
+      remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of practice is of
+      necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It lends itself to
+      deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically" controlled forbids
+      constructive applications of intelligence; it depends upon following in an
+      imitative slavish manner the models set in the past. Experimental science
+      means the possibility of using past experiences as the servant, not the
+      master, of mind. It means that reason operates within experience, not
+      beyond it, to give it an intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is
+      experience becoming rational. The effect of science is thus to change
+      men's idea of the nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the
+      same token, it changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of
+      being something beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime
+      region that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is
+      found indigenous in experience:&mdash;the factor by which past experiences
+      are purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used to
+      signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand, but also
+      that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an indispensable
+      trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do not literally
+      repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if they were identical
+      with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the different or novel
+      element is negligible for present purposes. But when the new element
+      requires especial attention, random reaction is the sole recourse unless
+      abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction deliberately selects
+      from the subject matter of former experiences that which is thought
+      helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious transfer of a
+      meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one. It is the very
+      artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of one experience
+      available for guidance of another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large
+      scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal and
+      strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with the
+      subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may be saved
+      for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social progress.
+      In any experience just as it occurs there is much which, while it may be
+      of precious import to the individual implicated in the experience, is
+      peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint of science, this material
+      is accidental, while the features which are widely shared are essential.
+      Whatever is unique in the situation, since dependent upon the
+      peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence of circumstance, is
+      not available for others; so that unless what is shared is abstracted and
+      fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the value of the experience
+      may perish in its passing. But abstraction and the use of terms to record
+      what is abstracted put the net value of individual experience at the
+      permanent disposal of mankind. No one can foresee in detail when or how it
+      may be of further use. The man of science in developing his abstractions
+      is like a manufacturer of tools who does not know who will use them nor
+      when. But intellectual tools are indefinitely more flexible in their range
+      of adaptation than other mechanical tools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning of
+      an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,&mdash;its
+      extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these
+      possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be
+      fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization
+      is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests
+      exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations
+      were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and
+      free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a
+      short time,&mdash;limited to their own established customs as a measure of
+      all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are
+      equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location
+      in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and
+      episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the
+      "abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free range
+      of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions record,
+      fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a given
+      experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a local
+      habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and body.
+      Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is essential to
+      the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many things which they
+      cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical, direct, and
+      personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be able to act upon
+      it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have their knowledge in
+      this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and, as it were,
+      instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience a man must
+      take into conscious account the experiences of others. He must try to find
+      a standpoint which includes the experience of others as well as his own.
+      Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He talks a language
+      which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes the supreme
+      successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally significant
+      to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another fashion, to
+      express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which any one will
+      know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals and enhances
+      the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific formulation
+      supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences with transformed
+      meanings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection
+      and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally, and
+      on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole
+      instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress. And
+      if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer upon
+      it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very
+      different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in
+      permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached
+      for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action.
+      There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but
+      genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its
+      expansion and its direction to new possibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational
+      tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the
+      curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests
+      is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a literary
+      philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of learning before
+      experimental science came into being. The latter had naturally to win its
+      way. No fortified and protected interest readily surrenders any monopoly
+      it may possess. But the assumption, from whichever side, that language and
+      literary products are exclusively humanistic in quality, and that science
+      is purely physical in import, is a false notion which tends to cripple the
+      educational use of both studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum,
+      nor is nature a mere stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante,
+      p. 211). Man's life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career,
+      for success or defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it.
+      Man's power of deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability
+      to direct natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent
+      upon insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for
+      the specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions
+      of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse
+      goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development is
+      to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in quality.
+      One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of the struggles
+      by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from superstitious
+      subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically, to intellectual
+      self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of formal and
+      technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever information
+      about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of such instruction
+      to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis of natural
+      knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a wrong educational
+      attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it functions in men's
+      occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic culture. The notion
+      that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than "pure" knowledge, was
+      natural to a society in which all useful work was performed by slaves and
+      serfs, and in which industry was controlled by the models set by custom
+      rather than by intelligence. Science, or the highest knowing, was then
+      identified with pure theorizing, apart from all application in the uses of
+      life; and knowledge relating to useful arts suffered the stigma attaching
+      to the classes who engaged in them (See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of
+      science thus generated persisted after science had itself adopted the
+      appliances of the arts, using them for the production of knowledge, and
+      after the rise of democracy. Taking theory just as theory, however, that
+      which concerns humanity is of more significance for man than that which
+      concerns a merely physical world. In adopting the criterion of knowledge
+      laid down by a literary culture, aloof from the practical needs of the
+      mass of men, the educational advocates of scientific education put
+      themselves at a strategic disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of
+      science appropriate to its experimental method and to the movements of a
+      democratic and industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that
+      natural science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases
+      its educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure class.
+      For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set in opposition
+      to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce themselves to
+      exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn tend to shrink
+      to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For modern languages may
+      evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the ban. It would be hard to
+      find anything in history more ironical than the educational practices
+      which have identified the "humanities" exclusively with a knowledge of
+      Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and institutions made such important
+      contributions to our civilization that there should always be the amplest
+      opportunities for making their acquaintance. But to regard them as par
+      excellence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect of the
+      possibilities of the subject matter which is accessible in education to
+      the masses, and tends to cultivate a narrow snobbery: that of a learned
+      class whose insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge
+      is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the
+      past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and
+      human sympathy. Any subject matter which accomplishes this result is
+      humane, and any subject matter which does not accomplish it is not even
+      educational.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM17" id="link2H_SUMM17">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of what
+      commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a
+      statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of a
+      belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to the
+      statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical characteristics
+      of method, since they belong to subject matter which has reached a high
+      degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from the method of the
+      learner&mdash;the chronological order of passing from a cruder to a more
+      refined intellectual quality of experience. When this fact is ignored,
+      science is treated as so much bare information, which however is less
+      interesting and more remote than ordinary information, being stated in an
+      unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which science has to
+      perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed for the race:
+      emancipation from local and temporary incidents of experience, and the
+      opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the accidents of personal
+      habit and predilection. The logical traits of abstraction, generalization,
+      and definite formulation are all associated with this function. In
+      emancipating an idea from the particular context in which it originated
+      and giving it a wider reference the results of the experience of any
+      individual are put at the disposal of all men. Thus ultimately and
+      philosophically science is the organ of general social progress. 1 Upon
+      the positive side, the value of problems arising in work in the garden,
+      the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p. 200). The laboratory may be
+      treated as an additional resource to supply conditions and appliances for
+      the better pursuit of these problems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have
+      already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide
+      with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility,
+      culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline
+      or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are
+      valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and
+      there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern
+      and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of
+      values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends
+      subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of
+      the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant
+      contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of
+      educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior
+      discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the
+      other, by bringing them into connection with one another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is
+      indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things
+      and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one
+      thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and
+      hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all
+      symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language
+      the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated." It stands
+      in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we
+      take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention
+      of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally
+      direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of
+      agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would
+      remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery
+      to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the
+      range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider
+      meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or
+      symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the
+      disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person&mdash;so
+      dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect
+      experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is
+      always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger that
+      instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make it
+      enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation will
+      become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed to
+      this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere
+      bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes with
+      it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used to
+      express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in
+      contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a
+      representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and
+      "appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for the
+      realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas
+      except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it in," etc.,
+      for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct experience of a
+      thing is by having it. But it is the difference between reading a
+      technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between just seeing
+      it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical equations about
+      light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious illumination of a
+      misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of
+      technique and other purely representative forms to encroach upon the
+      sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume
+      that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations
+      sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected by
+      formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or
+      bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it
+      must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic
+      material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying
+      facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine
+      situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the
+      material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the
+      pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account;
+      from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying
+      subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs, and
+      of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the material
+      symbolically conveyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the demand
+      for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the provision
+      made for play and active occupations embodying typical situations. Nothing
+      need be added to what has already been said except to point out that while
+      the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject matter of primary
+      education, where the demand for the available background of direct
+      experience is most obvious, the principle applies to the primary or
+      elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic function of
+      laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field,
+      is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain range of facts
+      and problems&mdash;to give him a "feeling" for them. Getting command of
+      technique and of methods of reaching and testing generalizations is at
+      first secondary to getting appreciation. As regards the primary school
+      activities, it is to be borne in mind that the fundamental intent is not
+      to amuse nor to convey information with a minimum of vexation nor yet to
+      acquire skill,&mdash;though these results may accrue as by-products,&mdash;but
+      to enlarge and enrich the scope of experience, and to keep alert and
+      effective the interest in intellectual progress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out
+      three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct
+      from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in
+      appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course of
+      study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the
+      course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the
+      worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon
+      qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral goods;
+      upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as aesthetic values,
+      and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain rules for these
+      values&mdash;the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance, etc.,
+      proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition, clarity, system
+      in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are so important as
+      standards of judging the worth of new experiences that parents and
+      instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the young. They
+      overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely symbolic; that
+      is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working as distinct from
+      professed standards depend upon what an individual has himself
+      specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete situations.
+      An individual may have learned that certain characteristics are
+      conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with some
+      correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that these
+      traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own past
+      experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is
+      ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are fixed on the
+      ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own personal
+      realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he has been
+      taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed
+      forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical experiences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it applies
+      equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A youth who has
+      had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value of kindliness
+      toward others built into his disposition has a measure of the worth of
+      generous treatment of others. Without this vital appreciation, the duty
+      and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by others as a standard
+      remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot adequately translate
+      into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed; it is only a knowledge
+      that others prize unselfishness as an excellence, and esteem him in the
+      degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows up a split between a
+      person's professed standards and his actual ones. A person may be aware of
+      the results of this struggle between his inclinations and his theoretical
+      opinions; he suffers from the conflict between doing what is really dear
+      to him and what he has learned will win the approval of others. But of the
+      split itself he is unaware; the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy,
+      an instability of disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked
+      through some confused intellectual situation and fought his way to
+      clearing up obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of
+      clarity and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He
+      may be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and
+      division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value of
+      these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow comes
+      home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the significance
+      of the logical norms&mdash;so-called&mdash;remains as much an external
+      piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He may be able
+      to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were
+      confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope is
+      as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of habits
+      is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also tastes&mdash;habitual
+      modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of excellence. There
+      are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium so often put in
+      schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and rewards, upon
+      promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of attention given
+      to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas, principles, and
+      problems is vitally brought home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or
+      representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the work
+      of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response involving
+      imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure "facts." The
+      imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement
+      of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than
+      mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative
+      with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the
+      full scope of a situation. This leads to an exaggerated estimate of fairy
+      tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and something labeled "Fine Art,"
+      as agencies for developing imagination and appreciation; and, by
+      neglecting imaginative vision in other matters, leads to methods which
+      reduce much instruction to an unimaginative acquiring of specialized skill
+      and amassing of a load of information. Theory, and&mdash;to some extent&mdash;practice,
+      have advanced far enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative
+      enterprise. But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially
+      marked-off stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the
+      difference between play and what is regarded as serious employment should
+      be not a difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a
+      difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The result
+      is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal" phases of
+      childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to a routine
+      efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement
+      comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do
+      better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the
+      achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside. Meantime
+      mind-wandering and wayward fancy are nothing but the unsuppressible
+      imagination cut loose from concern with what is done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of
+      realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct
+      physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in
+      teaching. The emphasis put in this book, in accord with many tendencies in
+      contemporary education, upon activity, will be misleading if it is not
+      recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral part of
+      human activity as is muscular movement. The educative value of manual
+      activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play, depends upon
+      the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing of the meaning of
+      what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are dramatizations.
+      Their utilitarian value in forming habits of skill to be used for tangible
+      results is important, but not when isolated from the appreciative side.
+      Were it not for the accompanying play of imagination, there would be no
+      road from a direct activity to representative knowledge; for it is by
+      imagination that symbols are translated over into a direct meaning and
+      integrated with a narrower activity so as to expand and enrich it. When
+      the representative creative imagination is made merely literary and
+      mythological, symbols are rendered mere means of directing physical
+      reactions of the organs of speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. In the account previously given nothing was explicitly said about the
+      place of literature and the fine arts in the course of study. The omission
+      at that point was intentional. At the outset, there is no sharp
+      demarcation of useful, or industrial, arts and fine arts. The activities
+      mentioned in Chapter XV contain within themselves the factors later
+      discriminated into fine and useful arts. As engaging the emotions and the
+      imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts their
+      quality. As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of tools to
+      materials with constantly increasing perfection, they involve the element
+      of technique indispensable to artistic production. From the standpoint of
+      product, or the work of art, they are naturally defective, though even in
+      this respect when they comprise genuine appreciation they often have a
+      rudimentary charm. As experiences they have both an artistic and an
+      esthetic quality. When they emerge into activities which are tested by
+      their product and when the socially serviceable value of the product is
+      emphasized, they pass into useful or industrial arts. When they develop in
+      the direction of an enhanced appreciation of the immediate qualities which
+      appeal to taste, they grow into fine arts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of its meanings, appreciation is opposed to depreciation. It
+      denotes an enlarged, an intensified prizing, not merely a prizing, much
+      less&mdash;like depreciation&mdash;a lowered and degraded prizing. This
+      enhancement of the qualities which make any ordinary experience appealing,
+      appropriable&mdash;capable of full assimilation&mdash;and enjoyable,
+      constitutes the prime function of literature, music, drawing, painting,
+      etc., in education. They are not the exclusive agencies of appreciation in
+      the most general sense of that word; but they are the chief agencies of an
+      intensified, enhanced appreciation. As such, they are not only
+      intrinsically and directly enjoyable, but they serve a purpose beyond
+      themselves. They have the office, in increased degree, of all appreciation
+      in fixing taste, in forming standards for the worth of later experiences.
+      They arouse discontent with conditions which fall below their measure;
+      they create a demand for surroundings coming up to their own level. They
+      reveal a depth and range of meaning in experiences which otherwise might
+      be mediocre and trivial. They supply, that is, organs of vision. Moreover,
+      in their fullness they represent the concentration and consummation of
+      elements of good which are otherwise scattered and incomplete. They select
+      and focus the elements of enjoyable worth which make any experience
+      directly enjoyable. They are not luxuries of education, but emphatic
+      expressions of that which makes any education worth while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Valuation of Studies. The theory of educational values involves not
+      only an account of the nature of appreciation as fixing the measure of
+      subsequent valuations, but an account of the specific directions in which
+      these valuations occur. To value means primarily to prize, to esteem; but
+      secondarily it means to apprise, to estimate. It means, that is, the act
+      of cherishing something, holding it dear, and also the act of passing
+      judgment upon the nature and amount of its value as compared with
+      something else. To value in the latter sense is to valuate or evaluate.
+      The distinction coincides with that sometimes made between intrinsic and
+      instrumental values. Intrinsic values are not objects of judgment, they
+      cannot (as intrinsic) be compared, or regarded as greater and less, better
+      or worse. They are invaluable; and if a thing is invaluable, it is neither
+      more nor less so than any other invaluable. But occasions present
+      themselves when it is necessary to choose, when we must let one thing go
+      in order to take another. This establishes an order of preference, a
+      greater and less, better and worse. Things judged or passed upon have to
+      be estimated in relation to some third thing, some further end. With
+      respect to that, they are means, or instrumental values.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may imagine a man who at one time thoroughly enjoys converse with his
+      friends, at another the hearing of a symphony; at another the eating of
+      his meals; at another the reading of a book; at another the earning of
+      money, and so on. As an appreciative realization, each of these is an
+      intrinsic value. It occupies a particular place in life; it serves its own
+      end, which cannot be supplied by a substitute. There is no question of
+      comparative value, and hence none of valuation. Each is the specific good
+      which it is, and that is all that can be said. In its own place, none is a
+      means to anything beyond itself. But there may arise a situation in which
+      they compete or conflict, in which a choice has to be made. Now comparison
+      comes in. Since a choice has to be made, we want to know the respective
+      claims of each competitor. What is to be said for it? What does it offer
+      in comparison with, as balanced over against, some other possibility?
+      Raising these questions means that a particular good is no longer an end
+      in itself, an intrinsic good. For if it were, its claims would be
+      incomparable, imperative. The question is now as to its status as a means
+      of realizing something else, which is then the invaluable of that
+      situation. If a man has just eaten, or if he is well fed generally and the
+      opportunity to hear music is a rarity, he will probably prefer the music
+      to eating. In the given situation that will render the greater
+      contribution. If he is starving, or if he is satiated with music for the
+      time being, he will naturally judge food to have the greater worth. In the
+      abstract or at large, apart from the needs of a particular situation in
+      which choice has to be made, there is no such thing as degrees or order of
+      value. Certain conclusions follow with respect to educational values. We
+      cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies. It is futile to
+      attempt to arrange them in an order, beginning with one having least worth
+      and going on to that of maximum value. In so far as any study has a unique
+      or irreplaceable function in experience, in so far as it marks a
+      characteristic enrichment of life, its worth is intrinsic or incomparable.
+      Since education is not a means to living, but is identical with the
+      operation of living a life which is fruitful and inherently significant,
+      the only ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living
+      itself. And this is not an end to which studies and activities are
+      subordinate means; it is the whole of which they are ingredients. And what
+      has been said about appreciation means that every study in one of its
+      aspects ought to have just such ultimate significance. It is true of
+      arithmetic as it is of poetry that in some place and at some time it ought
+      to be a good to be appreciated on its own account&mdash;just as an
+      enjoyable experience, in short. If it is not, then when the time and place
+      come for it to be used as a means or instrumentality, it will be in just
+      that much handicapped. Never having been realized or appreciated for
+      itself, one will miss something of its capacity as a resource for other
+      ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It equally follows that when we compare studies as to their values, that
+      is, treat them as means to something beyond themselves, that which
+      controls their proper valuation is found in the specific situation in
+      which they are to be used. The way to enable a student to apprehend the
+      instrumental value of arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit it
+      will be to him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him
+      discover that success in something he is interested in doing depends upon
+      ability to use number.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It also follows that the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of value
+      among different studies is a misguided one, in spite of the amount of time
+      recently devoted to the undertaking. Science for example may have any kind
+      of value, depending upon the situation into which it enters as a means. To
+      some the value of science may be military; it may be an instrument in
+      strengthening means of offense or defense; it may be technological, a tool
+      for engineering; or it may be commercial&mdash;an aid in the successful
+      conduct of business; under other conditions, its worth may be
+      philanthropic&mdash;the service it renders in relieving human suffering;
+      or again it may be quite conventional&mdash;of value in establishing one's
+      social status as an "educated" person. As matter of fact, science serves
+      all these purposes, and it would be an arbitrary task to try to fix upon
+      one of them as its "real" end. All that we can be sure of educationally is
+      that science should be taught so as to be an end in itself in the lives of
+      students&mdash;something worth while on account of its own unique
+      intrinsic contribution to the experience of life. Primarily it must have
+      "appreciation value." If we take something which seems to be at the
+      opposite pole, like poetry, the same sort of statement applies. It may be
+      that, at the present time, its chief value is the contribution it makes to
+      the enjoyment of leisure. But that may represent a degenerate condition
+      rather than anything necessary. Poetry has historically been allied with
+      religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the
+      mysterious depths of things. It has had an enormous patriotic value. Homer
+      to the Greeks was a Bible, a textbook of morals, a history, and a national
+      inspiration. In any case, it may be said that an education which does not
+      succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in
+      its leisure, has something the matter with it&mdash;or else the poetry is
+      artificial poetry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same considerations apply to the value of a study or a topic of a
+      study with reference to its motivating force. Those responsible for
+      planning and teaching the course of study should have grounds for thinking
+      that the studies and topics included furnish both direct increments to the
+      enriching of lives of the pupils and also materials which they can put to
+      use in other concerns of direct interest. Since the curriculum is always
+      getting loaded down with purely inherited traditional matter and with
+      subjects which represent mainly the energy of some influential person or
+      group of persons in behalf of something dear to them, it requires constant
+      inspection, criticism, and revision to make sure it is accomplishing its
+      purpose. Then there is always the probability that it represents the
+      values of adults rather than those of children and youth, or those of
+      pupils a generation ago rather than those of the present day. Hence a
+      further need for a critical outlook and survey. But these considerations
+      do not mean that for a subject to have motivating value to a pupil
+      (whether intrinsic or instrumental) is the same thing as for him to be
+      aware of the value, or to be able to tell what the study is good for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, as long as any topic makes an immediate appeal, it is
+      not necessary to ask what it is good for. This is a question which can be
+      asked only about instrumental values. Some goods are not good for
+      anything; they are just goods. Any other notion leads to an absurdity. For
+      we cannot stop asking the question about an instrumental good, one whose
+      value lies in its being good for something, unless there is at some point
+      something intrinsically good, good for itself. To a hungry, healthy child,
+      food is a good of the situation; we do not have to bring him to
+      consciousness of the ends subserved by food in order to supply a motive to
+      eat. The food in connection with his appetite is a motive. The same thing
+      holds of mentally eager pupils with respect to many topics. Neither they
+      nor the teacher could possibly foretell with any exactness the purposes
+      learning is to accomplish in the future; nor as long as the eagerness
+      continues is it advisable to try to specify particular goods which are to
+      come of it. The proof of a good is found in the fact that the pupil
+      responds; his response is use. His response to the material shows that the
+      subject functions in his life. It is unsound to urge that, say, Latin has
+      a value per se in the abstract, just as a study, as a sufficient
+      justification for teaching it. But it is equally absurd to argue that
+      unless teacher or pupil can point out some definite assignable future use
+      to which it is to be put, it lacks justifying value. When pupils are
+      genuinely concerned in learning Latin, that is of itself proof that it
+      possesses value. The most which one is entitled to ask in such cases is
+      whether in view of the shortness of time, there are not other things of
+      intrinsic value which in addition have greater instrumental value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This brings us to the matter of instrumental values&mdash;topics studied
+      because of some end beyond themselves. If a child is ill and his appetite
+      does not lead him to eat when food is presented, or if his appetite is
+      perverted so that he prefers candy to meat and vegetables, conscious
+      reference to results is indicated. He needs to be made conscious of
+      consequences as a justification of the positive or negative value of
+      certain objects. Or the state of things may be normal enough, and yet an
+      individual not be moved by some matter because he does not grasp how his
+      attainment of some intrinsic good depends upon active concern with what is
+      presented. In such cases, it is obviously the part of wisdom to establish
+      consciousness of connection. In general what is desirable is that a topic
+      be presented in such a way that it either have an immediate value, and
+      require no justification, or else be perceived to be a means of achieving
+      something of intrinsic value. An instrumental value then has the intrinsic
+      value of being a means to an end. It may be questioned whether some of the
+      present pedagogical interest in the matter of values of studies is not
+      either excessive or else too narrow. Sometimes it appears to be a labored
+      effort to furnish an apologetic for topics which no longer operate to any
+      purpose, direct or indirect, in the lives of pupils. At other times, the
+      reaction against useless lumber seems to have gone to the extent of
+      supposing that no subject or topic should be taught unless some quite
+      definite future utility can be pointed out by those making the course of
+      study or by the pupil himself, unmindful of the fact that life is its own
+      excuse for being; and that definite utilities which can be pointed out are
+      themselves justified only because they increase the experienced content of
+      life itself. 3. The Segregation and Organization of Values. It is of
+      course possible to classify in a general way the various valuable phases
+      of life. In order to get a survey of aims sufficiently wide (See ante, p.
+      110) to give breadth and flexibility to the enterprise of education, there
+      is some advantage in such a classification. But it is a great mistake to
+      regard these values as ultimate ends to which the concrete satisfactions
+      of experience are subordinate. They are nothing but generalizations, more
+      or less adequate, of concrete goods. Health, wealth, efficiency,
+      sociability, utility, culture, happiness itself are only abstract terms
+      which sum up a multitude of particulars. To regard such things as
+      standards for the valuation of concrete topics and process of education is
+      to subordinate to an abstraction the concrete facts from which the
+      abstraction is derived. They are not in any true sense standards of
+      valuation; these are found, as we have previously seen, in the specific
+      realizations which form tastes and habits of preference. They are,
+      however, of significance as points of view elevated above the details of
+      life whence to survey the field and see how its constituent details are
+      distributed, and whether they are well proportioned. No classification can
+      have other than a provisional validity. The following may prove of some
+      help. We may say that the kind of experience to which the work of the
+      schools should contribute is one marked by executive competency in the
+      management of resources and obstacles encountered (efficiency); by
+      sociability, or interest in the direct companionship of others; by
+      aesthetic taste or capacity to appreciate artistic excellence in at least
+      some of its classic forms; by trained intellectual method, or interest in
+      some mode of scientific achievement; and by sensitiveness to the rights
+      and claims of others&mdash;conscientiousness. And while these
+      considerations are not standards of value, they are useful criteria for
+      survey, criticism, and better organization of existing methods and subject
+      matter of instruction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The need of such general points of view is the greater because of a
+      tendency to segregate educational values due to the isolation from one
+      another of the various pursuits of life. The idea is prevalent that
+      different studies represent separate kinds of values, and that the
+      curriculum should, therefore, be constituted by gathering together various
+      studies till a sufficient variety of independent values have been cared
+      for. The following quotation does not use the word value, but it contains
+      the notion of a curriculum constructed on the idea that there are a number
+      of separate ends to be reached, and that various studies may be evaluated
+      by referring each study to its respective end. "Memory is trained by most
+      studies, but best by languages and history; taste is trained by the more
+      advanced study of languages, and still better by English literature;
+      imagination by all higher language teaching, but chiefly by Greek and
+      Latin poetry; observation by science work in the laboratory, though some
+      training is to be got from the earlier stages of Latin and Greek; for
+      expression, Greek and Latin composition comes first and English
+      composition next; for abstract reasoning, mathematics stands almost alone;
+      for concrete reasoning, science comes first, then geometry; for social
+      reasoning, the Greek and Roman historians and orators come first, and
+      general history next. Hence the narrowest education which can claim to be
+      at all complete includes Latin, one modern language, some history, some
+      English literature, and one science." There is much in the wording of this
+      passage which is irrelevant to our point and which must be discounted to
+      make it clear. The phraseology betrays the particular provincial tradition
+      within which the author is writing. There is the unquestioned assumption
+      of "faculties" to be trained, and a dominant interest in the ancient
+      languages; there is comparative disregard of the earth on which men happen
+      to live and the bodies they happen to carry around with them. But with
+      allowances made for these matters (even with their complete abandonment)
+      we find much in contemporary educational philosophy which parallels the
+      fundamental notion of parceling out special values to segregated studies.
+      Even when some one end is set up as a standard of value, like social
+      efficiency or culture, it will often be found to be but a verbal heading
+      under which a variety of disconnected factors are comprised. And although
+      the general tendency is to allow a greater variety of values to a given
+      study than does the passage quoted, yet the attempt to inventory a number
+      of values attaching to each study and to state the amount of each value
+      which the given study possesses emphasizes an implied educational
+      disintegration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As matter of fact, such schemes of values of studies are largely but
+      unconscious justifications of the curriculum with which one is familiar.
+      One accepts, for the most part, the studies of the existing course and
+      then assigns values to them as a sufficient reason for their being taught.
+      Mathematics is said to have, for example, disciplinary value in
+      habituating the pupil to accuracy of statement and closeness of reasoning;
+      it has utilitarian value in giving command of the arts of calculation
+      involved in trade and the arts; culture value in its enlargement of the
+      imagination in dealing with the most general relations of things; even
+      religious value in its concept of the infinite and allied ideas. But
+      clearly mathematics does not accomplish such results, because it is
+      endowed with miraculous potencies called values; it has these values if
+      and when it accomplishes these results, and not otherwise. The statements
+      may help a teacher to a larger vision of the possible results to be
+      effected by instruction in mathematical topics. But unfortunately, the
+      tendency is to treat the statement as indicating powers inherently
+      residing in the subject, whether they operate or not, and thus to give it
+      a rigid justification. If they do not operate, the blame is put not on the
+      subject as taught, but on the indifference and recalcitrancy of pupils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This attitude toward subjects is the obverse side of the conception of
+      experience or life as a patchwork of independent interests which exist
+      side by side and limit one another. Students of politics are familiar with
+      a check and balance theory of the powers of government. There are supposed
+      to be independent separate functions, like the legislative, executive,
+      judicial, administrative, and all goes well if each of these checks all
+      the others and thus creates an ideal balance. There is a philosophy which
+      might well be called the check and balance theory of experience. Life
+      presents a diversity of interests. Left to themselves, they tend to
+      encroach on one another. The ideal is to prescribe a special territory for
+      each till the whole ground of experience is covered, and then see to it
+      each remains within its own boundaries. Politics, business, recreation,
+      art, science, the learned professions, polite intercourse, leisure,
+      represent such interests. Each of these ramifies into many branches:
+      business into manual occupations, executive positions, bookkeeping,
+      railroading, banking, agriculture, trade and commerce, etc., and so with
+      each of the others. An ideal education would then supply the means of
+      meeting these separate and pigeon-holed interests. And when we look at the
+      schools, it is easy to get the impression that they accept this view of
+      the nature of adult life, and set for themselves the task of meeting its
+      demands. Each interest is acknowledged as a kind of fixed institution to
+      which something in the course of study must correspond. The course of
+      study must then have some civics and history politically and patriotically
+      viewed: some utilitarian studies; some science; some art (mainly
+      literature of course); some provision for recreation; some moral
+      education; and so on. And it will be found that a large part of current
+      agitation about schools is concerned with clamor and controversy about the
+      due meed of recognition to be given to each of these interests, and with
+      struggles to secure for each its due share in the course of study; or, if
+      this does not seem feasible in the existing school system, then to secure
+      a new and separate kind of schooling to meet the need. In the multitude of
+      educations education is forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obvious outcome is congestion of the course of study, overpressure and
+      distraction of pupils, and a narrow specialization fatal to the very idea
+      of education. But these bad results usually lead to more of the same sort
+      of thing as a remedy. When it is perceived that after all the requirements
+      of a full life experience are not met, the deficiency is not laid to the
+      isolation and narrowness of the teaching of the existing subjects, and
+      this recognition made the basis of reorganization of the system. No, the
+      lack is something to be made up for by the introduction of still another
+      study, or, if necessary, another kind of school. And as a rule those who
+      object to the resulting overcrowding and consequent superficiality and
+      distraction usually also have recourse to a merely quantitative criterion:
+      the remedy is to cut off a great many studies as fads and frills, and
+      return to the good old curriculum of the three R's in elementary education
+      and the equally good and equally old-fashioned curriculum of the classics
+      and mathematics in higher education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation has, of course, its historic explanation. Various epochs of
+      the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. Each
+      of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit,
+      like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way into
+      educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of
+      study, distinct types of schools. With the rapid change of political,
+      scientific, and economic interests in the last century, provision had to
+      be made for new values. Though the older courses resisted, they have had
+      at least in this country to retire their pretensions to a monopoly. They
+      have not, however, been reorganized in content and aim; they have only
+      been reduced in amount. The new studies, representing the new interests,
+      have not been used to transform the method and aim of all instruction;
+      they have been injected and added on. The result is a conglomerate, the
+      cement of which consists in the mechanics of the school program or time
+      table. Thence arises the scheme of values and standards of value which we
+      have mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This situation in education represents the divisions and separations which
+      obtain in social life. The variety of interests which should mark any rich
+      and balanced experience have been torn asunder and deposited in separate
+      institutions with diverse and independent purposes and methods. Business
+      is business, science is science, art is art, politics is politics, social
+      intercourse is social intercourse, morals is morals, recreation is
+      recreation, and so on. Each possesses a separate and independent province
+      with its own peculiar aims and ways of proceeding. Each contributes to the
+      others only externally and accidentally. All of them together make up the
+      whole of life by just apposition and addition. What does one expect from
+      business save that it should furnish money, to be used in turn for making
+      more money and for support of self and family, for buying books and
+      pictures, tickets to concerts which may afford culture, and for paying
+      taxes, charitable gifts and other things of social and ethical value? How
+      unreasonable to expect that the pursuit of business should be itself a
+      culture of the imagination, in breadth and refinement; that it should
+      directly, and not through the money which it supplies, have social service
+      for its animating principle and be conducted as an enterprise in behalf of
+      social organization! The same thing is to be said, mutatis mutandis, of
+      the pursuit of art or science or politics or religion. Each has become
+      specialized not merely in its appliances and its demands upon time, but in
+      its aim and animating spirit. Unconsciously, our course of studies and our
+      theories of the educational values of studies reflect this division of
+      interests. The point at issue in a theory of educational value is then the
+      unity or integrity of experience. How shall it be full and varied without
+      losing unity of spirit? How shall it be one and yet not narrow and
+      monotonous in its unity? Ultimately, the question of values and a standard
+      of values is the moral question of the organization of the interests of
+      life. Educationally, the question concerns that organization of schools,
+      materials, and methods which will operate to achieve breadth and richness
+      of experience. How shall we secure breadth of outlook without sacrificing
+      efficiency of execution? How shall we secure the diversity of interests,
+      without paying the price of isolation? How shall the individual be
+      rendered executive in his intelligence instead of at the cost of his
+      intelligence? How shall art, science, and politics reinforce one another
+      in an enriched temper of mind instead of constituting ends pursued at one
+      another's expense? How can the interests of life and the studies which
+      enforce them enrich the common experience of men instead of dividing men
+      from one another? With the questions of reorganization thus suggested, we
+      shall be concerned in the concluding chapters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM18" id="link2H_SUMM18">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      have been covered in the prior discussion of aims and interests. But since
+      educational values are generally discussed in connection with the claims
+      of the various studies of the curriculum, the consideration of aim and
+      interest is here resumed from the point of view of special studies. The
+      term "value" has two quite different meanings. On the one hand, it denotes
+      the attitude of prizing a thing finding it worth while, for its own sake,
+      or intrinsically. This is a name for a full or complete experience. To
+      value in this sense is to appreciate. But to value also means a
+      distinctively intellectual act&mdash;an operation of comparing and judging&mdash;to
+      valuate. This occurs when direct full experience is lacking, and the
+      question arises which of the various possibilities of a situation is to be
+      preferred in order to reach a full realization, or vital experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We must not, however, divide the studies of the curriculum into the
+      appreciative, those concerned with intrinsic value, and the instrumental,
+      concerned with those which are of value or ends beyond themselves. The
+      formation of proper standards in any subject depends upon a realization of
+      the contribution which it makes to the immediate significance of
+      experience, upon a direct appreciation. Literature and the fine arts are
+      of peculiar value because they represent appreciation at its best&mdash;a
+      heightened realization of meaning through selection and concentration. But
+      every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for
+      the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Contribution to immediate intrinsic values in all their variety in
+      experience is the only criterion for determining the worth of instrumental
+      and derived values in studies. The tendency to assign separate values to
+      each study and to regard the curriculum in its entirety as a kind of
+      composite made by the aggregation of segregated values is a result of the
+      isolation of social groups and classes. Hence it is the business of
+      education in a democratic social group to struggle against this isolation
+      in order that the various interests may reinforce and play into one
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Origin of the Opposition.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The isolation of aims and values which we have been considering leads to
+      opposition between them. Probably the most deep-seated antithesis which
+      has shown itself in educational history is that between education in
+      preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure. The bare
+      terms "useful labor" and "leisure" confirm the statement already made that
+      the segregation and conflict of values are not self-inclosed, but reflect
+      a division within social life. Were the two functions of gaining a
+      livelihood by work and enjoying in a cultivated way the opportunities of
+      leisure, distributed equally among the different members of a community,
+      it would not occur to any one that there was any conflict of educational
+      agencies and aims involved. It would be self-evident that the question was
+      how education could contribute most effectively to both. And while it
+      might be found that some materials of instruction chiefly accomplished one
+      result and other subject matter the other, it would be evident that care
+      must be taken to secure as much overlapping as conditions permit; that is,
+      the education which had leisure more directly in view should indirectly
+      reinforce as much as possible the efficiency and the enjoyment of work,
+      while that aiming at the latter should produce habits of emotion and
+      intellect which would procure a worthy cultivation of leisure. These
+      general considerations are amply borne out by the historical development
+      of educational philosophy. The separation of liberal education from
+      professional and industrial education goes back to the time of the Greeks,
+      and was formulated expressly on the basis of a division of classes into
+      those who had to labor for a living and those who were relieved from this
+      necessity. The conception that liberal education, adapted to men in the
+      latter class, is intrinsically higher than the servile training given to
+      the latter class reflected the fact that one class was free and the other
+      servile in its social status. The latter class labored not only for its
+      own subsistence, but also for the means which enabled the superior class
+      to live without personally engaging in occupations taking almost all the
+      time and not of a nature to engage or reward intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That a certain amount of labor must be engaged in goes without saying.
+      Human beings have to live and it requires work to supply the resources of
+      life. Even if we insist that the interests connected with getting a living
+      are only material and hence intrinsically lower than those connected with
+      enjoyment of time released from labor, and even if it were admitted that
+      there is something engrossing and insubordinate in material interests
+      which leads them to strive to usurp the place belonging to the higher
+      ideal interests, this would not&mdash;barring the fact of socially divided
+      classes&mdash;lead to neglect of the kind of education which trains men
+      for the useful pursuits. It would rather lead to scrupulous care for them,
+      so that men were trained to be efficient in them and yet to keep them in
+      their place; education would see to it that we avoided the evil results
+      which flow from their being allowed to flourish in obscure purlieus of
+      neglect. Only when a division of these interests coincides with a division
+      of an inferior and a superior social class will preparation for useful
+      work be looked down upon with contempt as an unworthy thing: a fact which
+      prepares one for the conclusion that the rigid identification of work with
+      material interests, and leisure with ideal interests is itself a social
+      product. The educational formulations of the social situation made over
+      two thousand years ago have been so influential and give such a clear and
+      logical recognition of the implications of the division into laboring and
+      leisure classes, that they deserve especial note. According to them, man
+      occupies the highest place in the scheme of animate existence. In part, he
+      shares the constitution and functions of plants and animals&mdash;nutritive,
+      reproductive, motor or practical. The distinctively human function is
+      reason existing for the sake of beholding the spectacle of the universe.
+      Hence the truly human end is the fullest possible of this distinctive
+      human prerogative. The life of observation, meditation, cogitation, and
+      speculation pursued as an end in itself is the proper life of man. From
+      reason moreover proceeds the proper control of the lower elements of human
+      nature&mdash;the appetites and the active, motor, impulses. In themselves
+      greedy, insubordinate, lovers of excess, aiming only at their own satiety,
+      they observe moderation&mdash;the law of the mean&mdash;and serve
+      desirable ends as they are subjected to the rule of reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the situation as an affair of theoretical psychology and as most
+      adequately stated by Aristotle. But this state of things is reflected in
+      the constitution of classes of men and hence in the organization of
+      society. Only in a comparatively small number is the function of reason
+      capable of operating as a law of life. In the mass of people, vegetative
+      and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble
+      and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and
+      passion. Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason
+      constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they are
+      means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves, although
+      unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain discretion
+      in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by nature, and not
+      merely by social convention, there are those who are slaves&mdash;that is,
+      means for the ends of others. 1 The great body of artisans are in one
+      important respect worse off than even slaves. Like the latter they are
+      given up to the service of ends external to themselves; but since they do
+      not enjoy the intimate association with the free superior class
+      experienced by domestic slaves they remain on a lower plane of excellence.
+      Moreover, women are classed with slaves and craftsmen as factors among the
+      animate instrumentalities of production and reproduction of the means for
+      a free or rational life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Individually and collectively there is a gulf between merely living and
+      living worthily. In order that one may live worthily he must first live,
+      and so with collective society. The time and energy spent upon mere life,
+      upon the gaining of subsistence, detracts from that available for
+      activities that have an inherent rational meaning; they also unfit for the
+      latter. Means are menial, the serviceable is servile. The true life is
+      possible only in the degree in which the physical necessities are had
+      without effort and without attention. Hence slaves, artisans, and women
+      are employed in furnishing the means of subsistence in order that others,
+      those adequately equipped with intelligence, may live the life of
+      leisurely concern with things intrinsically worth while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To these two modes of occupation, with their distinction of servile and
+      free activities (or "arts") correspond two types of education: the base or
+      mechanical and the liberal or intellectual. Some persons are trained by
+      suitable practical exercises for capacity in doing things, for ability to
+      use the mechanical tools involved in turning out physical commodities and
+      rendering personal service. This training is a mere matter of habituation
+      and technical skill; it operates through repetition and assiduity in
+      application, not through awakening and nurturing thought. Liberal
+      education aims to train intelligence for its proper office: to know. The
+      less this knowledge has to do with practical affairs, with making or
+      producing, the more adequately it engages intelligence. So consistently
+      does Aristotle draw the line between menial and liberal education that he
+      puts what are now called the "fine" arts, music, painting, sculpture, in
+      the same class with menial arts so far as their practice is concerned.
+      They involve physical agencies, assiduity of practice, and external
+      results. In discussing, for example, education in music he raises the
+      question how far the young should be practiced in the playing of
+      instruments. His answer is that such practice and proficiency may be
+      tolerated as conduce to appreciation; that is, to understanding and
+      enjoyment of music when played by slaves or professionals. When
+      professional power is aimed at, music sinks from the liberal to the
+      professional level. One might then as well teach cooking, says Aristotle.
+      Even a liberal concern with the works of fine art depends upon the
+      existence of a hireling class of practitioners who have subordinated the
+      development of their own personality to attaining skill in mechanical
+      execution. The higher the activity the more purely mental is it; the less
+      does it have to do with physical things or with the body. The more purely
+      mental it is, the more independent or self-sufficing is it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These last words remind us that Aristotle again makes a distinction of
+      superior and inferior even within those living the life of reason. For
+      there is a distinction in ends and in free action, according as one's life
+      is merely accompanied by reason or as it makes reason its own medium. That
+      is to say, the free citizen who devotes himself to the public life of his
+      community, sharing in the management of its affairs and winning personal
+      honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied by reason. But the
+      thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific inquiry and philosophic
+      speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not simply by *. Even the
+      activity of the citizen in his civic relations, in other words, retains
+      some of the taint of practice, of external or merely instrumental doing.
+      This infection is shown by the fact that civic activity and civic
+      excellence need the help of others; one cannot engage in public life all
+      by himself. But all needs, all desires imply, in the philosophy of
+      Aristotle, a material factor; they involve lack, privation; they are
+      dependent upon something beyond themselves for completion. A purely
+      intellectual life, however, one carries on by himself, in himself; such
+      assistance as he may derive from others is accidental, rather than
+      intrinsic. In knowing, in the life of theory, reason finds its own full
+      manifestation; knowing for the sake of knowing irrespective of any
+      application is alone independent, or self-sufficing. Hence only the
+      education that makes for power to know as an end in itself, without
+      reference to the practice of even civic duties, is truly liberal or free.
+      2. The Present Situation. If the Aristotelian conception represented just
+      Aristotle's personal view, it would be a more or less interesting
+      historical curiosity. It could be dismissed as an illustration of the lack
+      of sympathy or the amount of academic pedantry which may coexist with
+      extraordinary intellectual gifts. But Aristotle simply described without
+      confusion and without that insincerity always attendant upon mental
+      confusion, the life that was before him. That the actual social situation
+      has greatly changed since his day there is no need to say. But in spite of
+      these changes, in spite of the abolition of legal serfdom, and the spread
+      of democracy, with the extension of science and of general education (in
+      books, newspapers, travel, and general intercourse as well as in schools),
+      there remains enough of a cleavage of society into a learned and an
+      unlearned class, a leisure and a laboring class, to make his point of view
+      a most enlightening one from which to criticize the separation between
+      culture and utility in present education. Behind the intellectual and
+      abstract distinction as it figures in pedagogical discussion, there looms
+      a social distinction between those whose pursuits involve a minimum of
+      self-directive thought and aesthetic appreciation, and those who are
+      concerned more directly with things of the intelligence and with the
+      control of the activities of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aristotle was certainly permanently right when he said that "any
+      occupation or art or study deserves to be called mechanical if it renders
+      the body or soul or intellect of free persons unfit for the exercise and
+      practice of excellence." The force of the statement is almost infinitely
+      increased when we hold, as we nominally do at present, that all persons,
+      instead of a comparatively few, are free. For when the mass of men and all
+      women were regarded as unfree by the very nature of their bodies and
+      minds, there was neither intellectual confusion nor moral hypocrisy in
+      giving them only the training which fitted them for mechanical skill,
+      irrespective of its ulterior effect upon their capacity to share in a
+      worthy life. He was permanently right also when he went on to say that
+      "all mercenary employments as well as those which degrade the condition of
+      the body are mechanical, since they deprive the intellect of leisure and
+      dignity,"&mdash;permanently right, that is, if gainful pursuits as matter
+      of fact deprive the intellect of the conditions of its exercise and so of
+      its dignity. If his statements are false, it is because they identify a
+      phase of social custom with a natural necessity. But a different view of
+      the relations of mind and matter, mind and body, intelligence and social
+      service, is better than Aristotle's conception only if it helps render the
+      old idea obsolete in fact&mdash;in the actual conduct of life and
+      education. Aristotle was permanently right in assuming the inferiority and
+      subordination of mere skill in performance and mere accumulation of
+      external products to understanding, sympathy of appreciation, and the free
+      play of ideas. If there was an error, it lay in assuming the necessary
+      separation of the two: in supposing that there is a natural divorce
+      between efficiency in producing commodities and rendering service, and
+      self-directive thought; between significant knowledge and practical
+      achievement. We hardly better matters if we just correct his theoretical
+      misapprehension, and tolerate the social state of affairs which generated
+      and sanctioned his conception. We lose rather than gain in change from
+      serfdom to free citizenship if the most prized result of the change is
+      simply an increase in the mechanical efficiency of the human tools of
+      production. So we lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence
+      as an organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that an
+      unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage directly in
+      turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence which controls to be the
+      exclusive possession of remote scientists and captains of industry. We are
+      in a position honestly to criticize the division of life into separate
+      functions and of society into separate classes only so far as we are free
+      from responsibility for perpetuating the educational practices which train
+      the many for pursuits involving mere skill in production, and the few for
+      a knowledge that is an ornament and a cultural embellishment. In short,
+      ability to transcend the Greek philosophy of life and education is not
+      secured by a mere shifting about of the theoretical symbols meaning free,
+      rational, and worthy. It is not secured by a change of sentiment regarding
+      the dignity of labor, and the superiority of a life of service to that of
+      an aloof self-sufficing independence. Important as these theoretical and
+      emotional changes are, their importance consists in their being turned to
+      account in the development of a truly democratic society, a society in
+      which all share in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure. It is
+      not a mere change in the concepts of culture&mdash;or a liberal mind&mdash;and
+      social service which requires an educational reorganization; but the
+      educational transformation is needed to give full and explicit effect to
+      the changes implied in social life. The increased political and economic
+      emancipation of the "masses" has shown itself in education; it has
+      effected the development of a common school system of education, public
+      and free. It has destroyed the idea that learning is properly a monopoly
+      of the few who are predestined by nature to govern social affairs. But the
+      revolution is still incomplete. The idea still prevails that a truly
+      cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly at
+      least, with industrial affairs, and that the education which is fit for
+      the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense which
+      opposes useful and practical to nurture of appreciation and liberation of
+      thought. As a consequence, our actual system is an inconsistent mixture.
+      Certain studies and methods are retained on the supposition that they have
+      the sanction of peculiar liberality, the chief content of the term liberal
+      being uselessness for practical ends. This aspect is chiefly visible in
+      what is termed the higher education&mdash;that of the college and of
+      preparation for it. But is has filtered through into elementary education
+      and largely controls its processes and aims. But, on the other hand,
+      certain concessions have been made to the masses who must engage in
+      getting a livelihood and to the increased role of economic activities in
+      modern life. These concessions are exhibited in special schools and
+      courses for the professions, for engineering, for manual training and
+      commerce, in vocational and prevocational courses; and in the spirit in
+      which certain elementary subjects, like the three R's, are taught. The
+      result is a system in which both "cultural" and "utilitarian" subjects
+      exist in an inorganic composite where the former are not by dominant
+      purpose socially serviceable and the latter not liberative of imagination
+      or thinking power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the inherited situation, there is a curious intermingling, in even the
+      same study, of concession to usefulness and a survival of traits once
+      exclusively attributed to preparation for leisure. The "utility" element
+      is found in the motives assigned for the study, the "liberal" element in
+      methods of teaching. The outcome of the mixture is perhaps less
+      satisfactory than if either principle were adhered to in its purity. The
+      motive popularly assigned for making the studies of the first four or five
+      years consist almost entirely of reading, spelling, writing, and
+      arithmetic, is, for example, that ability to read, write, and figure
+      accurately is indispensable to getting ahead. These studies are treated as
+      mere instruments for entering upon a gainful employment or of later
+      progress in the pursuit of learning, according as pupils do not or do
+      remain in school. This attitude is reflected in the emphasis put upon
+      drill and practice for the sake of gaining automatic skill. If we turn to
+      Greek schooling, we find that from the earliest years the acquisition of
+      skill was subordinated as much as possible to acquisition of literary
+      content possessed of aesthetic and moral significance. Not getting a tool
+      for subsequent use but present subject matter was the emphasized thing.
+      Nevertheless the isolation of these studies from practical application,
+      their reduction to purely symbolic devices, represents a survival of the
+      idea of a liberal training divorced from utility. A thorough adoption of
+      the idea of utility would have led to instruction which tied up the
+      studies to situations in which they were directly needed and where they
+      were rendered immediately and not remotely helpful. It would be hard to
+      find a subject in the curriculum within which there are not found evil
+      results of a compromise between the two opposed ideals. Natural science is
+      recommended on the ground of its practical utility, but is taught as a
+      special accomplishment in removal from application. On the other hand,
+      music and literature are theoretically justified on the ground of their
+      culture value and are then taught with chief emphasis upon forming
+      technical modes of skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we had less compromise and resulting confusion, if we analyzed more
+      carefully the respective meanings of culture and utility, we might find it
+      easier to construct a course of study which should be useful and liberal
+      at the same time. Only superstition makes us believe that the two are
+      necessarily hostile so that a subject is illiberal because it is useful
+      and cultural because it is useless. It will generally be found that
+      instruction which, in aiming at utilitarian results, sacrifices the
+      development of imagination, the refining of taste and the deepening of
+      intellectual insight&mdash;surely cultural values&mdash;also in the same
+      degree renders what is learned limited in its use. Not that it makes it
+      wholly unavailable but that its applicability is restricted to routine
+      activities carried on under the supervision of others. Narrow modes of
+      skill cannot be made useful beyond themselves; any mode of skill which is
+      achieved with deepening of knowledge and perfecting of judgment is readily
+      put to use in new situations and is under personal control. It was not the
+      bare fact of social and economic utility which made certain activities
+      seem servile to the Greeks but the fact that the activities directly
+      connected with getting a livelihood were not, in their days, the
+      expression of a trained intelligence nor carried on because of a personal
+      appreciation of their meaning. So far as farming and the trades were
+      rule-of-thumb occupations and so far as they were engaged in for results
+      external to the minds of agricultural laborers and mechanics, they were
+      illiberal&mdash;but only so far. The intellectual and social context has
+      now changed. The elements in industry due to mere custom and routine have
+      become subordinate in most economic callings to elements derived from
+      scientific inquiry. The most important occupations of today represent and
+      depend upon applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The area of the
+      human world influenced by economic production and influencing consumption
+      has been so indefinitely widened that geographical and political
+      considerations of an almost infinitely wide scope enter in. It was natural
+      for Plato to deprecate the learning of geometry and arithmetic for
+      practical ends, because as matter of fact the practical uses to which they
+      were put were few, lacking in content and mostly mercenary in quality. But
+      as their social uses have increased and enlarged, their liberalizing or
+      "intellectual" value and their practical value approach the same limit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doubtless the factor which chiefly prevents our full recognition and
+      employment of this identification is the conditions under which so much
+      work is still carried on. The invention of machines has extended the
+      amount of leisure which is possible even while one is at work. It is a
+      commonplace that the mastery of skill in the form of established habits
+      frees the mind for a higher order of thinking. Something of the same kind
+      is true of the introduction of mechanically automatic operations in
+      industry. They may release the mind for thought upon other topics. But
+      when we confine the education of those who work with their hands to a few
+      years of schooling devoted for the most part to acquiring the use of
+      rudimentary symbols at the expense of training in science, literature, and
+      history, we fail to prepare the minds of workers to take advantage of this
+      opportunity. More fundamental is the fact that the great majority of
+      workers have no insight into the social aims of their pursuits and no
+      direct personal interest in them. The results actually achieved are not
+      the ends of their actions, but only of their employers. They do what they
+      do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of the wage earned. It
+      is this fact which makes the action illiberal, and which will make any
+      education designed simply to give skill in such undertakings illiberal and
+      immoral. The activity is not free because not freely participated in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, there is already an opportunity for an education which,
+      keeping in mind the larger features of work, will reconcile liberal
+      nurture with training in social serviceableness, with ability to share
+      efficiently and happily in occupations which are productive. And such an
+      education will of itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing
+      economic situation. In the degree in which men have an active concern in
+      the ends that control their activity, their activity becomes free or
+      voluntary and loses its externally enforced and servile quality, even
+      though the physical aspect of behavior remain the same. In what is termed
+      politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this direct
+      participation in control: in the economic region, control remains external
+      and autocratic. Hence the split between inner mental action and outer
+      physical action of which the traditional distinction between the liberal
+      and the utilitarian is the reflex. An education which should unify the
+      disposition of the members of society would do much to unify society
+      itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM19" id="link2H_SUMM19">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Of the segregations of educational values discussed in the
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      last chapter, that between culture and utility is probably the most
+      fundamental. While the distinction is often thought to be intrinsic and
+      absolute, it is really historical and social. It originated, so far as
+      conscious formulation is concerned, in Greece, and was based upon the fact
+      that the truly human life was lived only by a few who subsisted upon the
+      results of the labor of others. This fact affected the psychological
+      doctrine of the relation of intelligence and desire, theory and practice.
+      It was embodied in a political theory of a permanent division of human
+      beings into those capable of a life of reason and hence having their own
+      ends, and those capable only of desire and work, and needing to have their
+      ends provided by others. The two distinctions, psychological and
+      political, translated into educational terms, effected a division between
+      a liberal education, having to do with the self-sufficing life of leisure
+      devoted to knowing for its own sake, and a useful, practical training for
+      mechanical occupations, devoid of intellectual and aesthetic content.
+      While the present situation is radically diverse in theory and much
+      changed in fact, the factors of the older historic situation still persist
+      sufficiently to maintain the educational distinction, along with
+      compromises which often reduce the efficacy of the educational measures.
+      The problem of education in a democratic society is to do away with the
+      dualism and to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide
+      of free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting
+      responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 Aristotle does not hold that the class of actual slaves and of natural
+      slaves necessarily coincide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge. As livelihood and
+      leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice, intelligence and
+      execution, knowledge and activity. The latter set of oppositions doubtless
+      springs from the same social conditions which produce the former conflict;
+      but certain definite problems of education connected with them make it
+      desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the relationship and alleged
+      separation of knowing and doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
+      practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has a
+      long history. The history so far as conscious statement is concerned takes
+      us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated by Plato
+      and Aristotle. Much as these thinkers differed in many respects, they
+      agreed in identifying experience with purely practical concerns; and hence
+      with material interests as to its purpose and with the body as to its
+      organ. Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its own sake free from
+      practical reference, and found its source and organ in a purely immaterial
+      mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal interests. Again, experience
+      always involved lack, need, desire; it was never self-sufficing. Rational
+      knowing on the other hand, was complete and comprehensive within itself.
+      Hence the practical life was in a condition of perpetual flux, while
+      intellectual knowledge concerned eternal truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that Athenian philosophy
+      began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of knowledge and
+      conduct. In a search for something to replace them, it hit upon reason as
+      the only adequate guide of belief and activity. Since custom and tradition
+      were identified with experience, it followed at once that reason was
+      superior to experience. Moreover, experience, not content with its proper
+      position of subordination, was the great foe to the acknowledgment of the
+      authority of reason. Since custom and traditionary beliefs held men in
+      bondage, the struggle of reason for its legitimate supremacy could be won
+      only by showing the inherently unstable and inadequate nature of
+      experience. The statement of Plato that philosophers should be kings may
+      best be understood as a statement that rational intelligence and not
+      habit, appetite, impulse, and emotion should regulate human affairs. The
+      former secures unity, order, and law; the latter signify multiplicity and
+      discord, irrational fluctuations from one estate to another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grounds for the identification of experience with the unsatisfactory
+      condition of things, the state of affairs represented by rule of mere
+      custom, are not far to seek. Increasing trade and travel, colonizations,
+      migrations and wars, had broadened the intellectual horizon. The customs
+      and beliefs of different communities were found to diverge sharply from
+      one another. Civil disturbance had become a custom in Athens; the fortunes
+      of the city seemed given over to strife of factions. The increase of
+      leisure coinciding with the broadening of the horizon had brought into ken
+      many new facts of nature and had stimulated curiosity and speculation. The
+      situation tended to raise the question as to the existence of anything
+      constant and universal in the realm of nature and society. Reason was the
+      faculty by which the universal principle and essence is apprehended; while
+      the senses were the organs of perceiving change,&mdash;the unstable and
+      the diverse as against the permanent and uniform. The results of the work
+      of the senses, preserved in memory and imagination, and applied in the
+      skill given by habit, constituted experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Experience at its best is thus represented in the various handicrafts&mdash;the
+      arts of peace and war. The cobbler, the flute player, the soldier, have
+      undergone the discipline of experience to acquire the skill they have.
+      This means that the bodily organs, particularly the senses, have had
+      repeated contact with things and that the result of these contacts has
+      been preserved and consolidated till ability in foresight and in practice
+      had been secured. Such was the essential meaning of the term "empirical."
+      It suggested a knowledge and an ability not based upon insight into
+      principles, but expressing the result of a large number of separate
+      trials. It expressed the idea now conveyed by "method of trial and error,"
+      with especial emphasis upon the more or less accidental character of the
+      trials. So far as ability of control, of management, was concerned, it
+      amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure, to routine. If new circumstances
+      resembled the past, it might work well enough; in the degree in which they
+      deviated, failure was likely. Even to-day to speak of a physician as an
+      empiricist is to imply that he lacks scientific training, and that he is
+      proceeding simply on the basis of what he happens to have got out of the
+      chance medley of his past practice. Just because of the lack of science or
+      reason in "experience" it is hard to keep it at its poor best. The empiric
+      easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge
+      begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he
+      begins to pretend&mdash;to make claims for which there is no
+      justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others&mdash;to
+      "bluff." Moreover, he assumes that because he has learned one thing, he
+      knows others&mdash;as the history of Athens showed that the common
+      craftsmen thought they could manage household affairs, education, and
+      politics, because they had learned to do the specific things of their
+      trades. Experience is always hovering, then, on the edge of pretense, of
+      sham, of seeming, and appearance, in distinction from the reality upon
+      which reason lays hold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this state of
+      affairs. The senses are connected with the appetites, with wants and
+      desires. They lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation
+      which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of wants
+      and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the life of the
+      body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life. Experience thus
+      has a definitely material character; it has to do with physical things in
+      relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or science, lays hold of the
+      immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is something morally dangerous
+      about experience, as such words as sensual, carnal, material, worldly,
+      interests suggest; while pure reason and spirit connote something morally
+      praiseworthy. Moreover, ineradicable connection with the changing, the
+      inexplicably shifting, and with the manifold, the diverse, clings to
+      experience. Its material is inherently variable and untrustworthy. It is
+      anarchic, because unstable. The man who trusts to experience does not know
+      what he depends upon, since it changes from person to person, from day to
+      day, to say nothing of from country to country. Its connection with the
+      "many," with various particulars, has the same effect, and also carries
+      conflict in its train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. Out of
+      experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts within the
+      individual and between individuals. From experience no standard of belief
+      can issue, because it is the very nature of experience to instigate all
+      kinds of contrary beliefs, as varieties of local custom proved. Its
+      logical outcome is that anything is good and true to the particular
+      individual which his experience leads him to believe true and good at a
+      particular time and place. Finally practice falls of necessity within
+      experience. Doing proceeds from needs and aims at change. To produce or to
+      make is to alter something; to consume is to alter. All the obnoxious
+      characters of change and diversity thus attach themselves to doing while
+      knowing is as permanent as its object. To know, to grasp a thing
+      intellectually or theoretically, is to be out of the region of
+      vicissitude, chance, and diversity. Truth has no lack; it is untouched by
+      the perturbations of the world of sense. It deals with the eternal and the
+      universal. And the world of experience can be brought under control, can
+      be steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law of reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions persisted
+      in full technical definiteness. But they all of them profoundly influenced
+      men's subsequent thinking and their ideas about education. The contempt
+      for physical as compared with mathematical and logical science, for the
+      senses and sense observation; the feeling that knowledge is high and
+      worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal symbols instead of with
+      the concrete; the scorn of particulars except as they are deductively
+      brought under a universal; the disregard for the body; the depreciation of
+      arts and crafts as intellectual instrumentalities, all sought shelter and
+      found sanction under this estimate of the respective values of experience
+      and reason&mdash;or, what came to the same thing, of the practical and the
+      intellectual. Medieval philosophy continued and reinforced the tradition.
+      To know reality meant to be in relation to the supreme reality, or God,
+      and to enjoy the eternal bliss of that relation. Contemplation of supreme
+      reality was the ultimate end of man to which action is subordinate.
+      Experience had to do with mundane, profane, and secular affairs,
+      practically necessary indeed, but of little import in comparison with
+      supernatural objects of knowledge. When we add to this motive the force
+      derived from the literary character of the Roman education and the Greek
+      philosophic tradition, and conjoin to them the preference for studies
+      which obviously demarcated the aristocratic class from the lower classes,
+      we can readily understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent
+      preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply in
+      educational philosophies but in the higher schools. 2. The Modern Theory
+      of Experience and Knowledge. As we shall see later, the development of
+      experimentation as a method of knowledge makes possible and necessitates a
+      radical transformation of the view just set forth. But before coming to
+      that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge developed in
+      the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, it presents us with
+      an almost complete reversal of the classic doctrine of the relations of
+      experience and reason. To Plato experience meant habituation, or the
+      conservation of the net product of a lot of past chance trials. Reason
+      meant the principle of reform, of progress, of increase of control.
+      Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking through the limitations of
+      custom and getting at things as they really were. To the modern reformers,
+      the situation was the other way around. Reason, universal principles, a
+      priori notions, meant either blank forms which had to be filled in by
+      experience, by sense observations, in order to get significance and
+      validity; or else were mere indurated prejudices, dogmas imposed by
+      authority, which masqueraded and found protection under august names. The
+      great need was to break way from captivity to conceptions which, as Bacon
+      put it, "anticipated nature" and imposed merely human opinions upon her,
+      and to resort to experience to find out what nature was like. Appeal to
+      experience marked the breach with authority. It meant openness to new
+      impressions; eagerness in discovery and invention instead of absorption in
+      tabulating and systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of
+      the relations they sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the
+      mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over them
+      by preconceived ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it had
+      borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing and being
+      done to, and became a name for something intellectual and cognitive. It
+      meant the apprehension of material which should ballast and check the
+      exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic empiricist and by his
+      opponent, experience has been looked upon just as a way of knowing. The
+      only question was how good a way it is. The result was an even greater
+      "intellectualism" than is found in ancient philosophy, if that word be
+      used to designate an emphatic and almost exclusive interest in knowledge
+      in its isolation. Practice was not so much subordinated to knowledge as
+      treated as a kind of tag-end or aftermath of knowledge. The educational
+      result was only to confirm the exclusion of active pursuits from the
+      school, save as they might be brought in for purely utilitarian ends&mdash;the
+      acquisition by drill of certain habits. In the second place, the interest
+      in experience as a means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to
+      looking at the mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the
+      more truly objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a
+      hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to
+      vitiate true knowledge&mdash;to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a
+      maximum of receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by
+      objects were generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a
+      doctrine of sensationalism&mdash;that is to say, a doctrine which
+      identified knowledge with the reception and association of sensory
+      impressions. In John Locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we
+      find this sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental
+      faculties, like discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction,
+      and generalization which work up the material of sense into definite and
+      organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own account, such
+      as the fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics. (See ante, p.
+      61.) But some of his successors, especially in France in the latter part
+      of the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the limit; they
+      regarded discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations made in us by the
+      conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held that the mind is a
+      blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing engraved on it at birth
+      (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of ideas were concerned, but had
+      endowed it with activities to be exercised upon the material received. His
+      French successors razed away the powers and derived them also from
+      impressions received.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new interest in
+      education as method of social reform. (See ante, p. 93.) The emptier the
+      mind to begin with, the more it may be made anything we wish by bringing
+      the right influences to bear upon it. Thus Helvetius, perhaps the most
+      extreme and consistent sensationalist, proclaimed that education could do
+      anything&mdash;that it was omnipotent. Within the sphere of school
+      instruction, empiricism found its directly beneficial office in protesting
+      against mere book learning. If knowledge comes from the impressions made
+      upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure knowledge without
+      the use of objects which impress the mind. Words, all kinds of linguistic
+      symbols, in the lack of prior presentations of objects with which they may
+      be associated, convey nothing but sensations of their own shape and color&mdash;certainly
+      not a very instructive kind of knowledge. Sensationalism was an extremely
+      handy weapon with which to combat doctrines and opinions resting wholly
+      upon tradition and authority. With respect to all of them, it set up a
+      test: Where are the real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are
+      received? If such objects could not be produced, ideas were explained as
+      the result of false associations and combinations. Empiricism also
+      insisted upon a first-hand element. The impression must be made upon me,
+      upon my mind. The further we get away from this direct, first-hand source
+      of knowledge, the more numerous the sources of error, and the vaguer the
+      resulting idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the positive
+      side. Of course, the value of natural objects and firsthand acquaintance
+      was not dependent upon the truth of the theory. Introduced into the
+      schools they would do their work, even if the sensational theory about the
+      way in which they did it was quite wrong. So far, there is nothing to
+      complain of. But the emphasis upon sensationalism also operated to
+      influence the way in which natural objects were employed, and to prevent
+      full good being got from them. "Object lessons" tended to isolate the mere
+      sense-activity and make it an end in itself. The more isolated the object,
+      the more isolated the sensory quality, the more distinct the
+      sense-impression as a unit of knowledge. The theory worked not only in the
+      direction of this mechanical isolation, which tended to reduce instruction
+      to a kind of physical gymnastic of the sense-organs (good like any
+      gymnastic of bodily organs, but not more so), but also to the neglect of
+      thinking. According to the theory there was no need of thinking in
+      connection with sense-observation; in fact, in strict theory such thinking
+      would be impossible till afterwards, for thinking consisted simply in
+      combining and separating sensory units which had been received without any
+      participation of judgment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education upon
+      a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least after
+      the early years of infancy. Its obvious deficiencies have caused it to be
+      resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge (that is to
+      say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and modes of
+      application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for lending greater
+      "interest" to barren symbols. There are at least three serious defects of
+      sensationalistic empiricism as an educational philosophy of knowledge. (a)
+      the historical value of the theory was critical; it was a dissolvent of
+      current beliefs about the world and political institutions. It was a
+      destructive organ of criticism of hard and fast dogmas. But the work of
+      education is constructive, not critical. It assumes not old beliefs to be
+      eliminated and revised, but the need of building up new experience into
+      intellectual habitudes as correct as possible from the start.
+      Sensationalism is highly unfitted for this constructive task. Mind,
+      understanding, denotes responsiveness to meanings (ante, p. 29), not
+      response to direct physical stimuli. And meaning exists only with
+      reference to a context, which is excluded by any scheme which identifies
+      knowledge with a combination of sense-impressions. The theory, so far as
+      educationally applied, led either to a magnification of mere physical
+      excitations or else to a mere heaping up of isolated objects and
+      qualities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it also
+      has the disadvantage of being limited in range. Direct acquaintance with
+      the natural surroundings of the home environment so as to give reality to
+      ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of the senses, and as a
+      means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one thing. As an end-all and
+      be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally restricted. In precisely
+      analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and counters may be helpful aids to a
+      realization of numerical relations, but when employed except as aids to
+      thought&mdash;the apprehension of meaning&mdash;they become an obstacle to
+      the growth of arithmetical understanding. They arrest growth on a low
+      plane, the plane of specific physical symbols. Just as the race developed
+      especial symbols as tools of calculation and mathematical reasonings,
+      because the use of the fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the
+      individual must progress from concrete to abstract symbols&mdash;that is,
+      symbols whose meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. And
+      undue absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers
+      this growth. (c) A thoroughly false psychology of mental development
+      underlay sensationalistic empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter of
+      activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with things.
+      What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received quality
+      impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of handling,
+      throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the consequent
+      effect of the object upon the direction of activities. (See ante, p. 140.)
+      Fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the ancient notion of
+      experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that the modern notion
+      of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The neglect of the
+      deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a fatal defect of
+      the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more uninteresting and
+      mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which ignores and as far as may
+      be excludes the natural tendency to learn about the qualities of objects
+      by the uses to which they are put through trying to do something with
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience
+      represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical
+      assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished a
+      satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. Its educational influence
+      was confined to injecting a new factor into the older curriculum, with
+      incidental modifications of the older studies and methods. It introduced
+      greater regard for observation of things directly and through pictures and
+      graphic descriptions, and it reduced the importance attached to verbal
+      symbolization. But its own scope was so meager that it required
+      supplementation by information concerning matters outside of
+      sense-perception and by matters which appealed more directly to thought.
+      Consequently it left unimpaired the scope of informational and abstract,
+      or "rationalistic" studies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Experience as Experimentation. It has already been intimated that
+      sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience justified
+      by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by modern
+      scientific procedure. With respect to the former, it omits the primary
+      position of active response which puts things to use and which learns
+      about them through discovering the consequences that result from use. It
+      would seem as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of the way an
+      infant gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the notion that he
+      is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated ready-made
+      qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it would be seen that the
+      infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling, reaching, etc., in
+      order to see what results follow upon motor response to a sensory
+      stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not isolated
+      qualities, but the behavior which may be expected from a thing, and the
+      changes in things and persons which an activity may be expected to
+      produce. In other words, what he learns are connections. Even such
+      qualities as red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated
+      and identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
+      consequences these activities effect. We learn what things are hard and
+      what are soft by finding out through active experimentation what they
+      respectively will do and what can be done and what cannot be done with
+      them. In like fashion, children learn about persons by finding out what
+      responsive activities these persons exact and what these persons will do
+      in reply to the children's activities. And the combination of what things
+      do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind) in modifying our
+      actions, furthering some of them and resisting and checking others, and
+      what we can do to them in producing new changes constitutes experience.
+      The methods of science by which the revolution in our knowledge of the
+      world dating from the seventeenth century, was brought about, teach the
+      same lesson. For these methods are nothing but experimentation carried out
+      under conditions of deliberate control. To the Greek, it seemed absurd
+      that such an activity as, say, the cobbler punching holes in leather, or
+      using wax and needle and thread, could give an adequate knowledge of the
+      world. It seemed almost axiomatic that for true knowledge we must have
+      recourse to concepts coming from a reason above experience. But the
+      introduction of the experimental method signified precisely that such
+      operations, carried on under conditions of control, are just the ways in
+      which fruitful ideas about nature are obtained and tested. In other words,
+      it is only needed to conduct such an operation as the pouring of an acid
+      on a metal for the purpose of getting knowledge instead of for the purpose
+      of getting a trade result, in order to lay hold of the principle upon
+      which the science of nature was henceforth to depend. Sense perceptions
+      were indeed indispensable, but there was less reliance upon sense
+      perceptions in their natural or customary form than in the older science.
+      They were no longer regarded as containing within themselves some "form"
+      or "species" of universal kind in a disguised mask of sense which could be
+      stripped off by rational thought. On the contrary, the first thing was to
+      alter and extend the data of sense perception: to act upon the given
+      objects of sense by the lens of the telescope and microscope, and by all
+      sorts of experimental devices. To accomplish this in a way which would
+      arouse new ideas (hypotheses, theories) required even more general ideas
+      (like those of mathematics) than were at the command of ancient science.
+      But these general conceptions were no longer taken to give knowledge in
+      themselves. They were implements for instituting, conducting, interpreting
+      experimental inquiries and formulating their results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and knowledge, a
+      philosophy which no longer puts experience in opposition to rational
+      knowledge and explanation. Experience is no longer a mere summarizing of
+      what has been done in a more or less chance way in the past; it is a
+      deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens
+      to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions (of
+      suggested meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the
+      suggestions. When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by
+      impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure
+      and method, it becomes reasonable&mdash;rational. When what we suffer from
+      things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance
+      circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior
+      purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant&mdash;enlightening
+      and instructive. The antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses the
+      support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and relative
+      justification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely practical and
+      purely intellectual studies is self-evident. The distinction is not
+      intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions, and upon conditions which can
+      be regulated. Practical activities may be intellectually narrow and
+      trivial; they will be so in so far as they are routine, carried on under
+      the dictates of authority, and having in view merely some external result.
+      But childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just the time when it
+      is possible to carry them on in a different spirit. It is inexpedient to
+      repeat the discussions of our previous chapters on thinking and on the
+      evolution of educative subject matter from childlike work and play to
+      logically organized subject matter. The discussions of this chapter and
+      the prior one should, however, give an added meaning to those results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (i) Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations
+      subsisting between a human being and his natural and social surroundings.
+      In some cases, the initiative in activity is on the side of the
+      environment; the human being undergoes or suffers certain checkings and
+      deflections of endeavors. In other cases, the behavior of surrounding
+      things and persons carries to a successful issue the active tendencies of
+      the individual, so that in the end what the individual undergoes are
+      consequences which he has himself tried to produce. In just the degree in
+      which connections are established between what happens to a person and
+      what he does in response, and between what he does to his environment and
+      what it does in response to him, his acts and the things about him acquire
+      meaning. He learns to understand both himself and the world of men and
+      things. Purposive education or schooling should present such an
+      environment that this interaction will effect acquisition of those
+      meanings which are so important that they become, in turn, instruments of
+      further learnings. (ante, Ch. XI.) As has been repeatedly pointed out,
+      activity out of school is carried on under conditions which have not been
+      deliberately adapted to promoting the function of understanding and
+      formation of effective intellectual dispositions. The results are vital
+      and genuine as far as they go, but they are limited by all kinds of
+      circumstances. Some powers are left quite undeveloped and undirected;
+      others get only occasional and whimsical stimulations; others are formed
+      into habits of a routine skill at the expense of aims and resourceful
+      initiative and inventiveness. It is not the business of the school to
+      transport youth from an environment of activity into one of cramped study
+      of the records of other men's learning; but to transport them from an
+      environment of relatively chance activities (accidental in the relation
+      they bear to insight and thought) into one of activities selected with
+      reference to guidance of learning. A slight inspection of the improved
+      methods which have already shown themselves effective in education will
+      reveal that they have laid hold, more or less consciously, upon the fact
+      that "intellectual" studies instead of being opposed to active pursuits
+      represent an intellectualizing of practical pursuits. It remains to grasp
+      the principle with greater firmness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) The changes which are taking place in the content of social life
+      tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which will
+      intellectualize the play and work of the school. When one bears in mind
+      the social environment of the Greeks and the people of the Middle Ages,
+      where such practical activities as could be successfully carried on were
+      mostly of a routine and external sort and even servile in nature, one is
+      not surprised that educators turned their backs upon them as unfitted to
+      cultivate intelligence. But now that even the occupations of the
+      household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as transportation and
+      intercourse are instinct with applied science, the case stands otherwise.
+      It is true that many of those who now engage in them are not aware of the
+      intellectual content upon which their personal actions depend. But this
+      fact only gives an added reason why schooling should use these pursuits so
+      as to enable the coming generation to acquire a comprehension now too
+      generally lacking, and thus enable persons to carry on their pursuits
+      intelligently instead of blindly. (iii) The most direct blow at the
+      traditional separation of doing and knowing and at the traditional
+      prestige of purely "intellectual" studies, however, has been given by the
+      progress of experimental science. If this progress has demonstrated
+      anything, it is that there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and
+      fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing. The analysis and
+      rearrangement of facts which is indispensable to the growth of knowledge
+      and power of explanation and right classification cannot be attained
+      purely mentally&mdash;just inside the head. Men have to do something to
+      the things when they wish to find out something; they have to alter
+      conditions. This is the lesson of the laboratory method, and the lesson
+      which all education has to learn. The laboratory is a discovery of the
+      condition under which labor may become intellectually fruitful and not
+      merely externally productive. If, in too many cases at present, it results
+      only in the acquisition of an additional mode of technical skill, that is
+      because it still remains too largely but an isolated resource, not
+      resorted to until pupils are mostly too old to get the full advantage of
+      it, and even then is surrounded by other studies where traditional methods
+      isolate intellect from activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM20" id="link2H_SUMM20">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The Greeks were induced to philosophize by the increasing
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      failure of their traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. Thus
+      they were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other
+      source of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational
+      standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs
+      which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat
+      opposition of reason and experience. The more the former was exalted, the
+      more the latter was depreciated. Since experience was identified with what
+      men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of life, doing
+      shared in the philosophic depreciation. This influence fell in with many
+      others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods and topics which
+      involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily activity. The
+      modern age began with a revolt against this point of view, with an appeal
+      to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely rational concepts on
+      the ground that they either needed to be ballasted by the results of
+      concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions of prejudice and
+      institutionalized class interest, calling themselves rational for
+      protection. But various circumstances led to considering experience as
+      pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic active and emotional
+      phases, and to identifying it with a passive reception of isolated
+      "sensations." Hence the education reform effected by the new theory was
+      confined mainly to doing away with some of the bookishness of prior
+      methods; it did not accomplish a consistent reorganization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the
+      experimental method in science makes another conception of experience
+      explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of the
+      ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive&mdash;a
+      matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. But the ancient
+      theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so as to
+      take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as to
+      result in securely tested knowledge. "Experience" then ceases to be
+      empirical and becomes experimental. Reason ceases to be a remote and ideal
+      faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made
+      fruitful in meaning. Educationally, this change denotes such a plan for
+      the studies and method of instruction as has been developed in the
+      previous chapters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and Humanism
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ALLUSION has already been made to the conflict of natural science with
+      literary studies for a place in the curriculum. The solution thus far
+      reached consists essentially in a somewhat mechanical compromise whereby
+      the field is divided between studies having nature and studies having man
+      as their theme. The situation thus presents us with another instance of
+      the external adjustment of educational values, and focuses attention upon
+      the philosophy of the connection of nature with human affairs. In general,
+      it may be said that the educational division finds a reflection in the
+      dualistic philosophies. Mind and the world are regarded as two independent
+      realms of existence having certain points of contact with each other. From
+      this point of view it is natural that each sphere of existence should have
+      its own separate group of studies connected with it; it is even natural
+      that the growth of scientific studies should be viewed with suspicion as
+      marking a tendency of materialistic philosophy to encroach upon the domain
+      of spirit. Any theory of education which contemplates a more unified
+      scheme of education than now exists is under the necessity of facing the
+      question of the relation of man to nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. The Historic Background of Humanistic Study. It is noteworthy that
+      classic Greek philosophy does not present the problem in its modern form.
+      Socrates indeed appears to have thought that science of nature was not
+      attainable and not very important. The chief thing to know is the nature
+      and end of man. Upon that knowledge hangs all that is of deep significance&mdash;all
+      moral and social achievement. Plato, however, makes right knowledge of man
+      and society depend upon knowledge of the essential features of nature. His
+      chief treatise, entitled the Republic, is at once a treatise on morals, on
+      social organization, and on the metaphysics and science of nature. Since
+      he accepts the Socratic doctrine that right achievement in the former
+      depends upon rational knowledge, he is compelled to discuss the nature of
+      knowledge. Since he accepts the idea that the ultimate object of knowledge
+      is the discovery of the good or end of man, and is discontented with the
+      Socratic conviction that all we know is our own ignorance, he connects the
+      discussion of the good of man with consideration of the essential good or
+      end of nature itself. To attempt to determine the end of man apart from a
+      knowledge of the ruling end which gives law and unity to nature is
+      impossible. It is thus quite consistent with his philosophy that he
+      subordinates literary studies (under the name of music) to mathematics and
+      to physics as well as to logic and metaphysics. But on the other hand,
+      knowledge of nature is not an end in itself; it is a necessary stage in
+      bringing the mind to a realization of the supreme purpose of existence as
+      the law of human action, corporate and individual. To use the modern
+      phraseology, naturalistic studies are indispensable, but they are in the
+      interests of humanistic and ideal ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aristotle goes even farther, if anything, in the direction of naturalistic
+      studies. He subordinates (ante, p. 254) civic relations to the purely
+      cognitive life. The highest end of man is not human but divine&mdash;participation
+      in pure knowing which constitutes the divine life. Such knowing deals with
+      what is universal and necessary, and finds, therefore, a more adequate
+      subject matter in nature at its best than in the transient things of man.
+      If we take what the philosophers stood for in Greek life, rather than the
+      details of what they say, we might summarize by saying that the Greeks
+      were too much interested in free inquiry into natural fact and in the
+      aesthetic enjoyment of nature, and were too deeply conscious of the extent
+      in which society is rooted in nature and subject to its laws, to think of
+      bringing man and nature into conflict. Two factors conspire in the later
+      period of ancient life, however, to exalt literary and humanistic studies.
+      One is the increasingly reminiscent and borrowed character of culture; the
+      other is the political and rhetorical bent of Roman life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greek achievement in civilization was native; the civilization of the
+      Alexandrians and Romans was inherited from alien sources. Consequently it
+      looked back to the records upon which it drew, instead of looking out
+      directly upon nature and society, for material and inspiration. We cannot
+      do better than quote the words of Hatch to indicate the consequences for
+      educational theory and practice. "Greece on one hand had lost political
+      power, and on the other possessed in her splendid literature an
+      inalienable heritage. It was natural that she should turn to letters. It
+      was natural also that the study of letters should be reflected upon
+      speech. The mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay stress on that
+      acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations, and that habit of
+      cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly spoken of as
+      education. Our own comes by direct tradition from it. It set a fashion
+      which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the entire civilized
+      world. We study literature rather than nature because the Greeks did so,
+      and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials resolved to educate
+      their sons, they employed Greek teachers and followed in Greek paths." 1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The so-called practical bent of the Romans worked in the same direction.
+      In falling back upon the recorded ideas of the Greeks, they not only took
+      the short path to attaining a cultural development, but they procured just
+      the kind of material and method suited to their administrative talents.
+      For their practical genius was not directed to the conquest and control of
+      nature but to the conquest and control of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Hatch, in the passage quoted, takes a good deal of history for granted
+      in saying that we have studied literature rather than nature because the
+      Greeks, and the Romans whom they taught, did so. What is the link that
+      spans the intervening centuries? The question suggests that barbarian
+      Europe but repeated on a larger scale and with increased intensity the
+      Roman situation. It had to go to school to Greco-Roman civilization; it
+      also borrowed rather than evolved its culture. Not merely for its general
+      ideas and their artistic presentation but for its models of law it went to
+      the records of alien peoples. And its dependence upon tradition was
+      increased by the dominant theological interests of the period. For the
+      authorities to which the Church appealed were literatures composed in
+      foreign tongues. Everything converged to identify learning with linguistic
+      training and to make the language of the learned a literary language
+      instead of the mother speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The full scope of this fact escapes us, moreover, until we recognize that
+      this subject matter compelled recourse to a dialectical method.
+      Scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of
+      learning as a term of reproach. But all that it means is the method of The
+      Schools, or of the School Men. In its essence, it is nothing but a highly
+      effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning which
+      are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths. Where
+      literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes material
+      of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and
+      interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery, and
+      invention. And at bottom what is called Scholasticism is the whole-hearted
+      and consistent formulation and application of the methods which are suited
+      to instruction when the material of instruction is taken ready-made,
+      rather than as something which students are to find out for themselves. So
+      far as schools still teach from textbooks and rely upon the principle of
+      authority and acquisition rather than upon that of discovery and inquiry,
+      their methods are Scholastic&mdash;minus the logical accuracy and system
+      of Scholasticism at its best. Aside from laxity of method and statement,
+      the only difference is that geographies and histories and botanies and
+      astronomies are now part of the authoritative literature which is to be
+      mastered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a consequence, the Greek tradition was lost in which a humanistic
+      interest was used as a basis of interest in nature, and a knowledge of
+      nature used to support the distinctively human aims of man. Life found its
+      support in authority, not in nature. The latter was moreover an object of
+      considerable suspicion. Contemplation of it was dangerous, for it tended
+      to draw man away from reliance upon the documents in which the rules of
+      living were already contained. Moreover nature could be known only through
+      observation; it appealed to the senses&mdash;which were merely material as
+      opposed to a purely immaterial mind. Furthermore, the utilities of a
+      knowledge of nature were purely physical and secular; they connected with
+      the bodily and temporal welfare of man, while the literary tradition
+      concerned his spiritual and eternal well-being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Modern Scientific Interest in Nature. The movement of the fifteenth
+      century which is variously termed the revival of learning and the
+      renascence was characterized by a new interest in man's present life, and
+      accordingly by a new interest in his relationships with nature. It was
+      naturalistic, in the sense that it turned against the dominant
+      supernaturalistic interest. It is possible that the influence of a return
+      to classic Greek pagan literature in bringing about this changed mind has
+      been overestimated. Undoubtedly the change was mainly a product of
+      contemporary conditions. But there can be no doubt that educated men,
+      filled with the new point of view, turned eagerly to Greek literature for
+      congenial sustenance and reinforcement. And to a considerable extent, this
+      interest in Greek thought was not in literature for its own sake, but in
+      the spirit it expressed. The mental freedom, the sense of the order and
+      beauty of nature, which animated Greek expression, aroused men to think
+      and observe in a similar untrammeled fashion. The history of science in
+      the sixteenth century shows that the dawning sciences of physical nature
+      largely borrowed their points of departure from the new interest in Greek
+      literature. As Windelband has said, the new science of nature was the
+      daughter of humanism. The favorite notion of the time was that man was in
+      microcosm that which the universe was in macrocosm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This fact raises anew the question of how it was that nature and man were
+      later separated and a sharp division made between language and literature
+      and the physical sciences. Four reasons may be suggested. (a) The old
+      tradition was firmly entrenched in institutions. Politics, law, and
+      diplomacy remained of necessity branches of authoritative literature, for
+      the social sciences did not develop until the methods of the sciences of
+      physics and chemistry, to say nothing of biology, were much further
+      advanced. The same is largely true of history. Moreover, the methods used
+      for effective teaching of the languages were well developed; the inertia
+      of academic custom was on their side. Just as the new interest in
+      literature, especially Greek, had not been allowed at first to find
+      lodgment in the scholastically organized universities, so when it found
+      its way into them it joined hands with the older learning to minimize the
+      influence of experimental science. The men who taught were rarely trained
+      in science; the men who were scientifically competent worked in private
+      laboratories and through the medium of academies which promoted research,
+      but which were not organized as teaching bodies. Finally, the aristocratic
+      tradition which looked down upon material things and upon the senses and
+      the hands was still mighty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (b) The Protestant revolt brought with it an immense increase of interest
+      in theological discussion and controversies. The appeal on both sides was
+      to literary documents. Each side had to train men in ability to study and
+      expound the records which were relied upon. The demand for training men
+      who could defend the chosen faith against the other side, who were able to
+      propagandize and to prevent the encroachments of the other side, was such
+      that it is not too much to say that by the middle of the seventeenth
+      century the linguistic training of gymnasia and universities had been
+      captured by the revived theological interest, and used as a tool of
+      religious education and ecclesiastical controversy. Thus the educational
+      descent of the languages as they are found in education to-day is not
+      direct from the revival of learning, but from its adaptation to
+      theological ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (c) The natural sciences were themselves conceived in a way which
+      sharpened the opposition of man and nature. Francis Bacon presents an
+      almost perfect example of the union of naturalistic and humanistic
+      interest. Science, adopting the methods of observation and
+      experimentation, was to give up the attempt to "anticipate" nature&mdash;to
+      impose preconceived notions upon her&mdash;and was to become her humble
+      interpreter. In obeying nature intellectually, man would learn to command
+      her practically. "Knowledge is power." This aphorism meant that through
+      science man is to control nature and turn her energies to the execution of
+      his own ends. Bacon attacked the old learning and logic as purely
+      controversial, having to do with victory in argument, not with discovery
+      of the unknown. Through the new method of thought which was set forth in
+      his new logic an era of expansive discoveries was to emerge, and these
+      discoveries were to bear fruit in inventions for the service of man. Men
+      were to give up their futile, never-finished effort to dominate one
+      another to engage in the cooperative task of dominating nature in the
+      interests of humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the main, Bacon prophesied the direction of subsequent progress. But he
+      "anticipated" the advance. He did not see that the new science was for a
+      long time to be worked in the interest of old ends of human exploitation.
+      He thought that it would rapidly give man new ends. Instead, it put at the
+      disposal of a class the means to secure their old ends of aggrandizement
+      at the expense of another class. The industrial revolution followed, as he
+      foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific method. But it is taking the
+      revolution many centuries to produce a new mind. Feudalism was doomed by
+      the applications of the new science, for they transferred power from the
+      landed nobility to the manufacturing centers. But capitalism rather than a
+      social humanism took its place. Production and commerce were carried on as
+      if the new science had no moral lesson, but only technical lessons as to
+      economies in production and utilization of saving in self-interest.
+      Naturally, this application of physical science (which was the most
+      conspicuously perceptible one) strengthened the claims of professed
+      humanists that science was materialistic in its tendencies. It left a void
+      as to man's distinctively human interests which go beyond making, saving,
+      and expending money; and languages and literature put in their claim to
+      represent the moral and ideal interests of humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (d) Moreover, the philosophy which professed itself based upon science,
+      which gave itself out as the accredited representative of the net
+      significance of science, was either dualistic in character, marked by a
+      sharp division between mind (characterizing man) and matter, constituting
+      nature; or else it was openly mechanical, reducing the signal features of
+      human life to illusion. In the former case, it allowed the claims of
+      certain studies to be peculiar consignees of mental values, and indirectly
+      strengthened their claim to superiority, since human beings would incline
+      to regard human affairs as of chief importance at least to themselves. In
+      the latter case, it called out a reaction which threw doubt and suspicion
+      upon the value of physical science, giving occasion for treating it as an
+      enemy to man's higher interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Greek and medieval knowledge accepted the world in its qualitative
+      variety, and regarded nature's processes as having ends, or in technical
+      phrase as teleological. New science was expounded so as to deny the
+      reality of all qualities in real, or objective, existence. Sounds, colors,
+      ends, as well as goods and bads, were regarded as purely subjective&mdash;as
+      mere impressions in the mind. Objective existence was then treated as
+      having only quantitative aspects&mdash;as so much mass in motion, its only
+      differences being that at one point in space there was a larger aggregate
+      mass than at another, and that in some spots there were greater rates of
+      motion than at others. Lacking qualitative distinctions, nature lacked
+      significant variety. Uniformities were emphasized, not diversities; the
+      ideal was supposed to be the discovery of a single mathematical formula
+      applying to the whole universe at once from which all the seeming variety
+      of phenomena could be derived. This is what a mechanical philosophy means.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a philosophy does not represent the genuine purport of science. It
+      takes the technique for the thing itself; the apparatus and the
+      terminology for reality, the method for its subject matter. Science does
+      confine its statements to conditions which enable us to predict and
+      control the happening of events, ignoring the qualities of the events.
+      Hence its mechanical and quantitative character. But in leaving them out
+      of account, it does not exclude them from reality, nor relegate them to a
+      purely mental region; it only furnishes means utilizable for ends. Thus
+      while in fact the progress of science was increasing man's power over
+      nature, enabling him to place his cherished ends on a firmer basis than
+      ever before, and also to diversify his activities almost at will, the
+      philosophy which professed to formulate its accomplishments reduced the
+      world to a barren and monotonous redistribution of matter in space. Thus
+      the immediate effect of modern science was to accentuate the dualism of
+      matter and mind, and thereby to establish the physical and the humanistic
+      studies as two disconnected groups. Since the difference between better
+      and worse is bound up with the qualities of experience, any philosophy of
+      science which excludes them from the genuine content of reality is bound
+      to leave out what is most interesting and most important to mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The Present Educational Problem. In truth, experience knows no division
+      between human concerns and a purely mechanical physical world. Man's home
+      is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural
+      conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and
+      idle indulgences of fancy. From the standpoint of human experience, and
+      hence of educational endeavor, any distinction which can be justly made
+      between nature and man is a distinction between the conditions which have
+      to be reckoned with in the formation and execution of our practical aims,
+      and the aims themselves. This philosophy is vouched for by the doctrine of
+      biological development which shows that man is continuous with nature, not
+      an alien entering her processes from without. It is reinforced by the
+      experimental method of science which shows that knowledge accrues in
+      virtue of an attempt to direct physical energies in accord with ideas
+      suggested in dealing with natural objects in behalf of social uses. Every
+      step forward in the social sciences&mdash;the studies termed history,
+      economics, politics, sociology&mdash;shows that social questions are
+      capable of being intelligently coped with only in the degree in which we
+      employ the method of collected data, forming hypotheses, and testing them
+      in action which is characteristic of natural science, and in the degree in
+      which we utilize in behalf of the promotion of social welfare the
+      technical knowledge ascertained by physics and chemistry. Advanced methods
+      of dealing with such perplexing problems as insanity, intemperance,
+      poverty, public sanitation, city planning, the conservation of natural
+      resources, the constructive use of governmental agencies for furthering
+      the public good without weakening personal initiative, all illustrate the
+      direct dependence of our important social concerns upon the methods and
+      results of natural science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With respect then to both humanistic and naturalistic studies, education
+      should take its departure from this close interdependence. It should aim
+      not at keeping science as a study of nature apart from literature as a
+      record of human interests, but at cross-fertilizing both the natural
+      sciences and the various human disciplines such as history, literature,
+      economics, and politics. Pedagogically, the problem is simpler than the
+      attempt to teach the sciences as mere technical bodies of information and
+      technical forms of physical manipulation, on one side; and to teach
+      humanistic studies as isolated subjects, on the other. For the latter
+      procedure institutes an artificial separation in the pupils' experience.
+      Outside of school pupils meet with natural facts and principles in
+      connection with various modes of human action. (See ante, p. 30.) In all
+      the social activities in which they have shared they have had to
+      understand the material and processes involved. To start them in school
+      with a rupture of this intimate association breaks the continuity of
+      mental development, makes the student feel an indescribable unreality in
+      his studies, and deprives him of the normal motive for interest in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no doubt, of course, that the opportunities of education should
+      be such that all should have a chance who have the disposition to advance
+      to specialized ability in science, and thus devote themselves to its
+      pursuit as their particular occupation in life. But at present, the pupil
+      too often has a choice only between beginning with a study of the results
+      of prior specialization where the material is isolated from his daily
+      experiences, or with miscellaneous nature study, where material is
+      presented at haphazard and does not lead anywhere in particular. The habit
+      of introducing college pupils into segregated scientific subject matter,
+      such as is appropriate to the man who wishes to become an expert in a
+      given field, is carried back into the high schools. Pupils in the latter
+      simply get a more elementary treatment of the same thing, with
+      difficulties smoothed over and topics reduced to the level of their
+      supposed ability. The cause of this procedure lies in following tradition,
+      rather than in conscious adherence to a dualistic philosophy. But the
+      effect is the same as if the purpose were to inculcate an idea that the
+      sciences which deal with nature have nothing to do with man, and vice
+      versa. A large part of the comparative ineffectiveness of the teaching of
+      the sciences, for those who never become scientific specialists, is the
+      result of a separation which is unavoidable when one begins with
+      technically organized subject matter. Even if all students were embryonic
+      scientific specialists, it is questionable whether this is the most
+      effective procedure. Considering that the great majority are concerned
+      with the study of sciences only for its effect upon their mental habits&mdash;in
+      making them more alert, more open-minded, more inclined to tentative
+      acceptance and to testing of ideas propounded or suggested,&mdash;and for
+      achieving a better understanding of their daily environment, it is
+      certainly ill-advised. Too often the pupil comes out with a smattering
+      which is too superficial to be scientific and too technical to be
+      applicable to ordinary affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The utilization of ordinary experience to secure an advance into
+      scientific material and method, while keeping the latter connected with
+      familiar human interests, is easier to-day than it ever was before. The
+      usual experience of all persons in civilized communities to-day is
+      intimately associated with industrial processes and results. These in turn
+      are so many cases of science in action. The stationary and traction steam
+      engine, gasoline engine, automobile, telegraph and telephone, the electric
+      motor enter directly into the lives of most individuals. Pupils at an
+      early age are practically acquainted with these things. Not only does the
+      business occupation of their parents depend upon scientific applications,
+      but household pursuits, the maintenance of health, the sights seen upon
+      the streets, embody scientific achievements and stimulate interest in the
+      connected scientific principles. The obvious pedagogical starting point of
+      scientific instruction is not to teach things labeled science, but to
+      utilize the familiar occupations and appliances to direct observation and
+      experiment, until pupils have arrived at a knowledge of some fundamental
+      principles by understanding them in their familiar practical workings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opinion sometimes advanced that it is a derogation from the "purity"
+      of science to study it in its active incarnation, instead of in
+      theoretical abstraction, rests upon a misunderstanding. AS matter of fact,
+      any subject is cultural in the degree in which it is apprehended in its
+      widest possible range of meanings. Perception of meanings depends upon
+      perception of connections, of context. To see a scientific fact or law in
+      its human as well as in its physical and technical context is to enlarge
+      its significance and give it increased cultural value. Its direct economic
+      application, if by economic is meant something having money worth, is
+      incidental and secondary, but a part of its actual connections. The
+      important thing is that the fact be grasped in its social connections&mdash;its
+      function in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with an
+      intelligent sense of human interests. The social interest, identical in
+      its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is necessarily supreme with
+      man. Knowledge about man, information as to his past, familiarity with his
+      documented records of literature, may be as technical a possession as the
+      accumulation of physical details. Men may keep busy in a variety of ways,
+      making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or in
+      amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the chronology of
+      literary productions. Unless such activity reacts to enlarge the
+      imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with the busy work of
+      children. It has the letter without the spirit of activity. It readily
+      degenerates itself into a miser's accumulation, and a man prides himself
+      on what he has, and not on the meaning he finds in the affairs of life.
+      Any study so pursued that it increases concern for the values of life, any
+      study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and greater
+      ability to promote that well-being is humane study. The humanistic spirit
+      of the Greeks was native and intense but it was narrow in scope. Everybody
+      outside the Hellenic circle was a barbarian, and negligible save as a
+      possible enemy. Acute as were the social observations and speculations of
+      Greek thinkers, there is not a word in their writings to indicate that
+      Greek civilization was not self-inclosed and self-sufficient. There was,
+      apparently, no suspicion that its future was at the mercy of the despised
+      outsider. Within the Greek community, the intense social spirit was
+      limited by the fact that higher culture was based on a substratum of
+      slavery and economic serfdom&mdash;classes necessary to the existence of
+      the state, as Aristotle declared, and yet not genuine parts of it. The
+      development of science has produced an industrial revolution which has
+      brought different peoples in such close contact with one another through
+      colonization and commerce that no matter how some nations may still look
+      down upon others, no country can harbor the illusion that its career is
+      decided wholly within itself. The same revolution has abolished
+      agricultural serfdom, and created a class of more or less organized
+      factory laborers with recognized political rights, and who make claims for
+      a responsible role in the control of industry&mdash;claims which receive
+      sympathetic attention from many among the well-to-do, since they have been
+      brought into closer connections with the less fortunate classes through
+      the breaking down of class barriers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This state of affairs may be formulated by saying that the older humanism
+      omitted economic and industrial conditions from its purview. Consequently,
+      it was one sided. Culture, under such circumstances, inevitably
+      represented the intellectual and moral outlook of the class which was in
+      direct social control. Such a tradition as to culture is, as we have seen
+      (ante, p. 260), aristocratic; it emphasizes what marks off one class from
+      another, rather than fundamental common interests. Its standards are in
+      the past; for the aim is to preserve what has been gained rather than
+      widely to extend the range of culture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The modifications which spring from taking greater account of industry and
+      of whatever has to do with making a living are frequently condemned as
+      attacks upon the culture derived from the past. But a wider educational
+      outlook would conceive industrial activities as agencies for making
+      intellectual resources more accessible to the masses, and giving greater
+      solidity to the culture of those having superior resources. In short, when
+      we consider the close connection between science and industrial
+      development on the one hand, and between literary and aesthetic
+      cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the other, we get
+      light on the opposition between technical scientific studies and refining
+      literary studies. We have before us the need of overcoming this separation
+      in education if society is to be truly democratic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM21" id="link2H_SUMM21">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected in
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      the division of studies between the naturalistic and the humanistic with a
+      tendency to reduce the latter to the literary records of the past. This
+      dualism is not characteristic (as were the others which we have noted) of
+      Greek thought. It arose partly because of the fact that the culture of
+      Rome and of barbarian Europe was not a native product, being borrowed
+      directly or indirectly from Greece, and partly because political and
+      ecclesiastic conditions emphasized dependence upon the authority of past
+      knowledge as that was transmitted in literary documents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a restoration of the
+      intimate connection of nature and humanity, for it viewed knowledge of
+      nature as the means of securing human progress and well-being. But the
+      more immediate applications of science were in the interests of a class
+      rather than of men in common; and the received philosophic formulations of
+      scientific doctrine tended either to mark it off as merely material from
+      man as spiritual and immaterial, or else to reduce mind to a subjective
+      illusion. In education, accordingly, the tendency was to treat the
+      sciences as a separate body of studies, consisting of technical
+      information regarding the physical world, and to reserve the older
+      literary studies as distinctively humanistic. The account previously given
+      of the evolution of knowledge, and of the educational scheme of studies
+      based upon it, are designed to overcome the separation, and to secure
+      recognition of the place occupied by the subject matter of the natural
+      sciences in human affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1 The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church. pp.
+      43-44.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Mind as Purely Individual. We have been concerned with the influences
+      which have effected a division between work and leisure, knowing and
+      doing, man and nature. These influences have resulted in splitting up the
+      subject matter of education into separate studies. They have also found
+      formulation in various philosophies which have opposed to each other body
+      and mind, theoretical knowledge and practice, physical mechanism and ideal
+      purpose. Upon the philosophical side, these various dualisms culminate in
+      a sharp demarcation of individual minds from the world, and hence from one
+      another. While the connection of this philosophical position with
+      educational procedure is not so obvious as is that of the points
+      considered in the last three chapters, there are certain educational
+      considerations which correspond to it; such as the antithesis supposed to
+      exist between subject matter (the counterpart of the world) and method
+      (the counterpart of mind); such as the tendency to treat interest as
+      something purely private, without intrinsic connection with the material
+      studied. Aside from incidental educational bearings, it will be shown in
+      this chapter that the dualistic philosophy of mind and the world implies
+      an erroneous conception of the relationship between knowledge and social
+      interests, and between individuality or freedom, and social control and
+      authority. The identification of the mind with the individual self and of
+      the latter with a private psychic consciousness is comparatively modern.
+      In both the Greek and medieval periods, the rule was to regard the
+      individual as a channel through which a universal and divine intelligence
+      operated. The individual was in no true sense the knower; the knower was
+      the "Reason" which operated through him. The individual interfered at his
+      peril, and only to the detriment of the truth. In the degree in which the
+      individual rather than reason "knew," conceit, error, and opinion were
+      substituted for true knowledge. In Greek life, observation was acute and
+      alert; and thinking was free almost to the point of irresponsible
+      speculations. Accordingly the consequences of the theory were only such as
+      were consequent upon the lack of an experimental method. Without such a
+      method individuals could not engage in knowing, and be checked up by the
+      results of the inquiries of others. Without such liability to test by
+      others, the minds of men could not be intellectually responsible; results
+      were to be accepted because of their aesthetic consistency, agreeable
+      quality, or the prestige of their authors. In the barbarian period,
+      individuals were in a still more humble attitude to truth; important
+      knowledge was supposed to be divinely revealed, and nothing remained for
+      the minds of individuals except to work it over after it had been received
+      on authority. Aside from the more consciously philosophic aspects of these
+      movements, it never occurs to any one to identify mind and the personal
+      self wherever beliefs are transmitted by custom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the medieval period there was a religious individualism. The deepest
+      concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul. In the later
+      Middle Ages, this latent individualism found conscious formulation in the
+      nominalistic philosophies, which treated the structure of knowledge as
+      something built up within the individual through his own acts, and mental
+      states. With the rise of economic and political individualism after the
+      sixteenth century, and with the development of Protestantism, the times
+      were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the individual in
+      achieving knowledge for himself. This led to the view that knowledge is
+      won wholly through personal and private experiences. As a consequence,
+      mind, the source and possessor of knowledge, was thought of as wholly
+      individual. Thus upon the educational side, we find educational reformers,
+      like Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, henceforth vehemently denouncing all
+      learning which is acquired on hearsay, and asserting that even if beliefs
+      happen to be true, they do not constitute knowledge unless they have grown
+      up in and been tested by personal experience. The reaction against
+      authority in all spheres of life, and the intensity of the struggle,
+      against great odds, for freedom of action and inquiry, led to such an
+      emphasis upon personal observations and ideas as in effect to isolate
+      mind, and set it apart from the world to be known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This isolation is reflected in the great development of that branch of
+      philosophy known as epistemology&mdash;the theory of knowledge. The
+      identification of mind with the self, and the setting up of the self as
+      something independent and self-sufficient, created such a gulf between the
+      knowing mind and the world that it became a question how knowledge was
+      possible at all. Given a subject&mdash;the knower&mdash;and an object&mdash;the
+      thing to be known&mdash;wholly separate from one another, it is necessary
+      to frame a theory to explain how they get into connection with each other
+      so that valid knowledge may result. This problem, with the allied one of
+      the possibility of the world acting upon the mind and the mind acting upon
+      the world, became almost the exclusive preoccupation of philosophic
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The theories that we cannot know the world as it really is but only the
+      impressions made upon the mind, or that there is no world beyond the
+      individual mind, or that knowledge is only a certain association of the
+      mind's own states, were products of this preoccupation. We are not
+      directly concerned with their truth; but the fact that such desperate
+      solutions were widely accepted is evidence of the extent to which mind had
+      been set over the world of realities. The increasing use of the term
+      "consciousness" as an equivalent for mind, in the supposition that there
+      is an inner world of conscious states and processes, independent of any
+      relationship to nature and society, an inner world more truly and
+      immediately known than anything else, is evidence of the same fact. In
+      short, practical individualism, or struggle for greater freedom of thought
+      in action, was translated into philosophic subjectivism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Individual Mind as the Agent of Reorganization. It should be obvious
+      that this philosophic movement misconceived the significance of the
+      practical movement. Instead of being its transcript, it was a perversion.
+      Men were not actually engaged in the absurdity of striving to be free from
+      connection with nature and one another. They were striving for greater
+      freedom in nature and society. They wanted greater power to initiate
+      changes in the world of things and fellow beings; greater scope of
+      movement and consequently greater freedom in observations and ideas
+      implied in movement. They wanted not isolation from the world, but a more
+      intimate connection with it. They wanted to form their beliefs about it at
+      first hand, instead of through tradition. They wanted closer union with
+      their fellows so that they might influence one another more effectively
+      and might combine their respective actions for mutual aims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as their beliefs were concerned, they felt that a great deal which
+      passed for knowledge was merely the accumulated opinions of the past, much
+      of it absurd and its correct portions not understood when accepted on
+      authority. Men must observe for themselves, and form their own theories
+      and personally test them. Such a method was the only alternative to the
+      imposition of dogma as truth, a procedure which reduced mind to the formal
+      act of acquiescing in truth. Such is the meaning of what is sometimes
+      called the substitution of inductive experimental methods of knowing for
+      deductive. In some sense, men had always used an inductive method in
+      dealing with their immediate practical concerns. Architecture,
+      agriculture, manufacture, etc., had to be based upon observation of the
+      activities of natural objects, and ideas about such affairs had to be
+      checked, to some extent, by results. But even in such things there was an
+      undue reliance upon mere custom, followed blindly rather than
+      understandingly. And this observational-experimental method was restricted
+      to these "practical" matters, and a sharp distinction maintained between
+      practice and theoretical knowledge or truth. (See Ch. XX.) The rise of
+      free cities, the development of travel, exploration, and commerce, the
+      evolution of new methods of producing commodities and doing business,
+      threw men definitely upon their own resources. The reformers of science
+      like Galileo, Descartes, and their successors, carried analogous methods
+      into ascertaining the facts about nature. An interest in discovery took
+      the place of an interest in systematizing and "proving" received beliefs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A just philosophic interpretation of these movements would, indeed, have
+      emphasized the rights and responsibilities of the individual in gaining
+      knowledge and personally testing beliefs, no matter by what authorities
+      they were vouched for. But it would not have isolated the individual from
+      the world, and consequently isolated individuals&mdash;in theory&mdash;from
+      one another. It would have perceived that such disconnection, such rupture
+      of continuity, denied in advance the possibility of success in their
+      endeavors. As matter of fact every individual has grown up, and always
+      must grow up, in a social medium. His responses grow intelligent, or gain
+      meaning, simply because he lives and acts in a medium of accepted meanings
+      and values. (See ante, p. 30.) Through social intercourse, through sharing
+      in the activities embodying beliefs, he gradually acquires a mind of his
+      own. The conception of mind as a purely isolated possession of the self is
+      at the very antipodes of the truth. The self achieves mind in the degree
+      in which knowledge of things is incarnate in the life about him; the self
+      is not a separate mind building up knowledge anew on its own account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there is a valid distinction between knowledge which is objective and
+      impersonal, and thinking which is subjective and personal. In one sense,
+      knowledge is that which we take for granted. It is that which is settled,
+      disposed of, established, under control. What we fully know, we do not
+      need to think about. In common phrase, it is certain, assured. And this
+      does not mean a mere feeling of certainty. It denotes not a sentiment, but
+      a practical attitude, a readiness to act without reserve or quibble. Of
+      course we may be mistaken. What is taken for knowledge&mdash;for fact and
+      truth&mdash;at a given time may not be such. But everything which is
+      assumed without question, which is taken for granted in our intercourse
+      with one another and nature is what, at the given time, is called
+      knowledge. Thinking on the contrary, starts, as we have seen, from doubt
+      or uncertainty. It marks an inquiring, hunting, searching attitude,
+      instead of one of mastery and possession. Through its critical process
+      true knowledge is revised and extended, and our convictions as to the
+      state of things reorganized. Clearly the last few centuries have been
+      typically a period of revision and reorganization of beliefs. Men did not
+      really throw away all transmitted beliefs concerning the realities of
+      existence, and start afresh upon the basis of their private, exclusive
+      sensations and ideas. They could not have done so if they had wished to,
+      and if it had been possible general imbecility would have been the only
+      outcome. Men set out from what had passed as knowledge, and critically
+      investigated the grounds upon which it rested; they noted exceptions; they
+      used new mechanical appliances to bring to light data inconsistent with
+      what had been believed; they used their imaginations to conceive a world
+      different from that in which their forefathers had put their trust. The
+      work was a piecemeal, a retail, business. One problem was tackled at a
+      time. The net results of all the revisions amounted, however, to a
+      revolution of prior conceptions of the world. What occurred was a
+      reorganization of prior intellectual habitudes, infinitely more efficient
+      than a cutting loose from all connections would have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This state of affairs suggests a definition of the role of the individual,
+      or the self, in knowledge; namely, the redirection, or reconstruction of
+      accepted beliefs. Every new idea, every conception of things differing
+      from that authorized by current belief, must have its origin in an
+      individual. New ideas are doubtless always sprouting, but a society
+      governed by custom does not encourage their development. On the contrary,
+      it tends to suppress them, just because they are deviations from what is
+      current. The man who looks at things differently from others is in such a
+      community a suspect character; for him to persist is generally fatal. Even
+      when social censorship of beliefs is not so strict, social conditions may
+      fail to provide the appliances which are requisite if new ideas are to be
+      adequately elaborated; or they may fail to provide any material support
+      and reward to those who entertain them. Hence they remain mere fancies,
+      romantic castles in the air, or aimless speculations. The freedom of
+      observation and imagination involved in the modern scientific revolution
+      were not easily secured; they had to be fought for; many suffered for
+      their intellectual independence. But, upon the whole, modern European
+      society first permitted, and then, in some fields at least, deliberately
+      encouraged the individual reactions which deviate from what custom
+      prescribes. Discovery, research, inquiry in new lines, inventions, finally
+      came to be either the social fashion, or in some degree tolerable.
+      However, as we have already noted, philosophic theories of knowledge were
+      not content to conceive mind in the individual as the pivot upon which
+      reconstruction of beliefs turned, thus maintaining the continuity of the
+      individual with the world of nature and fellow men. They regarded the
+      individual mind as a separate entity, complete in each person, and
+      isolated from nature and hence from other minds. Thus a legitimate
+      intellectual individualism, the attitude of critical revision of former
+      beliefs which is indispensable to progress, was explicitly formulated as a
+      moral and social individualism. When the activities of mind set out from
+      customary beliefs and strive to effect transformations of them which will
+      in turn win general conviction, there is no opposition between the
+      individual and the social. The intellectual variations of the individual
+      in observation, imagination, judgment, and invention are simply the
+      agencies of social progress, just as conformity to habit is the agency of
+      social conservation. But when knowledge is regarded as originating and
+      developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of
+      one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied, it
+      becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual with
+      his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious separation of
+      different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion that the
+      consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed continent,
+      intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of everybody
+      else. But when men act, they act in a common and public world. This is the
+      problem to which the theory of isolated and independent conscious minds
+      gave rise: Given feelings, ideas, desires, which have nothing to do with
+      one another, how can actions proceeding from them be controlled in a
+      social or public interest? Given an egoistic consciousness, how can action
+      which has regard for others take place?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moral philosophies which have started from such premises have developed
+      four typical ways of dealing with the question. (i) One method represents
+      the survival of the older authoritative position, with such concessions
+      and compromises as the progress of events has made absolutely inevitable.
+      The deviations and departures characterizing an individual are still
+      looked upon with suspicion; in principle they are evidences of the
+      disturbances, revolts, and corruptions inhering in an individual apart
+      from external authoritative guidance. In fact, as distinct from principle,
+      intellectual individualism is tolerated in certain technical regions&mdash;in
+      subjects like mathematics and physics and astronomy, and in the technical
+      inventions resulting therefrom. But the applicability of a similar method
+      to morals, social, legal, and political matters, is denied. In such
+      matters, dogma is still to be supreme; certain eternal truths made known
+      by revelation, intuition, or the wisdom of our forefathers set unpassable
+      limits to individual observation and speculation. The evils from which
+      society suffers are set down to the efforts of misguided individuals to
+      transgress these boundaries. Between the physical and the moral sciences,
+      lie intermediate sciences of life, where the territory is only grudgingly
+      yielded to freedom of inquiry under the pressure of accomplished fact.
+      Although past history has demonstrated that the possibilities of human
+      good are widened and made more secure by trusting to a responsibility
+      built up within the very process of inquiry, the "authority" theory sets
+      apart a sacred domain of truth which must be protected from the inroads of
+      variation of beliefs. Educationally, emphasis may not be put on eternal
+      truth, but it is put on the authority of book and teacher, and individual
+      variation is discouraged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) Another method is sometimes termed rationalism or abstract
+      intellectualism. A formal logical faculty is set up in distinction from
+      tradition and history and all concrete subject matter. This faculty of
+      reason is endowed with power to influence conduct directly. Since it deals
+      wholly with general and impersonal forms, when different persons act in
+      accord with logical findings, their activities will be externally
+      consistent. There is no doubt of the services rendered by this philosophy.
+      It was a powerful factor in the negative and dissolving criticism of
+      doctrines having nothing but tradition and class interest behind them; it
+      accustomed men to freedom of discussion and to the notion that beliefs had
+      to be submitted to criteria of reasonableness. It undermined the power of
+      prejudice, superstition, and brute force, by habituating men to reliance
+      upon argument, discussion, and persuasion. It made for clarity and order
+      of exposition. But its influence was greater in destruction of old
+      falsities than in the construction of new ties and associations among men.
+      Its formal and empty nature, due to conceiving reason as something
+      complete in itself apart from subject matter, its hostile attitude toward
+      historical institutions, its disregard of the influence of habit,
+      instinct, and emotion, as operative factors in life, left it impotent in
+      the suggestion of specific aims and methods. Bare logic, however important
+      in arranging and criticizing existing subject matter, cannot spin new
+      subject matter out of itself. In education, the correlative is trust in
+      general ready-made rules and principles to secure agreement, irrespective
+      of seeing to it that the pupil's ideas really agree with one another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iii) While this rationalistic philosophy was developing in France,
+      English thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest of individuals
+      in order to secure outer unity in the acts which issued from isolated
+      streams of consciousness. Legal arrangements, especially penal
+      administration, and governmental regulations, were to be such as to
+      prevent the acts which proceeded from regard for one's own private
+      sensations from interfering with the feelings of others. Education was to
+      instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others and some
+      degree of positive regard for their welfare were necessary for security in
+      the pursuit of one's own happiness. Chief emphasis was put, however, upon
+      trade as a means of bringing the conduct of one into harmony with that of
+      others. In commerce, each aims at the satisfaction of his own wants, but
+      can gain his own profit only by furnishing some commodity or service to
+      another. Thus in aiming at the increase of his own private pleasurable
+      states of consciousness, he contributes to the consciousness of others.
+      Again there is no doubt that this view expressed and furthered a
+      heightened perception of the values of conscious life, and a recognition
+      that institutional arrangements are ultimately to be judged by the
+      contributions which they make to intensifying and enlarging the scope of
+      conscious experience. It also did much to rescue work, industry, and
+      mechanical devices from the contempt in which they had been held in
+      communities founded upon the control of a leisure class. In both ways,
+      this philosophy promoted a wider and more democratic social concern. But
+      it was tainted by the narrowness of its fundamental premise: the doctrine
+      that every individual acts only from regard for his own pleasures and
+      pains, and that so-called generous and sympathetic acts are only indirect
+      ways of procuring and assuring one's own comfort. In other words, it made
+      explicit the consequences inhering in any doctrine which makes mental life
+      a self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt to redirect and readapt
+      common concerns. It made union among men a matter of calculation of
+      externals. It lent itself to the contemptuous assertions of Carlyle that
+      it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a constable, and recognized only a "cash
+      nexus" among men. The educational equivalents of this doctrine in the uses
+      made of pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only too obvious.
+      (iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path. It started from what
+      was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of Descartes and his French
+      successors. But while French thought upon the whole developed the idea of
+      reason in opposition to the religious conception of a divine mind residing
+      in individuals, German thought (as in Hegel) made a synthesis of the two.
+      Reason is absolute. Nature is incarnate reason. History is reason in its
+      progressive unfolding in man. An individual becomes rational only as he
+      absorbs into himself the content of rationality in nature and in social
+      institutions. For an absolute reason is not, like the reason of
+      rationalism, purely formal and empty; as absolute it must include all
+      content within itself. Thus the real problem is not that of controlling
+      individual freedom so that some measure of social order and concord may
+      result, but of achieving individual freedom through developing individual
+      convictions in accord with the universal law found in the organization of
+      the state as objective Reason. While this philosophy is usually termed
+      absolute or objective idealism, it might better be termed, for educational
+      purposes at least, institutional idealism. (See ante, p. 59.) It idealized
+      historical institutions by conceiving them as incarnations of an immanent
+      absolute mind. There can be no doubt that this philosophy was a powerful
+      influence in rescuing philosophy in the beginning of the nineteenth
+      century from the isolated individualism into which it had fallen in France
+      and England. It served also to make the organization of the state more
+      constructively interested in matters of public concern. It left less to
+      chance, less to mere individual logical conviction, less to the workings
+      of private self-interest. It brought intelligence to bear upon the conduct
+      of affairs; it accentuated the need of nationally organized education in
+      the interests of the corporate state. It sanctioned and promoted freedom
+      of inquiry in all technical details of natural and historical phenomena.
+      But in all ultimate moral matters, it tended to reinstate the principle of
+      authority. It made for efficiency of organization more than did any of the
+      types of philosophy previously mentioned, but it made no provision for
+      free experimental modification of this organization. Political democracy,
+      with its belief in the right of individual desire and purpose to take part
+      in readapting even the fundamental constitution of society, was foreign to
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Educational Equivalents. It is not necessary to consider in detail the
+      educational counterparts of the various defects found in these various
+      types of philosophy. It suffices to say that in general the school has
+      been the institution which exhibited with greatest clearness the assumed
+      antithesis between purely individualistic methods of learning and social
+      action, and between freedom and social control. The antithesis is
+      reflected in the absence of a social atmosphere and motive for learning,
+      and the consequent separation, in the conduct of the school, between
+      method of instruction and methods of government; and in the slight
+      opportunity afforded individual variations. When learning is a phase of
+      active undertakings which involve mutual exchange, social control enters
+      into the very process of learning. When the social factor is absent,
+      learning becomes a carrying over of some presented material into a purely
+      individual consciousness, and there is no inherent reason why it should
+      give a more socialized direction to mental and emotional disposition.
+      There is tendency on the part of both the upholders and the opponents of
+      freedom in school to identify it with absence of social direction, or,
+      sometimes, with merely physical unconstraint of movement. But the essence
+      of the demand for freedom is the need of conditions which will enable an
+      individual to make his own special contribution to a group interest, and
+      to partake of its activities in such ways that social guidance shall be a
+      matter of his own mental attitude, and not a mere authoritative dictation
+      of his acts. Because what is often called discipline and "government" has
+      to do with the external side of conduct alone, a similar meaning is
+      attached, by reaction, to freedom. But when it is perceived that each idea
+      signifies the quality of mind expressed in action, the supposed opposition
+      between them falls away. Freedom means essentially the part played by
+      thinking&mdash;which is personal&mdash;in learning:&mdash;it means
+      intellectual initiative, independence in observation, judicious invention,
+      foresight of consequences, and ingenuity of adaptation to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But because these are the mental phase of behavior, the needed play of
+      individuality&mdash;or freedom&mdash;cannot be separated from opportunity
+      for free play of physical movements. Enforced physical quietude may be
+      unfavorable to realization of a problem, to undertaking the observations
+      needed to define it, and to performance of the experiments which test the
+      ideas suggested. Much has been said about the importance of
+      "self-activity" in education, but the conception has too frequently been
+      restricted to something merely internal&mdash;something excluding the free
+      use of sensory and motor organs. Those who are at the stage of learning
+      from symbols, or who are engaged in elaborating the implications of a
+      problem or idea preliminary to more carefully thought-out activity, may
+      need little perceptible overt activity. But the whole cycle of
+      self-activity demands an opportunity for investigation and
+      experimentation, for trying out one's ideas upon things, discovering what
+      can be done with materials and appliances. And this is incompatible with
+      closely restricted physical activity. Individual activity has sometimes
+      been taken as meaning leaving a pupil to work by himself or alone. Relief
+      from need of attending to what any one else is doing is truly required to
+      secure calm and concentration. Children, like grown persons, require a
+      judicious amount of being let alone. But the time, place, and amount of
+      such separate work is a matter of detail, not of principle. There is no
+      inherent opposition between working with others and working as an
+      individual. On the contrary, certain capacities of an individual are not
+      brought out except under the stimulus of associating with others. That a
+      child must work alone and not engage in group activities in order to be
+      free and let his individuality develop, is a notion which measures
+      individuality by spatial distance and makes a physical thing of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Individuality as a factor to be respected in education has a double
+      meaning. In the first place, one is mentally an individual only as he has
+      his own purpose and problem, and does his own thinking. The phrase "think
+      for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self, it isn't
+      thinking. Only by a pupil's own observations, reflections, framing and
+      testing of suggestions can what he already knows be amplified and
+      rectified. Thinking is as much an individual matter as is the digestion of
+      food. In the second place, there are variations of point of view, of
+      appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from person to person. When
+      these variations are suppressed in the alleged interests of uniformity,
+      and an attempt is made to have a single mold of method of study and
+      recitation, mental confusion and artificiality inevitably result.
+      Originality is gradually destroyed, confidence in one's own quality of
+      mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to the opinion of
+      others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild. The harm is greater now than
+      when the whole community was governed by customary beliefs, because the
+      contrast between methods of learning in school and those relied upon
+      outside the school is greater. That systematic advance in scientific
+      discovery began when individuals were allowed, and then encouraged, to
+      utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject matter, no one will
+      deny. If it is said in objection, that pupils in school are not capable of
+      any such originality, and hence must be confined to appropriating and
+      reproducing things already known by the better informed, the reply is
+      twofold. (i) We are concerned with originality of attitude which is
+      equivalent to the unforced response of one's own individuality, not with
+      originality as measured by product. No one expects the young to make
+      original discoveries of just the same facts and principles as are embodied
+      in the sciences of nature and man. But it is not unreasonable to expect
+      that learning may take place under such conditions that from the
+      standpoint of the learner there is genuine discovery. While immature
+      students will not make discoveries from the standpoint of advanced
+      students, they make them from their own standpoint, whenever there is
+      genuine learning. (ii) In the normal process of becoming acquainted with
+      subject matter already known to others, even young pupils react in
+      unexpected ways. There is something fresh, something not capable of being
+      fully anticipated by even the most experienced teacher, in the ways they
+      go at the topic, and in the particular ways in which things strike them.
+      Too often all this is brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are deliberately
+      held to rehearsing material in the exact form in which the older person
+      conceives it. The result is that what is instinctively original in
+      individuality, that which marks off one from another, goes unused and
+      undirected. Teaching then ceases to be an educative process for the
+      teacher. At most he learns simply to improve his existing technique; he
+      does not get new points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual
+      companionship. Hence both teaching and learning tend to become
+      conventional and mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides
+      therein implied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background of
+      familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or less
+      random physical experimentation is reduced. Activity is defined or
+      specialized in certain channels. To the eyes of others, the student may be
+      in a position of complete physical quietude, because his energies are
+      confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes and
+      vocal organs. But because this attitude is evidence of intense mental
+      concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not follow that
+      it should be set up as a model for students who still have to find their
+      intellectual way about. And even with the adult, it does not cover the
+      whole circuit of mental energy. It marks an intermediate period, capable
+      of being lengthened with increased mastery of a subject, but always coming
+      between an earlier period of more general and conspicuous organic action
+      and a later time of putting to use what has been apprehended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and body in
+      acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the need of
+      obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to identify the freedom which
+      is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking by which what a
+      person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. If attention is
+      centered upon the conditions which have to be met in order to secure a
+      situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take care of
+      itself. The individual who has a question which being really a question to
+      him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his eagerness for information
+      that will help him cope with it, and who has at command an equipment which
+      will permit these interests to take effect, is intellectually free.
+      Whatever initiative and imaginative vision he possesses will be called
+      into play and control his impulses and habits. His own purposes will
+      direct his actions. Otherwise, his seeming attention, his docility, his
+      memorizings and reproductions, will partake of intellectual servility.
+      Such a condition of intellectual subjection is needed for fitting the
+      masses into a society where the many are not expected to have aims or
+      ideas of their own, but to take orders from the few set in authority. It
+      is not adapted to a society which intends to be democratic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM22" id="link2H_SUMM22">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. True individualism is a product of the relaxation of the grip
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      of the authority of custom and traditions as standards of belief. Aside
+      from sporadic instances, like the height of Greek thought, it is a
+      comparatively modern manifestation. Not but that there have always been
+      individual diversities, but that a society dominated by conservative
+      custom represses them or at least does not utilize them and promote them.
+      For various reasons, however, the new individualism was interpreted
+      philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for revising and
+      transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an assertion that each
+      individual's mind was complete in isolation from everything else. In the
+      theoretical phase of philosophy, this produced the epistemological
+      problem: the question as to the possibility of any cognitive relationship
+      of the individual to the world. In its practical phase, it generated the
+      problem of the possibility of a purely individual consciousness acting on
+      behalf of general or social interests,&mdash;the problem of social
+      direction. While the philosophies which have been elaborated to deal with
+      these questions have not affected education directly, the assumptions
+      underlying them have found expression in the separation frequently made
+      between study and government and between freedom of individuality and
+      control by others. Regarding freedom, the important thing to bear in mind
+      is that it designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint
+      of movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair
+      leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc. A
+      society based on custom will utilize individual variations only up to a
+      limit of conformity with usage; uniformity is the chief ideal within each
+      class. A progressive society counts individual variations as precious
+      since it finds in them the means of its own growth. Hence a democratic
+      society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for intellectual
+      freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in its educational
+      measures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. The Meaning of Vocation. At the present time the conflict of
+      philosophic theories focuses in discussion of the proper place and
+      function of vocational factors in education. The bald statement that
+      significant differences in fundamental philosophical conceptions find
+      their chief issue in connection with this point may arouse incredulity:
+      there seems to be too great a gap between the remote and general terms in
+      which philosophic ideas are formulated and the practical and concrete
+      details of vocational education. But a mental review of the intellectual
+      presuppositions underlying the oppositions in education of labor and
+      leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the world,
+      will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and cultural
+      education. Traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to the notions
+      of leisure, purely contemplative knowledge and a spiritual activity not
+      involving the active use of bodily organs. Culture has also tended,
+      latterly, to be associated with a purely private refinement, a cultivation
+      of certain states and attitudes of consciousness, separate from either
+      social direction or service. It has been an escape from the former, and a
+      solace for the necessity of the latter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole subject
+      of vocational education, that it is necessary to define the meaning of
+      vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the impression that an
+      education which centers about it is narrowly practical, if not merely
+      pecuniary. A vocation means nothing but such a direction of life
+      activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because of
+      the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates. The
+      opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture, but aimlessness,
+      capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in experience, on
+      the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence upon the others,
+      on the social side. Occupation is a concrete term for continuity. It
+      includes the development of artistic capacity of any kind, of special
+      scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well as professional and
+      business occupations, to say nothing of mechanical labor or engagement in
+      gainful pursuits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to the
+      occupations where immediately tangible commodities are produced, but also
+      the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one and
+      only one to each person. Such restricted specialism is impossible; nothing
+      could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an eye to
+      only one line of activity. In the first place, each individual has of
+      necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be
+      intelligently effective; and in the second place any one occupation loses
+      its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy at something in the degree
+      in which it is isolated from other interests. (i) No one is just an artist
+      and nothing else, and in so far as one approximates that condition, he is
+      so much the less developed human being; he is a kind of monstrosity. He
+      must, at some period of his life, be a member of a family; he must have
+      friends and companions; he must either support himself or be supported by
+      others, and thus he has a business career. He is a member of some
+      organized political unit, and so on. We naturally name his vocation from
+      that one of the callings which distinguishes him, rather than from those
+      which he has in common with all others. But we should not allow ourselves
+      to be so subject to words as to ignore and virtually deny his other
+      callings when it comes to a consideration of the vocational phases of
+      education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) As a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized
+      phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his
+      efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by its
+      association with other callings. A person must have experience, he must
+      live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical accomplishment. He
+      cannot find the subject matter of his artistic activity within his art;
+      this must be an expression of what he suffers and enjoys in other
+      relationships&mdash;a thing which depends in turn upon the alertness and
+      sympathy of his interests. What is true of an artist is true of any other
+      special calling. There is doubtless&mdash;in general accord with the
+      principle of habit&mdash;a tendency for every distinctive vocation to
+      become too dominant, too exclusive and absorbing in its specialized
+      aspect. This means emphasis upon skill or technical method at the expense
+      of meaning. Hence it is not the business of education to foster this
+      tendency, but rather to safeguard against it, so that the scientific
+      inquirer shall not be merely the scientist, the teacher merely the
+      pedagogue, the clergyman merely one who wears the cloth, and so on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Place of Vocational Aims in Education. Bearing in mind the varied
+      and connected content of the vocation, and the broad background upon which
+      a particular calling is projected, we shall now consider education for the
+      more distinctive activity of an individual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. An occupation is the only thing which balances the distinctive capacity
+      of an individual with his social service. To find out what one is fitted
+      to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness.
+      Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true business in
+      life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into
+      an uncongenial calling. A right occupation means simply that the aptitudes
+      of a person are in adequate play, working with the minimum of friction and
+      the maximum of satisfaction. With reference to other members of a
+      community, this adequacy of action signifies, of course, that they are
+      getting the best service the person can render. It is generally believed,
+      for example, that slave labor was ultimately wasteful even from the purely
+      economic point of view&mdash;that there was not sufficient stimulus to
+      direct the energies of slaves, and that there was consequent wastage.
+      Moreover, since slaves were confined to certain prescribed callings, much
+      talent must have remained unavailable to the community, and hence there
+      was a dead loss. Slavery only illustrates on an obvious scale what happens
+      in some degree whenever an individual does not find himself in his work.
+      And he cannot completely find himself when vocations are looked upon with
+      contempt, and a conventional ideal of a culture which is essentially the
+      same for all is maintained. Plato (ante, p. 88) laid down the fundamental
+      principle of a philosophy of education when he asserted that it was the
+      business of education to discover what each person is good for, and to
+      train him to mastery of that mode of excellence, because such development
+      would also secure the fulfillment of social needs in the most harmonious
+      way. His error was not in qualitative principle, but in his limited
+      conception of the scope of vocations socially needed; a limitation of
+      vision which reacted to obscure his perception of the infinite variety of
+      capacities found in different individuals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. An occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose. Education
+      through occupations consequently combines within itself more of the
+      factors conducive to learning than any other method. It calls instincts
+      and habits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. It has an end in
+      view; results are to be accomplished. Hence it appeals to thought; it
+      demands that an idea of an end be steadily maintained, so that activity
+      cannot be either routine or capricious. Since the movement of activity
+      must be progressive, leading from one stage to another, observation and
+      ingenuity are required at each stage to overcome obstacles and to discover
+      and readapt means of execution. In short, an occupation, pursued under
+      conditions where the realization of the activity rather than merely the
+      external product is the aim, fulfills the requirements which were laid
+      down earlier in connection with the discussion of aims, interest, and
+      thinking. (See Chapters VIII, X, XII.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for information and
+      ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth. It provides an axis which
+      runs through an immense diversity of detail; it causes different
+      experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with one
+      another. The lawyer, the physician, the laboratory investigator in some
+      branch of chemistry, the parent, the citizen interested in his own
+      locality, has a constant working stimulus to note and relate whatever has
+      to do with his concern. He unconsciously, from the motivation of his
+      occupation, reaches out for all relevant information, and holds to it. The
+      vocation acts as both magnet to attract and as glue to hold. Such
+      organization of knowledge is vital, because it has reference to needs; it
+      is so expressed and readjusted in action that it never becomes stagnant.
+      No classification, no selection and arrangement of facts, which is
+      consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever compare in
+      solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of an
+      occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal, superficial, and
+      cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. The only adequate training for occupations is training through
+      occupations. The principle stated early in this book (see Chapter VI) that
+      the educative process is its own end, and that the only sufficient
+      preparation for later responsibilities comes by making the most of
+      immediately present life, applies in full force to the vocational phases
+      of education. The dominant vocation of all human beings at all times is
+      living&mdash;intellectual and moral growth. In childhood and youth, with
+      their relative freedom from economic stress, this fact is naked and
+      unconcealed. To predetermine some future occupation for which education is
+      to be a strict preparation is to injure the possibilities of present
+      development and thereby to reduce the adequacy of preparation for a future
+      right employment. To repeat the principle we have had occasion to appeal
+      to so often, such training may develop a machine-like skill in routine
+      lines (it is far from being sure to do so, since it may develop distaste,
+      aversion, and carelessness), but it will be at the expense of those
+      qualities of alert observation and coherent and ingenious planning which
+      make an occupation intellectually rewarding. In an autocratically managed
+      society, it is often a conscious object to prevent the development of
+      freedom and responsibility, a few do the planning and ordering, the others
+      follow directions and are deliberately confined to narrow and prescribed
+      channels of endeavor. However much such a scheme may inure to the prestige
+      and profit of a class, it is evident that it limits the development of the
+      subject class; hardens and confines the opportunities for learning through
+      experience of the master class, and in both ways hampers the life of the
+      society as a whole. (See ante, p. 260.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only alternative is that all the earlier preparation for vocations be
+      indirect rather than direct; namely, through engaging in those active
+      occupations which are indicated by the needs and interests of the pupil at
+      the time. Only in this way can there be on the part of the educator and of
+      the one educated a genuine discovery of personal aptitudes so that the
+      proper choice of a specialized pursuit in later life may be indicated.
+      Moreover, the discovery of capacity and aptitude will be a constant
+      process as long as growth continues. It is a conventional and arbitrary
+      view which assumes that discovery of the work to be chosen for adult life
+      is made once for all at some particular date. One has discovered in
+      himself, say, an interest, intellectual and social, in the things which
+      have to do with engineering and has decided to make that his calling. At
+      most, this only blocks out in outline the field in which further growth is
+      to be directed. It is a sort of rough sketch for use in direction of
+      further activities. It is the discovery of a profession in the sense in
+      which Columbus discovered America when he touched its shores. Future
+      explorations of an indefinitely more detailed and extensive sort remain to
+      be made. When educators conceive vocational guidance as something which
+      leads up to a definitive, irretrievable, and complete choice, both
+      education and the chosen vocation are likely to be rigid, hampering
+      further growth. In so far, the calling chosen will be such as to leave the
+      person concerned in a permanently subordinate position, executing the
+      intelligence of others who have a calling which permits more flexible play
+      and readjustment. And while ordinary usages of language may not justify
+      terming a flexible attitude of readjustment a choice of a new and further
+      calling, it is such in effect. If even adults have to be on the lookout to
+      see that their calling does not shut down on them and fossilize them,
+      educators must certainly be careful that the vocational preparation of
+      youth is such as to engage them in a continuous reorganization of aims and
+      methods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Present Opportunities and Dangers. In the past, education has been much
+      more vocational in fact than in name. (i) The education of the masses was
+      distinctly utilitarian. It was called apprenticeship rather than
+      education, or else just learning from experience. The schools devoted
+      themselves to the three R's in the degree in which ability to go through
+      the forms of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements in all
+      kinds of labor. Taking part in some special line of work, under the
+      direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education. The
+      two supplemented each other; the school work in its narrow and formal
+      character was as much a part of apprenticeship to a calling as that
+      explicitly so termed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) To a considerable extent, the education of the dominant classes was
+      essentially vocational&mdash;it only happened that their pursuits of
+      ruling and of enjoying were not called professions. For only those things
+      were named vocations or employments which involved manual labor, laboring
+      for a reward in keep, or its commuted money equivalent, or the rendering
+      of personal services to specific persons. For a long time, for example,
+      the profession of the surgeon and physician ranked almost with that of the
+      valet or barber&mdash;partly because it had so much to do with the body,
+      and partly because it involved rendering direct service for pay to some
+      definite person. But if we go behind words, the business of directing
+      social concerns, whether politically or economically, whether in war or
+      peace, is as much a calling as anything else; and where education has not
+      been completely under the thumb of tradition, higher schools in the past
+      have been upon the whole calculated to give preparation for this business.
+      Moreover, display, the adornment of person, the kind of social
+      companionship and entertainment which give prestige, and the spending of
+      money, have been made into definite callings. Unconsciously to themselves
+      the higher institutions of learning have been made to contribute to
+      preparation for these employments. Even at present, what is called higher
+      education is for a certain class (much smaller than it once was) mainly
+      preparation for engaging effectively in these pursuits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other respects, it is largely, especially in the most advanced work,
+      training for the calling of teaching and special research. By a peculiar
+      superstition, education which has to do chiefly with preparation for the
+      pursuit of conspicuous idleness, for teaching, and for literary callings,
+      and for leadership, has been regarded as non-vocational and even as
+      peculiarly cultural. The literary training which indirectly fits for
+      authorship, whether of books, newspaper editorials, or magazine articles,
+      is especially subject to this superstition: many a teacher and author
+      writes and argues in behalf of a cultural and humane education against the
+      encroachments of a specialized practical education, without recognizing
+      that his own education, which he calls liberal, has been mainly training
+      for his own particular calling. He has simply got into the habit of
+      regarding his own business as essentially cultural and of overlooking the
+      cultural possibilities of other employments. At the bottom of these
+      distinctions is undoubtedly the tradition which recognizes as employment
+      only those pursuits where one is responsible for his work to a specific
+      employer, rather than to the ultimate employer, the community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are, however, obvious causes for the present conscious emphasis upon
+      vocational education&mdash;for the disposition to make explicit and
+      deliberate vocational implications previously tacit. (i) In the first
+      place, there is an increased esteem, in democratic communities, of
+      whatever has to do with manual labor, commercial occupations, and the
+      rendering of tangible services to society. In theory, men and women are
+      now expected to do something in return for their support&mdash;intellectual
+      and economic&mdash;by society. Labor is extolled; service is a much-lauded
+      moral ideal. While there is still much admiration and envy of those who
+      can pursue lives of idle conspicuous display, better moral sentiment
+      condemns such lives. Social responsibility for the use of time and
+      personal capacity is more generally recognized than it used to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) In the second place, those vocations which are specifically
+      industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last century and
+      a half. Manufacturing and commerce are no longer domestic and local, and
+      consequently more or less incidental, but are world-wide. They engage the
+      best energies of an increasingly large number of persons. The
+      manufacturer, banker, and captain of industry have practically displaced a
+      hereditary landed gentry as the immediate directors of social affairs. The
+      problem of social readjustment is openly industrial, having to do with the
+      relations of capital and labor. The great increase in the social
+      importance of conspicuous industrial processes has inevitably brought to
+      the front questions having to do with the relationship of schooling to
+      industrial life. No such vast social readjustment could occur without
+      offering a challenge to an education inherited from different social
+      conditions, and without putting up to education new problems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iii) In the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly mentioned:
+      Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical, rule-of-thumb
+      procedure, handed down by custom. Its technique is now technological: that
+      is to say, based upon machinery resulting from discoveries in mathematics,
+      physics, chemistry, bacteriology, etc. The economic revolution has
+      stimulated science by setting problems for solution, by producing greater
+      intellectual respect for mechanical appliances. And industry received back
+      payment from science with compound interest. As a consequence, industrial
+      occupations have infinitely greater intellectual content and infinitely
+      larger cultural possibilities than they used to possess. The demand for
+      such education as will acquaint workers with the scientific and social
+      bases and bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative, since those who
+      are without it inevitably sink to the role of appendages to the machines
+      they operate. Under the old regime all workers in a craft were
+      approximately equals in their knowledge and outlook. Personal knowledge
+      and ingenuity were developed within at least a narrow range, because work
+      was done with tools under the direct command of the worker. Now the
+      operator has to adjust himself to his machine, instead of his tool to his
+      own purposes. While the intellectual possibilities of industry have
+      multiplied, industrial conditions tend to make industry, for great masses,
+      less of an educative resource than it was in the days of hand production
+      for local markets. The burden of realizing the intellectual possibilities
+      inhering in work is thus thrown back on the school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iv) In the fourth place, the pursuit of knowledge has become, in science,
+      more experimental, less dependent upon literary tradition, and less
+      associated with dialectical methods of reasoning, and with symbols. As a
+      result, the subject matter of industrial occupation presents not only more
+      of the content of science than it used to, but greater opportunity for
+      familiarity with the method by which knowledge is made. The ordinary
+      worker in the factory is of course under too immediate economic pressure
+      to have a chance to produce a knowledge like that of the worker in the
+      laboratory. But in schools, association with machines and industrial
+      processes may be had under conditions where the chief conscious concern of
+      the students is insight. The separation of shop and laboratory, where
+      these conditions are fulfilled, is largely conventional, the laboratory
+      having the advantage of permitting the following up of any intellectual
+      interest a problem may suggest; the shop the advantage of emphasizing the
+      social bearings of the scientific principle, as well as, with many pupils,
+      of stimulating a livelier interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (v) Finally, the advances which have been made in the psychology of
+      learning in general and of childhood in particular fall into line with the
+      increased importance of industry in life. For modern psychology emphasizes
+      the radical importance of primitive unlearned instincts of exploring,
+      experimentation, and "trying on." It reveals that learning is not the work
+      of something ready-made called mind, but that mind itself is an
+      organization of original capacities into activities having significance.
+      As we have already seen (ante, p. 204), in older pupils work is to
+      educative development of raw native activities what play is for younger
+      pupils. Moreover, the passage from play to work should be gradual, not
+      involving a radical change of attitude but carrying into work the elements
+      of play, plus continuous reorganization in behalf of greater control. The
+      reader will remark that these five points practically resume the main
+      contentions of the previous part of the work. Both practically and
+      philosophically, the key to the present educational situation lies in a
+      gradual reconstruction of school materials and methods so as to utilize
+      various forms of occupation typifying social callings, and to bring out
+      their intellectual and moral content. This reconstruction must relegate
+      purely literary methods&mdash;including textbooks&mdash;and dialectical
+      methods to the position of necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent
+      development of consecutive and cumulative activities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational
+      reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a technical
+      preparation for industries and professions as they now operate, much less
+      by merely reproducing existing industrial conditions in the school. The
+      problem is not that of making the schools an adjunct to manufacture and
+      commerce, but of utilizing the factors of industry to make school life
+      more active, more full of immediate meaning, more connected with
+      out-of-school experience. The problem is not easy of solution. There is a
+      standing danger that education will perpetuate the older traditions for a
+      select few, and effect its adjustment to the newer economic conditions
+      more or less on the basis of acquiescence in the untransformed,
+      unrationalized, and unsocialized phases of our defective industrial
+      regime. Put in concrete terms, there is danger that vocational education
+      will be interpreted in theory and practice as trade education: as a means
+      of securing technical efficiency in specialized future pursuits. Education
+      would then become an instrument of perpetuating unchanged the existing
+      industrial order of society, instead of operating as a means of its
+      transformation. The desired transformation is not difficult to define in a
+      formal way. It signifies a society in which every person shall be occupied
+      in something which makes the lives of others better worth living, and
+      which accordingly makes the ties which bind persons together more
+      perceptible&mdash;which breaks down the barriers of distance between them.
+      It denotes a state of affairs in which the interest of each in his work is
+      uncoerced and intelligent: based upon its congeniality to his own
+      aptitudes. It goes without saying that we are far from such a social
+      state; in a literal and quantitative sense, we may never arrive at it. But
+      in principle, the quality of social changes already accomplished lies in
+      this direction. There are more ample resources for its achievement now
+      than ever there have been before. No insuperable obstacles, given the
+      intelligent will for its realization, stand in the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Success or failure in its realization depends more upon the adoption of
+      educational methods calculated to effect the change than upon anything
+      else. For the change is essentially a change in the quality of mental
+      disposition&mdash;an educative change. This does not mean that we can
+      change character and mind by direct instruction and exhortation, apart
+      from a change in industrial and political conditions. Such a conception
+      contradicts our basic idea that character and mind are attitudes of
+      participative response in social affairs. But it does mean that we may
+      produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like to
+      realize, and by forming minds in accord with it gradually modify the
+      larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society. Sentimentally, it
+      may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present regime is not
+      found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact
+      that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are
+      pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such callings
+      constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire to slight and
+      evade. Neither men's hearts nor their minds are in their work. On the
+      other hand, those who are not only much better off in worldly goods, but
+      who are in excessive, if not monopolistic, control of the activities of
+      the many are shut off from equality and generality of social intercourse.
+      They are stimulated to pursuits of indulgence and display; they try to
+      make up for the distance which separates them from others by the
+      impression of force and superior possession and enjoyment which they can
+      make upon others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational
+      education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form. Taking its stand
+      upon a dogma of social predestination, it would assume that some are to
+      continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like the present,
+      and would aim simply to give them what is termed a trade education&mdash;that
+      is, greater technical efficiency. Technical proficiency is often sadly
+      lacking, and is surely desirable on all accounts&mdash;not merely for the
+      sake of the production of better goods at less cost, but for the greater
+      happiness found in work. For no one cares for what one cannot half do. But
+      there is a great difference between a proficiency limited to immediate
+      work, and a competency extended to insight into its social bearings;
+      between efficiency in carrying out the plans of others and in one forming
+      one's own. At present, intellectual and emotional limitation characterizes
+      both the employing and the employed class. While the latter often have no
+      concern with their occupation beyond the money return it brings, the
+      former's outlook may be confined to profit and power. The latter interest
+      generally involves much greater intellectual initiation and larger survey
+      of conditions. For it involves the direction and combination of a large
+      number of diverse factors, while the interest in wages is restricted to
+      certain direct muscular movements. But none the less there is a limitation
+      of intelligence to technical and non-humane, non-liberal channels, so far
+      as the work does not take in its social bearings. And when the animating
+      motive is desire for private profit or personal power, this limitation is
+      inevitable. In fact, the advantage in immediate social sympathy and humane
+      disposition often lies with the economically unfortunate, who have not
+      experienced the hardening effects of a one-sided control of the affairs of
+      others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of departure
+      from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely to assume and to
+      perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and thus to become an instrument
+      in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination. Those who are
+      in a position to make their wishes good, will demand a liberal, a cultural
+      occupation, and one which fits for directive power the youth in whom they
+      are directly interested. To split the system, and give to others, less
+      fortunately situated, an education conceived mainly as specific trade
+      preparation, is to treat the schools as an agency for transferring the
+      older division of labor and leisure, culture and service, mind and body,
+      directed and directive class, into a society nominally democratic. Such a
+      vocational education inevitably discounts the scientific and historic
+      human connections of the materials and processes dealt with. To include
+      such things in narrow trade education would be to waste time; concern for
+      them would not be "practical." They are reserved for those who have
+      leisure at command&mdash;the leisure due to superior economic resources.
+      Such things might even be dangerous to the interests of the controlling
+      class, arousing discontent or ambitions "beyond the station" of those
+      working under the direction of others. But an education which acknowledges
+      the full intellectual and social meaning of a vocation would include
+      instruction in the historic background of present conditions; training in
+      science to give intelligence and initiative in dealing with material and
+      agencies of production; and study of economics, civics, and politics, to
+      bring the future worker into touch with the problems of the day and the
+      various methods proposed for its improvement. Above all, it would train
+      power of readaptation to changing conditions so that future workers would
+      not become blindly subject to a fate imposed upon them. This ideal has to
+      contend not only with the inertia of existing educational traditions, but
+      also with the opposition of those who are entrenched in command of the
+      industrial machinery, and who realize that such an educational system if
+      made general would threaten their ability to use others for their own
+      ends. But this very fact is the presage of a more equitable and
+      enlightened social order, for it gives evidence of the dependence of
+      social reorganization upon educational reconstruction. It is accordingly
+      an encouragement to those believing in a better order to undertake the
+      promotion of a vocational education which does not subject youth to the
+      demands and standards of the present system, but which utilizes its
+      scientific and social factors to develop a courageous intelligence, and to
+      make intelligence practical and executive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM23" id="link2H_SUMM23">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. A vocation signifies any form of continuous activity which
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      renders service to others and engages personal powers in behalf of the
+      accomplishment of results. The question of the relation of vocation to
+      education brings to a focus the various problems previously discussed
+      regarding the connection of thought with bodily activity; of individual
+      conscious development with associated life; of theoretical culture with
+      practical behavior having definite results; of making a livelihood with
+      the worthy enjoyment of leisure. In general, the opposition to recognition
+      of the vocational phases of life in education (except for the utilitarian
+      three R's in elementary schooling) accompanies the conservation of
+      aristocratic ideals of the past. But, at the present juncture, there is a
+      movement in behalf of something called vocational training which, if
+      carried into effect, would harden these ideas into a form adapted to the
+      existing industrial regime. This movement would continue the traditional
+      liberal or cultural education for the few economically able to enjoy it,
+      and would give to the masses a narrow technical trade education for
+      specialized callings, carried on under the control of others. This scheme
+      denotes, of course, simply a perpetuation of the older social division,
+      with its counterpart intellectual and moral dualisms. But it means its
+      continuation under conditions where it has much less justification for
+      existence. For industrial life is now so dependent upon science and so
+      intimately affects all forms of social intercourse, that there is an
+      opportunity to utilize it for development of mind and character. Moreover,
+      a right educational use of it would react upon intelligence and interest
+      so as to modify, in connection with legislation and administration, the
+      socially obnoxious features of the present industrial and commercial
+      order. It would turn the increasing fund of social sympathy to
+      constructive account, instead of leaving it a somewhat blind philanthropic
+      sentiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would give those who engage in industrial callings desire and ability
+      to share in social control, and ability to become masters of their
+      industrial fate. It would enable them to saturate with meaning the
+      technical and mechanical features which are so marked a feature of our
+      machine system of production and distribution. So much for those who now
+      have the poorer economic opportunities. With the representatives of the
+      more privileged portion of the community, it would increase sympathy for
+      labor, create a disposition of mind which can discover the culturing
+      elements in useful activity, and increase a sense of social
+      responsibility. The crucial position of the question of vocational
+      education at present is due, in other words, to the fact that it
+      concentrates in a specific issue two fundamental questions:&mdash;Whether
+      intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity which puts
+      nature to human use, and whether individual culture is best secured under
+      egoistic or social conditions. No discussion of details is undertaken in
+      this chapter, because this conclusion but summarizes the discussion of the
+      previous chapters, XV to XXII, inclusive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. A Critical Review. Although we are dealing with the philosophy of
+      education, DO definition of philosophy has yet been given; nor has there
+      been an explicit consideration of the nature of a philosophy of education.
+      This topic is now introduced by a summary account of the logical order
+      implied in the previous discussions, for the purpose of bringing out the
+      philosophic issues involved. Afterwards we shall undertake a brief
+      discussion, in more specifically philosophical terms, of the theories of
+      knowledge and of morals implied in different educational ideals as they
+      operate in practice. The prior chapters fall logically into three parts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I. The first chapters deal with education as a social need and function.
+      Their purpose is to outline the general features of education as the
+      process by which social groups maintain their continuous existence.
+      Education was shown to be a process of renewal of the meanings of
+      experience through a process of transmission, partly incidental to the
+      ordinary companionship or intercourse of adults and youth, partly
+      deliberately instituted to effect social continuity. This process was seen
+      to involve control and growth of both the immature individual and the
+      group in which he lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This consideration was formal in that it took no specific account of the
+      quality of the social group concerned&mdash;the kind of society aiming at
+      its own perpetuation through education. The general discussion was then
+      specified by application to social groups which are intentionally
+      progressive, and which aim at a greater variety of mutually shared
+      interests in distinction from those which aim simply at the preservation
+      of established customs. Such societies were found to be democratic in
+      quality, because of the greater freedom allowed the constituent members,
+      and the conscious need of securing in individuals a consciously socialized
+      interest, instead of trusting mainly to the force of customs operating
+      under the control of a superior class. The sort of education appropriate
+      to the development of a democratic community was then explicitly taken as
+      the criterion of the further, more detailed analysis of education.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      II. This analysis, based upon the democratic criterion, was seen to imply
+      the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing of experience, of
+      such a nature as to increase its recognized meaning or social content, and
+      as to increase the capacity of individuals to act as directive guardians
+      of this reorganization. (See Chapters VI-VII.) This distinction was then
+      used to outline the respective characters of subject matter and method. It
+      also defined their unity, since method in study and learning upon this
+      basis is just the consciously directed movement of reorganization of the
+      subject matter of experience. From this point of view the main principles
+      of method and subject matter of learning were developed (Chapters
+      XIII-XIV.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      III. Save for incidental criticisms designed to illustrate principles by
+      force of contrast, this phase of the discussion took for granted the
+      democratic criterion and its application in present social life. In the
+      subsequent chapters (XVIII-XXII) we considered the present limitation of
+      its actual realization. They were found to spring from the notion that
+      experience consists of a variety of segregated domains, or interests, each
+      having its own independent value, material, and method, each checking
+      every other, and, when each is kept properly bounded by the others,
+      forming a kind of "balance of powers" in education. We then proceeded to
+      an analysis of the various assumptions underlying this segregation. On the
+      practical side, they were found to have their cause in the divisions of
+      society into more or less rigidly marked-off classes and groups&mdash;in
+      other words, in obstruction to full and flexible social interaction and
+      intercourse. These social ruptures of continuity were seen to have their
+      intellectual formulation in various dualisms or antitheses&mdash;such as
+      that of labor and leisure, practical and intellectual activity, man and
+      nature, individuality and association, culture and vocation. In this
+      discussion, we found that these different issues have their counterparts
+      in formulations which have been made in classic philosophic systems; and
+      that they involve the chief problems of philosophy&mdash;such as mind (or
+      spirit) and matter, body and mind, the mind and the world, the individual
+      and his relationships to others, etc. Underlying these various separations
+      we found the fundamental assumption to be an isolation of mind from
+      activity involving physical conditions, bodily organs, material
+      appliances, and natural objects. Consequently, there was indicated a
+      philosophy which recognizes the origin, place, and function of mind in an
+      activity which controls the environment. Thus we have completed the
+      circuit and returned to the conceptions of the first portion of this book:
+      such as the biological continuity of human impulses and instincts with
+      natural energies; the dependence of the growth of mind upon participation
+      in conjoint activities having a common purpose; the influence of the
+      physical environment through the uses made of it in the social medium; the
+      necessity of utilization of individual variations in desire and thinking
+      for a progressively developing society; the essential unity of method and
+      subject matter; the intrinsic continuity of ends and means; the
+      recognition of mind as thinking which perceives and tests the meanings of
+      behavior. These conceptions are consistent with the philosophy which sees
+      intelligence to be the purposive reorganization, through action, of the
+      material of experience; and they are inconsistent with each of the
+      dualistic philosophies mentioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Nature of Philosophy. Our further task is to extract and make
+      explicit the idea of philosophy implicit in these considerations. We have
+      already virtually described, though not defined, philosophy in terms of
+      the problems with which it deals; and we have pointed out that these problems originate in the conflicts
+and difficulties of social life. The problems are such things as the
+relations of mind and matter; body and soul; humanity and physical
+nature; the individual and the social; theory&mdash;or knowing, and
+practice&mdash;or doing. The philosophical systems which formulate these
+problems record the main lineaments and difficulties of contemporary
+social practice. They bring to explicit consciousness what men have come
+to think, in virtue of the quality of their current experience, about
+nature, themselves, and the reality they conceive to include or to
+govern both.
+</p>
+<p>
+As we might expect, then, philosophy has generally been defined in ways
+which imply a certain totality, generality, and ultimateness of both
+subject matter and method. With respect to subject matter, philosophy
+is an attempt to <i>comprehend</i>&mdash;that is, to gather together the varied
+details of the world and of life into a single inclusive whole, which
+shall either be a unity, or, as in the dualistic systems, shall reduce
+the plural details to a small number of ultimate principles. On the
+side of the attitude of the philosopher and of those who accept his
+conclusions, there is the endeavor to attain as unified, consistent,
+and complete an outlook upon experience as is possible. This aspect is
+expressed in the word 'philosophy'&mdash;love of wisdom. Whenever philosophy
+has been taken seriously, it has always been assumed that it signified
+achieving a wisdom which would influence the conduct of life. Witness
+the fact that almost all ancient schools of philosophy were also
+organized ways of living, those who accepted their tenets being
+committed to certain distinctive modes of conduct; witness the intimate
+connection of philosophy with the theology of the Roman church in the
+middle ages, its frequent association with religious interests, and, at
+national crises, its association with political struggles.
+</p>
+<p>
+This direct and intimate connection of philosophy with an outlook upon
+life obviously differentiates philosophy from science. Particular facts
+and laws of science evidently influence conduct. They suggest things to
+do and not do, and provide means of execution. When science denotes not
+simply a report of the particular facts discovered about the world but
+a <i>general attitude</i> toward it&mdash;as distinct from special things to do
+&mdash;it merges into philosophy. For an underlying disposition represents an
+attitude not to this and that thing nor even to the aggregate
+      of known things, but to the considerations which govern conduct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of subject matter.
+      For this reason, the definition of such conceptions as generality,
+      totality, and ultimateness is most readily reached from the side of the
+      disposition toward the world which they connote. In any literal and
+      quantitative sense, these terms do not apply to the subject matter of
+      knowledge, for completeness and finality are out of the question. The very
+      nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process forbids. In a less
+      rigid sense, they apply to science rather than to philosophy. For
+      obviously it is to mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology,
+      history, etc. that we must go, not to philosophy, to find out the facts of
+      the world. It is for the sciences to say what generalizations are tenable
+      about the world and what they specifically are. But when we ask what sort
+      of permanent disposition of action toward the world the scientific
+      disclosures exact of us we are raising a philosophic question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this point of view, "totality" does not mean the hopeless task of a
+      quantitative summation. It means rather consistency of mode of response in
+      reference to the plurality of events which occur. Consistency does not
+      mean literal identity; for since the same thing does not happen twice, an
+      exact repetition of a reaction involves some maladjustment. Totality means
+      continuity&mdash;the carrying on of a former habit of action with the
+      readaptation necessary to keep it alive and growing. Instead of signifying
+      a ready-made complete scheme of action, it means keeping the balance in a
+      multitude of diverse actions, so that each borrows and gives significance
+      to every other. Any person who is open-minded and sensitive to new
+      perceptions, and who has concentration and responsibility in connecting
+      them has, in so far, a philosophic disposition. One of the popular senses
+      of philosophy is calm and endurance in the face of difficulty and loss; it
+      is even supposed to be a power to bear pain without complaint. This
+      meaning is a tribute to the influence of the Stoic philosophy rather than
+      an attribute of philosophy in general. But in so far as it suggests that
+      the wholeness characteristic of philosophy is a power to learn, or to
+      extract meaning, from even the unpleasant vicissitudes of experience and
+      to embody what is learned in an ability to go on learning, it is justified
+      in any scheme. An analogous interpretation applies to the generality and
+      ultimateness of philosophy. Taken literally, they are absurd pretensions;
+      they indicate insanity. Finality does not mean, however, that experience
+      is ended and exhausted, but means the disposition to penetrate to deeper
+      levels of meaning&mdash;to go below the surface and find out the
+      connections of any event or object, and to keep at it. In like manner the
+      philosophic attitude is general in the sense that it is averse to taking
+      anything as isolated; it tries to place an act in its context&mdash;which
+      constitutes its significance. It is of assistance to connect philosophy
+      with thinking in its distinction from knowledge. Knowledge, grounded
+      knowledge, is science; it represents objects which have been settled,
+      ordered, disposed of rationally. Thinking, on the other hand, is
+      prospective in reference. It is occasioned by an unsettlement and it aims
+      at overcoming a disturbance. Philosophy is thinking what the known demands
+      of us&mdash;what responsive attitude it exacts. It is an idea of what is
+      possible, not a record of accomplished fact. Hence it is hypothetical,
+      like all thinking. It presents an assignment of something to be done&mdash;something
+      to be tried. Its value lies not in furnishing solutions (which can be
+      achieved only in action) but in defining difficulties and suggesting
+      methods for dealing with them. Philosophy might almost be described as
+      thinking which has become conscious of itself&mdash;which has generalized
+      its place, function, and value in experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      More specifically, the demand for a "total" attitude arises because there
+      is the need of integration in action of the conflicting various interests
+      in life. Where interests are so superficial that they glide readily into
+      one another, or where they are not sufficiently organized to come into
+      conflict with one another, the need for philosophy is not perceptible. But
+      when the scientific interest conflicts with, say, the religious, or the
+      economic with the scientific or aesthetic, or when the conservative
+      concern for order is at odds with the progressive interest in freedom, or
+      when institutionalism clashes with individuality, there is a stimulus to
+      discover some more comprehensive point of view from which the divergencies
+      may be brought together, and consistency or continuity of experience
+      recovered. Often these clashes may be settled by an individual for
+      himself; the area of the struggle of aims is limited and a person works
+      out his own rough accommodations. Such homespun philosophies are genuine
+      and often adequate. But they do not result in systems of philosophy. These
+      arise when the discrepant claims of different ideals of conduct affect the
+      community as a whole, and the need for readjustment is general. These
+      traits explain some things which are often brought as objections against
+      philosophies, such as the part played in them by individual speculation,
+      and their controversial diversity, as well as the fact that philosophy
+      seems to be repeatedly occupied with much the same questions differently
+      stated. Without doubt, all these things characterize historic philosophies
+      more or less. But they are not objections to philosophy so much as they
+      are to human nature, and even to the world in which human nature is set.
+      If there are genuine uncertainties in life, philosophies must reflect that
+      uncertainty. If there are different diagnoses of the cause of a
+      difficulty, and different proposals for dealing with it; if, that is, the
+      conflict of interests is more or less embodied in different sets of
+      persons, there must be divergent competing philosophies. With respect to
+      what has happened, sufficient evidence is all that is needed to bring
+      agreement and certainty. The thing itself is sure. But with reference to
+      what it is wise to do in a complicated situation, discussion is inevitable
+      precisely because the thing itself is still indeterminate. One would not
+      expect a ruling class living at ease to have the same philosophy of life
+      as those who were having a hard struggle for existence. If the possessing
+      and the dispossessed had the same fundamental disposition toward the
+      world, it would argue either insincerity or lack of seriousness. A
+      community devoted to industrial pursuits, active in business and commerce,
+      is not likely to see the needs and possibilities of life in the same way
+      as a country with high aesthetic culture and little enterprise in turning
+      the energies of nature to mechanical account. A social group with a fairly
+      continuous history will respond mentally to a crisis in a very different
+      way from one which has felt the shock of abrupt breaks. Even if the same
+      data were present, they would be evaluated differently. But the different
+      sorts of experience attending different types of life prevent just the
+      same data from presenting themselves, as well as lead to a different
+      scheme of values. As for the similarity of problems, this is often more a
+      matter of appearance than of fact, due to old discussions being translated
+      into the terms of contemporary perplexities. But in certain fundamental
+      respects the same predicaments of life recur from time to time with only
+      such changes as are due to change of social context, including the growth
+      of the sciences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact that philosophic problems arise because of widespread and widely
+      felt difficulties in social practice is disguised because philosophers
+      become a specialized class which uses a technical language, unlike the
+      vocabulary in which the direct difficulties are stated. But where a system
+      becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of interests calling
+      for some program of social adjustment may always be discovered. At this
+      point, the intimate connection between philosophy and education appears.
+      In fact, education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the
+      human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic
+      discussions. The student of philosophy "in itself" is always in danger of
+      taking it as so much nimble or severe intellectual exercise&mdash;as
+      something said by philosophers and concerning them alone. But when
+      philosophic issues are approached from the side of the kind of mental
+      disposition to which they correspond, or the differences in educational
+      practice they make when acted upon, the life-situations which they
+      formulate can never be far from view. If a theory makes no difference in
+      educational endeavor, it must be artificial. The educational point of view
+      enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and
+      thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a
+      difference in practice. If we are willing to conceive education as the
+      process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional,
+      toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the
+      general theory of education. Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic&mdash;or
+      verbal&mdash;or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary
+      dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take
+      effect in conduct. Public agitation, propaganda, legislative and
+      administrative action are effective in producing the change of disposition
+      which a philosophy indicates as desirable, but only in the degree in which
+      they are educative&mdash;that is to say, in the degree in which they
+      modify mental and moral attitudes. And at the best, such methods are
+      compromised by the fact they are used with those whose habits are already
+      largely set, while education of youth has a fairer and freer field of
+      operation. On the other side, the business of schooling tends to become a
+      routine empirical affair unless its aims and methods are animated by such
+      a broad and sympathetic survey of its place in contemporary life as it is
+      the business of philosophy to provide. Positive science always implies
+      practically the ends which the community is concerned to achieve. Isolated
+      from such ends, it is matter of indifference whether its disclosures are
+      used to cure disease or to spread it; to increase the means of sustenance
+      of life or to manufacture war material to wipe life out. If society is
+      interested in one of these things rather than another, science shows the
+      way of attainment. Philosophy thus has a double task: that of criticizing
+      existing aims with respect to the existing state of science, pointing out
+      values which have become obsolete with the command of new resources,
+      showing what values are merely sentimental because there are no means for
+      their realization; and also that of interpreting the results of
+      specialized science in their bearing on future social endeavor. It is
+      impossible that it should have any success in these tasks without
+      educational equivalents as to what to do and what not to do. For
+      philosophic theory has no Aladdin's lamp to summon into immediate
+      existence the values which it intellectually constructs. In the mechanical
+      arts, the sciences become methods of managing things so as to utilize
+      their energies for recognized aims. By the educative arts philosophy may
+      generate methods of utilizing the energies of human beings in accord with
+      serious and thoughtful conceptions of life. Education is the laboratory in
+      which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are tested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is suggestive that European philosophy originated (among the Athenians)
+      under the direct pressure of educational questions. The earlier history of
+      philosophy, developed by the Greeks in Asia Minor and Italy, so far as its
+      range of topics is concerned, is mainly a chapter in the history of
+      science rather than of philosophy as that word is understood to-day. It
+      had nature for its subject, and speculated as to how things are made and
+      changed. Later the traveling teachers, known as the Sophists, began to
+      apply the results and the methods of the natural philosophers to human
+      conduct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Sophists, the first body of professional educators in Europe,
+      instructed the youth in virtue, the political arts, and the management of
+      city and household, philosophy began to deal with the relation of the
+      individual to the universal, to some comprehensive class, or to some
+      group; the relation of man and nature, of tradition and reflection, of
+      knowledge and action. Can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be
+      learned, they asked? What is learning? It has to do with knowledge. What,
+      then, is knowledge? How is it achieved? Through the senses, or by
+      apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has undergone a
+      preliminary logical discipline? Since learning is coming to know, it
+      involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom, from privation to fullness
+      from defect to perfection, from non-being to being, in the Greek way of
+      putting it. How is such a transition possible? Is change, becoming,
+      development really possible and if so, how? And supposing such questions
+      answered, what is the relation of instruction, of knowledge, to virtue?
+      This last question led to opening the problem of the relation of reason to
+      action, of theory to practice, since virtue clearly dwelt in action. Was
+      not knowing, the activity of reason, the noblest attribute of man? And
+      consequently was not purely intellectual activity itself the highest of
+      all excellences, compared with which the virtues of neighborliness and the
+      citizen's life were secondary? Or, on the other hand, was the vaunted
+      intellectual knowledge more than empty and vain pretense, demoralizing to
+      character and destructive of the social ties that bound men together in
+      their community life? Was not the only true, because the only moral, life
+      gained through obedient habituation to the customary practices of the
+      community? And was not the new education an enemy to good citizenship,
+      because it set up a rival standard to the established traditions of the
+      community?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of two or three generations such questions were cut loose
+      from their original practical bearing upon education and were discussed on
+      their own account; that is, as matters of philosophy as an independent
+      branch of inquiry. But the fact that the stream of European philosophical
+      thought arose as a theory of educational procedure remains an eloquent
+      witness to the intimate connection of philosophy and education.
+      "Philosophy of education" is not an external application of ready-made
+      ideas to a system of practice having a radically different origin and
+      purpose: it is only an explicit formulation of the problems of the
+      formation of right mental and moral habitudes in respect to the
+      difficulties of contemporary social life. The most penetrating definition
+      of philosophy which can be given is, then, that it is the theory of
+      education in its most general phases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social ideals and
+      methods thus go hand in hand. If there is especial need of educational
+      reconstruction at the present time, if this need makes urgent a
+      reconsideration of the basic ideas of traditional philosophic systems, it
+      is because of the thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying the
+      advance of science, the industrial revolution, and the development of
+      democracy. Such practical changes cannot take place without demanding an
+      educational reformation to meet them, and without leading men to ask what
+      ideas and ideals are implicit in these social changes, and what revisions
+      they require of the ideas and ideals which are inherited from older and
+      unlike cultures. Incidentally throughout the whole book, explicitly in the
+      last few chapters, we have been dealing with just these questions as they
+      affect the relationship of mind and body, theory and practice, man and
+      nature, the individual and social, etc. In our concluding chapters we
+      shall sum up the prior discussions with respect first to the philosophy of
+      knowledge, and then to the philosophy of morals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM24" id="link2H_SUMM24">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. After a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      implicit in the previous discussions, philosophy was defined as the
+      generalized theory of education. Philosophy was stated to be a form of
+      thinking, which, like all thinking, finds its origin in what is uncertain
+      in the subject matter of experience, which aims to locate the nature of
+      the perplexity and to frame hypotheses for its clearing up to be tested in
+      action. Philosophic thinking has for its differentia the fact that the
+      uncertainties with which it deals are found in widespread social
+      conditions and aims, consisting in a conflict of organized interests and
+      institutional claims. Since the only way of bringing about a harmonious
+      readjustment of the opposed tendencies is through a modification of
+      emotional and intellectual disposition, philosophy is at once an explicit
+      formulation of the various interests of life and a propounding of points
+      of view and methods through which a better balance of interests may be
+      effected. Since education is the process through which the needed
+      transformation may be accomplished and not remain a mere hypothesis as to
+      what is desirable, we reach a justification of the statement that
+      philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately conducted
+      practice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1. Continuity versus Dualism. A number of theories of knowing have been
+      criticized in the previous pages. In spite of their differences from one
+      another, they all agree in one fundamental respect which contrasts with
+      the theory which has been positively advanced. The latter assumes
+      continuity; the former state or imply certain basic divisions,
+      separations, or antitheses, technically called dualisms. The origin of
+      these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walls which mark off
+      social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and
+      poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers
+      mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent to
+      the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with isolated
+      subject matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social condition
+      must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is to be a
+      sincere account of experience. When it gets beyond dualism&mdash;as many
+      philosophies do in form&mdash;it can only be by appeal to something higher
+      than anything found in experience, by a flight to some transcendental
+      realm. And in denying duality in name such theories restore it in fact,
+      for they end in a division between things of this world as mere
+      appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as these divisions persist and others are added to them, each
+      leaves its mark upon the educational system, until the scheme of
+      education, taken as a whole, is a deposit of various purposes and
+      procedures. The outcome is that kind of check and balance of segregated
+      factors and values which has been described. (See Chapter XVIII.) The
+      present discussion is simply a formulation, in the terminology of
+      philosophy, of various antithetical conceptions involved in the theory of
+      knowing. In the first place, there is the opposition of empirical and
+      higher rational knowing. The first is connected with everyday affairs,
+      serves the purposes of the ordinary individual who has no specialized
+      intellectual
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      pursuit, and brings his wants into some kind of working connection with
+      the immediate environment. Such knowing is depreciated, if not despised,
+      as purely utilitarian, lacking in cultural significance. Rational
+      knowledge is supposed to be something which touches reality in ultimate,
+      intellectual fashion; to be pursued for its own sake and properly to
+      terminate in purely theoretical insight, not debased by application in
+      behavior. Socially, the distinction corresponds to that of the
+      intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a learned class
+      remote from concern with the means of living. Philosophically, the
+      difference turns about the distinction of the particular and universal.
+      Experience is an aggregate of more or less isolated particulars,
+      acquaintance with each of which must be separately made. Reason deals with
+      universals, with general principles, with laws, which lie above the welter
+      of concrete details. In the educational precipitate, the pupil is supposed
+      to have to learn, on one hand, a lot of items of specific information,
+      each standing by itself, and upon the other hand, to become familiar with
+      a certain number of laws and general relationships. Geography, as often
+      taught, illustrates the former; mathematics, beyond the rudiments of
+      figuring, the latter. For all practical purposes, they represent two
+      independent worlds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another antithesis is suggested by the two senses of the word "learning."
+      On the one hand, learning is the sum total of what is known, as that is
+      handed down by books and learned men. It is something external, an
+      accumulation of cognitions as one might store material commodities in a
+      warehouse. Truth exists ready-made somewhere. Study is then the process by
+      which an individual draws on what is in storage. On the other hand,
+      learning means something which the individual does when he studies. It is
+      an active, personally conducted affair. The dualism here is between
+      knowledge as something external, or, as it is often called, objective, and
+      knowing as something purely internal, subjective, psychical. There is, on
+      one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on the other, a ready-made
+      mind equipped with a faculty of knowing&mdash;if it only wills to exercise
+      it, which it is often strangely loath to do. The separation, often touched
+      upon, between subject matter and method is the educational equivalent of
+      this dualism. Socially the distinction has to do with the part of life
+      which is dependent upon authority and that where individuals are free to
+      advance. Another dualism is that of activity and passivity in knowing.
+      Purely empirical and physical things are often supposed to be known by
+      receiving impressions. Physical things somehow stamp themselves upon the
+      mind or convey themselves into consciousness by means of the sense organs.
+      Rational knowledge and knowledge of spiritual things is supposed, on the
+      contrary, to spring from activity initiated within the mind, an activity
+      carried on better if it is kept remote from all sullying touch of the
+      senses and external objects. The distinction between sense training and
+      object lessons and laboratory exercises, and pure ideas contained in
+      books, and appropriated&mdash;so it is thought&mdash;by some miraculous
+      output of mental energy, is a fair expression in education of this
+      distinction. Socially, it reflects a division between those who are
+      controlled by direct concern with things and those who are free to
+      cultivate themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another current opposition is that said to exist between the intellect and
+      the emotions. The emotions are conceived to be purely private and
+      personal, having nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in
+      apprehending facts and truths,&mdash;except perhaps the single emotion of
+      intellectual curiosity. The intellect is a pure light; the emotions are a
+      disturbing heat. The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions turn inward
+      to considerations of personal advantage and loss. Thus in education we
+      have that systematic depreciation of interest which has been noted, plus
+      the necessity in practice, with most pupils, of recourse to extraneous and
+      irrelevant rewards and penalties in order to induce the person who has a
+      mind (much as his clothes have a pocket) to apply that mind to the truths
+      to be known. Thus we have the spectacle of professional educators decrying
+      appeal to interest while they uphold with great dignity the need of
+      reliance upon examinations, marks, promotions and emotions, prizes, and
+      the time-honored paraphernalia of rewards and punishments. The effect of
+      this situation in crippling the teacher's sense of humor has not received
+      the attention which it deserves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and doing,
+      theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of action and the
+      body as its organ and means. We shall not repeat what has been said about
+      the source of this dualism in the division of society into a class
+      laboring with their muscles for material sustenance and a class which,
+      relieved from economic pressure, devotes itself to the arts of expression
+      and social direction. Nor is it necessary to speak again of the
+      educational evils which spring from the separation. We shall be content to
+      summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of this
+      conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity. (i) The
+      advance of physiology and the psychology associated with it have shown the
+      connection of mental activity with that of the nervous system. Too often
+      recognition of connection has stopped short at this point; the older
+      dualism of soul and body has been replaced by that of the brain and the
+      rest of the body. But in fact the nervous system is only a specialized
+      mechanism for keeping all bodily activities working together. Instead of
+      being isolated from them, as an organ of knowing from organs of motor
+      response, it is the organ by which they interact responsively with one
+      another. The brain is essentially an organ for effecting the reciprocal
+      adjustment to each other of the stimuli received from the environment and
+      responses directed upon it. Note that the adjusting is reciprocal; the
+      brain not only enables organic activity to be brought to bear upon any
+      object of the environment in response to a sensory stimulation, but this
+      response also determines what the next stimulus will be. See what happens,
+      for example, when a carpenter is at work upon a board, or an etcher upon
+      his plate&mdash;or in any case of a consecutive activity. While each motor
+      response is adjusted to the state of affairs indicated through the sense
+      organs, that motor response shapes the next sensory stimulus. Generalizing
+      this illustration, the brain is the machinery for a constant reorganizing
+      of activity so as to maintain its continuity; that is to say, to make such
+      modifications in future action as are required because of what has already
+      been done. The continuity of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it
+      from a routine repetition of identically the same motion, and from a
+      random activity where there is nothing cumulative. What makes it
+      continuous, consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act prepares
+      the way for later acts, while these take account of or reckon with the
+      results already attained&mdash;the basis of all responsibility. No one who
+      has realized the full force of the facts of the connection of knowing with
+      the nervous system and of the nervous system with the readjusting of
+      activity continuously to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing has
+      to do with reorganizing activity, instead of being something isolated from
+      all activity, complete on its own account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its discovery
+      of evolution. For the philosophic significance of the doctrine of
+      evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon continuity of simpler and
+      more complex organic forms until we reach man. The development of organic
+      forms begins with structures where the adjustment of environment and
+      organism is obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is at a
+      minimum. As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a greater number
+      of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a more and more marked
+      role, for it has a larger span of the future to forecast and plan for. The
+      effect upon the theory of knowing is to displace the notion that it is the
+      activity of a mere onlooker or spectator of the world, the notion which
+      goes with the idea of knowing as something complete in itself. For the
+      doctrine of organic development means that the living creature is a part
+      of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes, and making itself
+      secure in its precarious dependence only as it intellectually identifies
+      itself with the things about it, and, forecasting the future consequences
+      of what is going on, shapes its own activities accordingly. If the living,
+      experiencing being is an intimate participant in the activities of the
+      world to which it belongs, then knowledge is a mode of participation,
+      valuable in the degree in which it is effective. It cannot be the idle
+      view of an unconcerned spectator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (iii) The development of the experimental method as the method of getting
+      knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not mere opinion&mdash;the
+      method of both discovery and proof&mdash;is the remaining great force in
+      bringing about a transformation in the theory of knowledge. The
+      experimental method has two sides. (i) On one hand, it means that we have
+      no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has actually
+      produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with and confirm
+      the conception entertained. Short of such specific changes, our beliefs
+      are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and are to be
+      entertained tentatively and to be utilized as indications of experiments
+      to be tried. (ii) On the other hand, the experimental method of thinking
+      signifies that thinking is of avail; that it is of avail in just the
+      degree in which the anticipation of future consequences is made on the
+      basis of thorough observation of present conditions. Experimentation, in
+      other words, is not equivalent to blind reacting. Such surplus activity&mdash;a
+      surplus with reference to what has been observed and is now anticipated&mdash;is
+      indeed an unescapable factor in all our behavior, but it is not experiment
+      save as consequences are noted and are used to make predictions and plans
+      in similar situations in the future. The more the meaning of the
+      experimental method is perceived, the more our trying out of a certain way
+      of treating the material resources and obstacles which confront us
+      embodies a prior use of intelligence. What we call magic was with respect
+      to many things the experimental method of the savage; but for him to try
+      was to try his luck, not his ideas. The scientific experimental method is,
+      on the contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even when practically&mdash;or
+      immediately&mdash;unsuccessful, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we learn
+      from our failures when our endeavors are seriously thoughtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The experimental method is new as a scientific resource&mdash;as a
+      systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as a
+      practical device. Hence it is not surprising that men have not recognized
+      its full scope. For the most part, its significance is regarded as
+      belonging to certain technical and merely physical matters. It will
+      doubtless take a long time to secure the perception that it holds equally
+      as to the forming and testing of ideas in social and moral matters. Men
+      still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed by authority, to relieve
+      them of the trouble of thinking and the responsibility of directing their
+      activity by thought. They tend to confine their own thinking to a
+      consideration of which one among the rival systems of dogma they will
+      accept. Hence the schools are better adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to
+      make disciples than inquirers. But every advance in the influence of the
+      experimental method is sure to aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic,
+      and authoritative methods of forming beliefs which have governed the
+      schools of the past, and to transfer their prestige to methods which will
+      procure an active concern with things and persons, directed by aims of
+      increasing temporal reach and deploying greater range of things in space.
+      In time the theory of knowing must be derived from the practice which is
+      most successful in making knowledge; and then that theory will be employed
+      to improve the methods which are less successful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Schools of Method. There are various systems of philosophy with
+      characteristically different conceptions of the method of knowing. Some of
+      them are named scholasticism, sensationalism, rationalism, idealism,
+      realism, empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, etc. Many of them have
+      been criticized in connection with the discussion of some educational
+      problem. We are here concerned with them as involving deviations from that
+      method which has proved most effective in achieving knowledge, for a
+      consideration of the deviations may render clearer the true place of
+      knowledge in experience. In brief, the function of knowledge is to make
+      one experience freely available in other experiences. The word "freely"
+      marks the difference between the principle of knowledge and that of habit.
+      Habit means that an individual undergoes a modification through an
+      experience, which modification forms a predisposition to easier and more
+      effective action in a like direction in the future. Thus it also has the
+      function of making one experience available in subsequent experiences.
+      Within certain limits, it performs this function successfully. But habit,
+      apart from knowledge, does not make allowance for change of conditions,
+      for novelty. Prevision of change is not part of its scope, for habit
+      assumes the essential likeness of the new situation with the old.
+      Consequently it often leads astray, or comes between a person and the
+      successful performance of his task, just as the skill, based on habit
+      alone, of the mechanic will desert him when something unexpected occurs in
+      the running of the machine. But a man who understands the machine is the
+      man who knows what he is about. He knows the conditions under which a
+      given habit works, and is in a position to introduce the changes which
+      will readapt it to new conditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an
+      object which determine its applicability in a given situation. To take an
+      extreme example; savages react to a flaming comet as they are accustomed
+      to react to other events which threaten the security of their life. Since
+      they try to frighten wild animals or their enemies by shrieks, beating of
+      gongs, brandishing of weapons, etc., they use the same methods to scare
+      away the comet. To us, the method is plainly absurd&mdash;so absurd that
+      we fail to note that savages are simply falling back upon habit in a way
+      which exhibits its limitations. The only reason we do not act in some
+      analogous fashion is because we do not take the comet as an isolated,
+      disconnected event, but apprehend it in its connections with other events.
+      We place it, as we say, in the astronomical system. We respond to its
+      connections and not simply to the immediate occurrence. Thus our attitude
+      to it is much freer. We may approach it, so to speak, from any one of the
+      angles provided by its connections. We can bring into play, as we deem
+      wise, any one of the habits appropriate to any one of the connected
+      objects. Thus we get at a new event indirectly instead of immediately&mdash;by
+      invention, ingenuity, resourcefulness. An ideally perfect knowledge would
+      represent such a network of interconnections that any past experience
+      would offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problem
+      presented in a new experience. In fine, while a habit apart from knowledge
+      supplies us with a single fixed method of attack, knowledge means that
+      selection may be made from a much wider range of habits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two aspects of this more general and freer availability of former
+      experiences for subsequent ones may be distinguished. (See ante, p. 77.)
+      (i) One, the more tangible, is increased power of control. What cannot be
+      managed directly may be handled indirectly; or we can interpose barriers
+      between us and undesirable consequences; or we may evade them if we cannot
+      overcome them. Genuine knowledge has all the practical value attaching to
+      efficient habits in any case. (ii) But it also increases the meaning, the
+      experienced significance, attaching to an experience. A situation to which
+      we respond capriciously or by routine has only a minimum of conscious
+      significance; we get nothing mentally from it. But wherever knowledge
+      comes into play in determining a new experience there is mental reward;
+      even if we fail practically in getting the needed control we have the
+      satisfaction of experiencing a meaning instead of merely reacting
+      physically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the content of knowledge is what has happened, what is taken as
+      finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of knowledge is future
+      or prospective. For knowledge furnishes the means of understanding or
+      giving meaning to what is still going on and what is to be done. The
+      knowledge of a physician is what he has found out by personal acquaintance
+      and by study of what others have ascertained and recorded. But it is
+      knowledge to him because it supplies the resources by which he interprets
+      the unknown things which confront him, fills out the partial obvious facts
+      with connected suggested phenomena, foresees their probable future, and
+      makes plans accordingly. When knowledge is cut off from use in giving
+      meaning to what is blind and baffling, it drops out of consciousness
+      entirely or else becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation. There is
+      much emotional satisfaction to be had from a survey of the symmetry and
+      order of possessed knowledge, and the satisfaction is a legitimate one.
+      But this contemplative attitude is aesthetic, not intellectual. It is the
+      same sort of joy that comes from viewing a finished picture or a well
+      composed landscape. It would make no difference if the subject matter were
+      totally different, provided it had the same harmonious organization.
+      Indeed, it would make no difference if it were wholly invented, a play of
+      fancy. Applicability to the world means not applicability to what is past
+      and gone&mdash;that is out of the question by the nature of the case; it
+      means applicability to what is still going on, what is still unsettled, in
+      the moving scene in which we are implicated. The very fact that we so
+      easily overlook this trait, and regard statements of what is past and out
+      of reach as knowledge is because we assume the continuity of past and
+      future. We cannot entertain the conception of a world in which knowledge
+      of its past would not be helpful in forecasting and giving meaning to its
+      future. We ignore the prospective reference just because it is so
+      irretrievably implied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet many of the philosophic schools of method which have been mentioned
+      transform the ignoring into a virtual denial. They regard knowledge as
+      something complete in itself irrespective of its availability in dealing
+      with what is yet to be. And it is this omission which vitiates them and
+      which makes them stand as sponsors for educational methods which an
+      adequate conception of knowledge condemns. For one has only to call to
+      mind what is sometimes treated in schools as acquisition of knowledge to
+      realize how lacking it is in any fruitful connection with the ongoing
+      experience of the students&mdash;how largely it seems to be believed that
+      the mere appropriation of subject matter which happens to be stored in
+      books constitutes knowledge. No matter how true what is learned to those
+      who found it out and in whose experience it functioned, there is nothing
+      which makes it knowledge to the pupils. It might as well be something
+      about Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the
+      individual's own life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to social
+      conditions. It was a method for systematizing and lending rational
+      sanction to material accepted on authority. This subject matter meant so
+      much that it vitalized the defining and systematizing brought to bear upon
+      it. Under present conditions the scholastic method, for most persons,
+      means a form of knowing which has no especial connection with any
+      particular subject matter. It includes making distinctions, definitions,
+      divisions, and classifications for the mere sake of making them&mdash;with
+      no objective in experience. The view of thought as a purely physical
+      activity having its own forms, which are applied to any material as a seal
+      may be stamped on any plastic stuff, the view which underlies what is
+      termed formal logic is essentially the scholastic method generalized. The
+      doctrine of formal discipline in education is the natural counterpart of
+      the scholastic method.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The contrasting theories of the method of knowledge which go by the name
+      of sensationalism and rationalism correspond to an exclusive emphasis upon
+      the particular and the general respectively&mdash;or upon bare facts on
+      one side and bare relations on the other. In real knowledge, there is a
+      particularizing and a generalizing function working together. So far as a
+      situation is confused, it has to be cleared up; it has to be resolved into
+      details, as sharply defined as possible. Specified facts and qualities
+      constitute the elements of the problem to be dealt with, and it is through
+      our sense organs that they are specified. As setting forth the problem,
+      they may well be termed particulars, for they are fragmentary. Since our
+      task is to discover their connections and to recombine them, for us at the
+      time they are partial. They are to be given meaning; hence, just as they
+      stand, they lack it. Anything which is to be known, whose meaning has
+      still to be made out, offers itself as particular. But what is already
+      known, if it has been worked over with a view to making it applicable to
+      intellectually mastering new particulars, is general in function. Its
+      function of introducing connection into what is otherwise unconnected
+      constitutes its generality. Any fact is general if we use it to give
+      meaning to the elements of a new experience. "Reason" is just the ability
+      to bring the subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the
+      significance of the subject matter of a new experience. A person is
+      reasonable in the degree in which he is habitually open to seeing an event
+      which immediately strikes his senses not as an isolated thing but in its
+      connection with the common experience of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without the particulars as they are discriminated by the active responses
+      of sense organs, there is no material for knowing and no intellectual
+      growth. Without placing these particulars in the context of the meanings
+      wrought out in the larger experience of the past&mdash;without the use of
+      reason or thought&mdash;particulars are mere excitations or irritations.
+      The mistake alike of the sensational and the rationalistic schools is that
+      each fails to see that the function of sensory stimulation and thought is
+      relative to reorganizing experience in applying the old to the new,
+      thereby maintaining the continuity or consistency of life. The theory of
+      the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed
+      pragmatic. Its essential feature is to maintain the continuity of knowing
+      with an activity which purposely modifies the environment. It holds that
+      knowledge in its strict sense of something possessed consists of our
+      intellectual resources&mdash;of all the habits that render our action
+      intelligent. Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as
+      to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims
+      and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge.
+      Knowledge is not just something which we are now conscious of, but
+      consists of the dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now
+      happens. Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to
+      consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by conceiving
+      the connection between ourselves and the world in which we live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM25" id="link2H_SUMM25">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. Such social divisions as interfere with free and full
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      intercourse react to make the intelligence and knowing of members of the
+      separated classes one-sided. Those whose experience has to do with
+      utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve are practical
+      empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings in
+      whose active production they have had no share are practical rationalists.
+      Those who come in direct contact with things and have to adapt their
+      activities to them immediately are, in effect, realists; those who isolate
+      the meanings of these things and put them in a religious or so-called
+      spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect, idealists. Those
+      concerned with progress, who are striving to change received beliefs,
+      emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those whose chief business it
+      is to withstand change and conserve received truth emphasize the universal
+      and the fixed&mdash;and so on. Philosophic systems in their opposed
+      theories of knowledge present an explicit formulation of the traits
+      characteristic of these cut-off and one-sided segments of experience&mdash;one-sided
+      because barriers to intercourse prevent the experience of one from being
+      enriched and supplemented by that of others who are differently situated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free
+      interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of knowledge
+      which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is made
+      available in giving direction and meaning to another. The recent advances
+      in physiology, biology, and the logic of the experimental sciences supply
+      the specific intellectual instrumentalities demanded to work out and
+      formulate such a theory. Their educational equivalent is the connection of
+      the acquisition of knowledge in the schools with activities, or
+      occupations, carried on in a medium of associated life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1. The Inner and the Outer.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Since morality is concerned with conduct, any dualisms which are set up
+      between mind and activity must reflect themselves in the theory of morals.
+      Since the formulations of the separation in the philosophic theory of
+      morals are used to justify and idealize the practices employed in moral
+      training, a brief critical discussion is in place. It is a commonplace of
+      educational theory that the establishing of character is a comprehensive
+      aim of school instruction and discipline. Hence it is important that we
+      should be on our guard against a conception of the relations of
+      intelligence to character which hampers the realization of the aim, and on
+      the look-out for the conditions which have to be provided in order that
+      the aim may be successfully acted upon. The first obstruction which meets
+      us is the currency of moral ideas which split the course of activity into
+      two opposed factors, often named respectively the inner and outer, or the
+      spiritual and the physical. This division is a culmination of the dualism
+      of mind and the world, soul and body, end and means, which we have so
+      frequently noted. In morals it takes the form of a sharp demarcation of
+      the motive of action from its consequences, and of character from conduct.
+      Motive and character are regarded as something purely "inner," existing
+      exclusively in consciousness, while consequences and conduct are regarded
+      as outside of mind, conduct having to do simply with the movements which
+      carry out motives; consequences with what happens as a result. Different
+      schools identify morality with either the inner state of mind or the outer
+      act and results, each in separation from the other. Action with a purpose
+      is deliberate; it involves a consciously foreseen end and a mental
+      weighing of considerations pro and eon. It also involves a conscious state
+      of longing or desire for the end. The deliberate choice of an aim and of a
+      settled disposition of desire takes time. During this time complete overt
+      action is suspended. A person who does not have his mind made up, does not
+      know what to do. Consequently he postpones definite action so far as
+      possible. His position may be compared to that of a man considering
+      jumping across a ditch. If he were sure he could or could not make it,
+      definite activity in some direction would occur. But if he considers, he
+      is in doubt; he hesitates. During the time in which a single overt line of
+      action is in suspense, his activities are confined to such redistributions
+      of energy within the organism as will prepare a determinate course of
+      action. He measures the ditch with his eyes; he brings himself taut to get
+      a feel of the energy at his disposal; he looks about for other ways
+      across, he reflects upon the importance of getting across. All this means
+      an accentuation of consciousness; it means a turning in upon the
+      individual's own attitudes, powers, wishes, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Obviously, however, this surging up of personal factors into conscious
+      recognition is a part of the whole activity in its temporal development.
+      There is not first a purely psychical process, followed abruptly by a
+      radically different physical one. There is one continuous behavior,
+      proceeding from a more uncertain, divided, hesitating state to a more
+      overt, determinate, or complete state. The activity at first consists
+      mainly of certain tensions and adjustments within the organism; as these
+      are coordinated into a unified attitude, the organism as a whole acts&mdash;some
+      definite act is undertaken. We may distinguish, of course, the more
+      explicitly conscious phase of the continuous activity as mental or
+      psychical. But that only identifies the mental or psychical to mean the
+      indeterminate, formative state of an activity which in its fullness
+      involves putting forth of overt energy to modify the environment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our conscious thoughts, observations, wishes, aversions are important,
+      because they represent inchoate, nascent activities. They fulfill their
+      destiny in issuing, later on, into specific and perceptible acts. And
+      these inchoate, budding organic readjustments are important because they
+      are our sole escape from the dominion of routine habits and blind impulse.
+      They are activities having a new meaning in process of development. Hence,
+      normally, there is an accentuation of personal consciousness whenever our
+      instincts and ready formed habits find themselves blocked by novel
+      conditions. Then we are thrown back upon ourselves to reorganize our own
+      attitude before proceeding to a definite and irretrievable course of
+      action. Unless we try to drive our way through by sheer brute force, we
+      must modify our organic resources to adapt them to the specific features
+      of the situation in which we find ourselves. The conscious deliberating
+      and desiring which precede overt action are, then, the methodic personal
+      readjustment implied in activity in uncertain situations. This role of
+      mind in continuous activity is not always maintained, however. Desires for
+      something different, aversion to the given state of things caused by the
+      blocking of successful activity, stimulates the imagination. The picture
+      of a different state of things does not always function to aid ingenious
+      observation and recollection to find a way out and on. Except where there
+      is a disciplined disposition, the tendency is for the imagination to run
+      loose. Instead of its objects being checked up by conditions with
+      reference to their practicability in execution, they are allowed to
+      develop because of the immediate emotional satisfaction which they yield.
+      When we find the successful display of our energies checked by uncongenial
+      surroundings, natural and social, the easiest way out is to build castles
+      in the air and let them be a substitute for an actual achievement which
+      involves the pains of thought. So in overt action we acquiesce, and build
+      up an imaginary world in, mind. This break between thought and conduct is
+      reflected in those theories which make a sharp separation between mind as
+      inner and conduct and consequences as merely outer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the split may be more than an incident of a particular individual's
+      experience. The social situation may be such as to throw the class given
+      to articulate reflection back into their own thoughts and desires without
+      providing the means by which these ideas and aspirations can be used to
+      reorganize the environment. Under such conditions, men take revenge, as it
+      were, upon the alien and hostile environment by cultivating contempt for
+      it, by giving it a bad name. They seek refuge and consolation within their
+      own states of mind, their own imaginings and wishes, which they compliment
+      by calling both more real and more ideal than the despised outer world.
+      Such periods have recurred in history. In the early centuries of the
+      Christian era, the influential moral systems of Stoicism, of monastic and
+      popular Christianity and other religious movements of the day, took shape
+      under the influence of such conditions. The more action which might
+      express prevailing ideals was checked, the more the inner possession and
+      cultivation of ideals was regarded as self-sufficient&mdash;as the essence
+      of morality. The external world in which activity belongs was thought of
+      as morally indifferent. Everything lay in having the right motive, even
+      though that motive was not a moving force in the world. Much the same sort
+      of situation recurred in Germany in the later eighteenth and early
+      nineteenth centuries; it led to the Kantian insistence upon the good will
+      as the sole moral good, the will being regarded as something complete in
+      itself, apart from action and from the changes or consequences effected in
+      the world. Later it led to any idealization of existing institutions as
+      themselves the embodiment of reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purely internal morality of "meaning well," of having a good
+      disposition regardless of what comes of it, naturally led to a reaction.
+      This is generally known as either hedonism or utilitarianism. It was said
+      in effect that the important thing morally is not what a man is inside of
+      his own consciousness, but what he does&mdash;the consequences which
+      issue, the charges he actually effects. Inner morality was attacked as
+      sentimental, arbitrary, dogmatic, subjective&mdash;as giving men leave to
+      dignify and shield any dogma congenial to their self-interest or any
+      caprice occurring to imagination by calling it an intuition or an ideal of
+      conscience. Results, conduct, are what counts; they afford the sole
+      measure of morality. Ordinary morality, and hence that of the schoolroom,
+      is likely to be an inconsistent compromise of both views. On one hand,
+      certain states of feeling are made much of; the individual must "mean
+      well," and if his intentions are good, if he had the right sort of
+      emotional consciousness, he may be relieved of responsibility for full
+      results in conduct. But since, on the other hand, certain things have to
+      be done to meet the convenience and the requirements of others, and of
+      social order in general, there is great insistence upon the doing of
+      certain things, irrespective of whether the individual has any concern or
+      intelligence in their doing. He must toe the mark; he must have his nose
+      held to the grindstone; he must obey; he must form useful habits; he must
+      learn self-control,&mdash;all of these precepts being understood in a way
+      which emphasizes simply the immediate thing tangibly done, irrespective of
+      the spirit of thought and desire in which it is done, and irrespective
+      therefore of its effect upon other less obvious doings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hoped that the prior discussion has sufficiently elaborated the
+      method by which both of these evils are avoided. One or both of these
+      evils must result wherever individuals, whether young or old, cannot
+      engage in a progressively cumulative undertaking under conditions which
+      engage their interest and require their reflection. For only in such cases
+      is it possible that the disposition of desire and thinking should be an
+      organic factor in overt and obvious conduct. Given a consecutive activity
+      embodying the student's own interest, where a definite result is to be
+      obtained, and where neither routine habit nor the following of dictated
+      directions nor capricious improvising will suffice, and there the rise of
+      conscious purpose, conscious desire, and deliberate reflection are
+      inevitable. They are inevitable as the spirit and quality of an activity
+      having specific consequences, not as forming an isolated realm of inner
+      consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. The Opposition of Duty and Interest. Probably there is no antithesis
+      more often set up in moral discussion than that between acting from
+      "principle" and from "interest." To act on principle is to act
+      disinterestedly, according to a general law, which is above all personal
+      considerations. To act according to interest is, so the allegation runs,
+      to act selfishly, with one's own personal profit in view. It substitutes
+      the changing expediency of the moment for devotion to unswerving moral
+      law. The false idea of interest underlying this opposition has already
+      been criticized (See Chapter X), but some moral aspects of the question
+      will now be considered. A clew to the matter may be found in the fact that
+      the supporters of the "interest" side of the controversy habitually use
+      the term "self-interest." Starting from the premises that unless there is
+      interest in an object or idea, there is no motive force, they end with the
+      conclusion that even when a person claims to be acting from principle or
+      from a sense of duty, he really acts as he does because there "is
+      something in it" for himself. The premise is sound; the conclusion false.
+      In reply the other school argues that since man is capable of generous
+      self-forgetting and even self-sacrificing action, he is capable of acting
+      without interest. Again the premise is sound, and the conclusion false.
+      The error on both sides lies in a false notion of the relation of interest
+      and the self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both sides assume that the self is a fixed and hence isolated quantity. As
+      a consequence, there is a rigid dilemma between acting for an interest of
+      the self and without interest. If the self is something fixed antecedent
+      to action, then acting from interest means trying to get more in the way
+      of possessions for the self&mdash;whether in the way of fame, approval of
+      others, power over others, pecuniary profit, or pleasure. Then the
+      reaction from this view as a cynical depreciation of human nature leads to
+      the view that men who act nobly act with no interest at all. Yet to an
+      unbiased judgment it would appear plain that a man must be interested in
+      what he is doing or he would not do it. A physician who continues to serve
+      the sick in a plague at almost certain danger to his own life must be
+      interested in the efficient performance of his profession&mdash;more
+      interested in that than in the safety of his own bodily life. But it is
+      distorting facts to say that this interest is merely a mask for an
+      interest in something else which he gets by continuing his customary
+      services&mdash;such as money or good repute or virtue; that it is only a
+      means to an ulterior selfish end. The moment we recognize that the self is
+      not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through
+      choice of action, the whole situation clears up. A man's interest in
+      keeping at his work in spite of danger to life means that his self is
+      found in that work; if he finally gave up, and preferred his personal
+      safety or comfort, it would mean that he preferred to be that kind of a
+      self. The mistake lies in making a separation between interest and self,
+      and supposing that the latter is the end to which interest in objects and
+      acts and others is a mere means. In fact, self and interest are two names
+      for the same fact; the kind and amount of interest actively taken in a
+      thing reveals and measures the quality of selfhood which exists. Bear in
+      mind that interest means the active or moving identity of the self with a
+      certain object, and the whole alleged dilemma falls to the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unselfishness, for example, signifies neither lack of interest in what is
+      done (that would mean only machine-like indifference) nor selflessness&mdash;which
+      would mean absence of virility and character. As employed everywhere
+      outside of this particular theoretical controversy, the term
+      "unselfishness" refers to the kind of aims and objects which habitually
+      interest a man. And if we make a mental survey of the kind of interests
+      which evoke the use of this epithet, we shall see that they have two
+      intimately associated features. (i) The generous self consciously
+      identifies itself with the full range of relationships implied in its
+      activity, instead of drawing a sharp line between itself and
+      considerations which are excluded as alien or indifferent; (ii) it
+      readjusts and expands its past ideas of itself to take in new consequences
+      as they become perceptible. When the physician began his career he may not
+      have thought of a pestilence; he may not have consciously identified
+      himself with service under such conditions. But, if he has a normally
+      growing or active self, when he finds that his vocation involves such
+      risks, he willingly adopts them as integral portions of his activity. The
+      wider or larger self which means inclusion instead of denial of
+      relationships is identical with a self which enlarges in order to assume
+      previously unforeseen ties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In such crises of readjustment&mdash;and the crisis may be slight as well
+      as great&mdash;there may be a transitional conflict of "principle" with
+      "interest." It is the nature of a habit to involve ease in the accustomed
+      line of activity. It is the nature of a readjusting of habit to involve an
+      effort which is disagreeable&mdash;something to which a man has
+      deliberately to hold himself. In other words, there is a tendency to
+      identify the self&mdash;or take interest&mdash;in what one has got used
+      to, and to turn away the mind with aversion or irritation when an
+      unexpected thing which involves an unpleasant modification of habit comes
+      up. Since in the past one has done one's duty without having to face such
+      a disagreeable circumstance, why not go on as one has been? To yield to
+      this temptation means to narrow and isolate the thought of the self&mdash;to
+      treat it as complete. Any habit, no matter how efficient in the past,
+      which has become set, may at any time bring this temptation with it. To
+      act from principle in such an emergency is not to act on some abstract
+      principle, or duty at large; it is to act upon the principle of a course
+      of action, instead of upon the circumstances which have attended it. The
+      principle of a physician's conduct is its animating aim and spirit&mdash;the
+      care for the diseased. The principle is not what justifies an activity,
+      for the principle is but another name for the continuity of the activity.
+      If the activity as manifested in its consequences is undesirable, to act
+      upon principle is to accentuate its evil. And a man who prides himself
+      upon acting upon principle is likely to be a man who insists upon having
+      his own way without learning from experience what is the better way. He
+      fancies that some abstract principle justifies his course of action
+      without recognizing that his principle needs justification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Assuming, however, that school conditions are such as to provide desirable
+      occupations, it is interest in the occupation as a whole&mdash;that is, in
+      its continuous development&mdash;which keeps a pupil at his work in spite
+      of temporary diversions and unpleasant obstacles. Where there is no
+      activity having a growing significance, appeal to principle is either
+      purely verbal, or a form of obstinate pride or an appeal to extraneous
+      considerations clothed with a dignified title. Undoubtedly there are
+      junctures where momentary interest ceases and attention flags, and where
+      reinforcement is needed. But what carries a person over these hard
+      stretches is not loyalty to duty in the abstract, but interest in his
+      occupation. Duties are "offices"&mdash;they are the specific acts needed
+      for the fulfilling of a function&mdash;or, in homely language&mdash;doing
+      one's job. And the man who is genuinely interested in his job is the man
+      who is able to stand temporary discouragement, to persist in the face of
+      obstacles, to take the lean with the fat: he makes an interest out of
+      meeting and overcoming difficulties and distraction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Intelligence and Character. A noteworthy paradox often accompanies
+      discussions of morals. On the one hand, there is an identification of the
+      moral with the rational. Reason is set up as a faculty from which proceed
+      ultimate moral intuitions, and sometimes, as in the Kantian theory, it is
+      said to supply the only proper moral motive. On the other hand, the value
+      of concrete, everyday intelligence is constantly underestimated, and even
+      deliberately depreciated. Morals is often thought to be an affair with
+      which ordinary knowledge has nothing to do. Moral knowledge is thought to
+      be a thing apart, and conscience is thought of as something radically
+      different from consciousness. This separation, if valid, is of especial
+      significance for education. Moral education in school is practically
+      hopeless when we set up the development of character as a supreme end, and
+      at the same time treat the acquiring of knowledge and the development of
+      understanding, which of necessity occupy the chief part of school time, as
+      having nothing to do with character. On such a basis, moral education is
+      inevitably reduced to some kind of catechetical instruction, or lessons
+      about morals. Lessons "about morals" signify as matter of course lessons
+      in what other people think about virtues and duties. It amounts to
+      something only in the degree in which pupils happen to be already animated
+      by a sympathetic and dignified regard for the sentiments of others.
+      Without such a regard, it has no more influence on character than
+      information about the mountains of Asia; with a servile regard, it
+      increases dependence upon others, and throws upon those in authority the
+      responsibility for conduct. As a matter of fact, direct instruction in
+      morals has been effective only in social groups where it was a part of the
+      authoritative control of the many by the few. Not the teaching as such but
+      the reinforcement of it by the whole regime of which it was an incident
+      made it effective. To attempt to get similar results from lessons about
+      morals in a democratic society is to rely upon sentimental magic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the other end of the scale stands the Socratic-Platonic teaching which
+      identifies knowledge and virtue&mdash;which holds that no man does evil
+      knowingly but only because of ignorance of the good. This doctrine is
+      commonly attacked on the ground that nothing is more common than for a man
+      to know the good and yet do the bad: not knowledge, but habituation or
+      practice, and motive are what is required. Aristotle, in fact, at once
+      attacked the Platonic teaching on the ground that moral virtue is like an
+      art, such as medicine; the experienced practitioner is better than a man
+      who has theoretical knowledge but no practical experience of disease and
+      remedies. The issue turns, however, upon what is meant by knowledge.
+      Aristotle's objection ignored the gist of Plato's teaching to the effect
+      that man could not attain a theoretical insight into the good except as he
+      had passed through years of practical habituation and strenuous
+      discipline. Knowledge of the good was not a thing to be got either from
+      books or from others, but was achieved through a prolonged education. It
+      was the final and culminating grace of a mature experience of life.
+      Irrespective of Plato's position, it is easy to perceive that the term
+      knowledge is used to denote things as far apart as intimate and vital
+      personal realization,&mdash;a conviction gained and tested in experience,&mdash;and
+      a second-handed, largely symbolic, recognition that persons in general
+      believe so and so&mdash;a devitalized remote information. That the latter
+      does not guarantee conduct, that it does not profoundly affect character,
+      goes without saying. But if knowledge means something of the same sort as
+      our conviction gained by trying and testing that sugar is sweet and
+      quinine bitter, the case stands otherwise. Every time a man sits on a
+      chair rather than on a stove, carries an umbrella when it rains, consults
+      a doctor when ill&mdash;or in short performs any of the thousand acts
+      which make up his daily life, he proves that knowledge of a certain kind
+      finds direct issue in conduct. There is every reason to suppose that the
+      same sort of knowledge of good has a like expression; in fact "good" is an
+      empty term unless it includes the satisfactions experienced in such
+      situations as those mentioned. Knowledge that other persons are supposed
+      to know something might lead one to act so as to win the approbation
+      others attach to certain actions, or at least so as to give others the
+      impression that one agrees with them; there is no reason why it should
+      lead to personal initiative and loyalty in behalf of the beliefs
+      attributed to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not necessary, accordingly, to dispute about the proper meaning of
+      the term knowledge. It is enough for educational purposes to note the
+      different qualities covered by the one name, to realize that it is
+      knowledge gained at first hand through the exigencies of experience which
+      affects conduct in significant ways. If a pupil learns things from books
+      simply in connection with school lessons and for the sake of reciting what
+      he has learned when called upon, then knowledge will have effect upon some
+      conduct&mdash;namely upon that of reproducing statements at the demand of
+      others. There is nothing surprising that such "knowledge" should not have
+      much influence in the life out of school. But this is not a reason for
+      making a divorce between knowledge and conduct, but for holding in low
+      esteem this kind of knowledge. The same thing may be said of knowledge
+      which relates merely to an isolated and technical specialty; it modifies
+      action but only in its own narrow line. In truth, the problem of moral
+      education in the schools is one with the problem of securing knowledge&mdash;the
+      knowledge connected with the system of impulses and habits. For the use to
+      which any known fact is put depends upon its connections. The knowledge of
+      dynamite of a safecracker may be identical in verbal form with that of a
+      chemist; in fact, it is different, for it is knit into connection with
+      different aims and habits, and thus has a different import.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our prior discussion of subject-matter as proceeding from direct activity
+      having an immediate aim, to the enlargement of meaning found in geography
+      and history, and then to scientifically organized knowledge, was based
+      upon the idea of maintaining a vital connection between knowledge and
+      activity. What is learned and employed in an occupation having an aim and
+      involving cooperation with others is moral knowledge, whether consciously
+      so regarded or not. For it builds up a social interest and confers the
+      intelligence needed to make that interest effective in practice. Just
+      because the studies of the curriculum represent standard factors in social
+      life, they are organs of initiation into social values. As mere school
+      studies, their acquisition has only a technical worth. Acquired under
+      conditions where their social significance is realized, they feed moral
+      interest and develop moral insight. Moreover, the qualities of mind
+      discussed under the topic of method of learning are all of them
+      intrinsically moral qualities. Open-mindedness, single-mindedness,
+      sincerity, breadth of outlook, thoroughness, assumption of responsibility
+      for developing the consequences of ideas which are accepted, are moral
+      traits. The habit of identifying moral characteristics with external
+      conformity to authoritative prescriptions may lead us to ignore the
+      ethical value of these intellectual attitudes, but the same habit tends to
+      reduce morals to a dead and machinelike routine. Consequently while such
+      an attitude has moral results, the results are morally undesirable&mdash;above
+      all in a democratic society where so much depends upon personal
+      disposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. The Social and the Moral. All of the separations which we have been
+      criticizing&mdash;and which the idea of education set forth in the
+      previous chapters is designed to avoid&mdash;spring from taking morals too
+      narrowly,&mdash;giving them, on one side, a sentimental goody-goody turn
+      without reference to effective ability to do what is socially needed, and,
+      on the other side, overemphasizing convention and tradition so as to limit
+      morals to a list of definitely stated acts. As a matter of fact, morals
+      are as broad as acts which concern our relationships with others. And
+      potentially this includes all our acts, even though their social bearing
+      may not be thought of at the time of performance. For every act, by the
+      principle of habit, modifies disposition&mdash;it sets up a certain kind
+      of inclination and desire. And it is impossible to tell when the habit
+      thus strengthened may have a direct and perceptible influence on our
+      association with others. Certain traits of character have such an obvious
+      connection with our social relationships that we call them "moral" in an
+      emphatic sense&mdash;truthfulness, honesty, chastity, amiability, etc. But
+      this only means that they are, as compared with some other attitudes,
+      central:&mdash;that they carry other attitudes with them. They are moral
+      in an emphatic sense not because they are isolated and exclusive, but
+      because they are so intimately connected with thousands of other attitudes
+      which we do not explicitly recognize&mdash;which perhaps we have not even
+      names for. To call them virtues in their isolation is like taking the
+      skeleton for the living body. The bones are certainly important, but their
+      importance lies in the fact that they support other organs of the body in
+      such a way as to make them capable of integrated effective activity. And
+      the same is true of the qualities of character which we specifically
+      designate virtues. Morals concern nothing less than the whole character,
+      and the whole character is identical with the man in all his concrete
+      make-up and manifestations. To possess virtue does not signify to have
+      cultivated a few namable and exclusive traits; it means to be fully and
+      adequately what one is capable of becoming through association with others
+      in all the offices of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The moral and the social quality of conduct are, in the last analysis,
+      identical with each other. It is then but to restate explicitly the import
+      of our earlier chapters regarding the social function of education to say
+      that the measure of the worth of the administration, curriculum, and
+      methods of instruction of the school is the extent to which they are
+      animated by a social spirit. And the great danger which threatens school
+      work is the absence of conditions which make possible a permeating social
+      spirit; this is the great enemy of effective moral training. For this
+      spirit can be actively present only when certain conditions are met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (i) In the first place, the school must itself be a community life in all
+      which that implies. Social perceptions and interests can be developed only
+      in a genuinely social medium&mdash;one where there is give and take in the
+      building up of a common experience. Informational statements about things
+      can be acquired in relative isolation by any one who previously has had
+      enough intercourse with others to have learned language. But realization
+      of the meaning of the linguistic signs is quite another matter. That
+      involves a context of work and play in association with others. The plea
+      which has been made for education through continued constructive
+      activities in this book rests upon the fact they afford an opportunity for
+      a social atmosphere. In place of a school set apart from life as a place
+      for learning lessons, we have a miniature social group in which study and
+      growth are incidents of present shared experience. Playgrounds, shops,
+      workrooms, laboratories not only direct the natural active tendencies of
+      youth, but they involve intercourse, communication, and cooperation,&mdash;all
+      extending the perception of connections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (ii) The learning in school should be continuous with that out of school.
+      There should be a free interplay between the two. This is possible only
+      when there are numerous points of contact between the social interests of
+      the one and of the other. A school is conceivable in which there should be
+      a spirit of companionship and shared activity, but where its social life
+      would no more represent or typify that of the world beyond the school
+      walls than that of a monastery. Social concern and understanding would be
+      developed, but they would not be available outside; they would not carry
+      over. The proverbial separation of town and gown, the cultivation of
+      academic seclusion, operate in this direction. So does such adherence to
+      the culture of the past as generates a reminiscent social spirit, for this
+      makes an individual feel more at home in the life of other days than in
+      his own. A professedly cultural education is peculiarly exposed to this
+      danger. An idealized past becomes the refuge and solace of the spirit;
+      present-day concerns are found sordid, and unworthy of attention. But as a
+      rule, the absence of a social environment in connection with which
+      learning is a need and a reward is the chief reason for the isolation of
+      the school; and this isolation renders school knowledge inapplicable to
+      life and so infertile in character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to
+      recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education
+      are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social
+      efficiency, are moral traits&mdash;marks of a person who is a worthy
+      member of that society which it is the business of education to further.
+      There is an old saying to the effect that it is not enough for a man to be
+      good; he must be good for something. The something for which a man must be
+      good is capacity to live as a social member so that what he gets from
+      living with others balances with what he contributes. What he gets and
+      gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions, and ideas, is not
+      external possessions, but a widening and deepening of conscious life&mdash;a
+      more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings. What he
+      materially receives and gives is at most opportunities and means for the
+      evolution of conscious life. Otherwise, it is neither giving nor taking,
+      but a shifting about of the position of things in space, like the stirring
+      of water and sand with a stick. Discipline, culture, social efficiency,
+      personal refinement, improvement of character are but phases of the growth
+      of capacity nobly to share in such a balanced experience. And education is
+      not a mere means to such a life. Education is such a life. To maintain
+      capacity for such education is the essence of morals. For conscious life
+      is a continual beginning afresh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_SUMM26" id="link2H_SUMM26">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Summary. The most important problem of moral education in the school
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      concerns the relationship of knowledge and conduct. For unless the
+      learning which accrues in the regular course of study affects character,
+      it is futile to conceive the moral end as the unifying and culminating end
+      of education. When there is no intimate organic connection between the
+      methods and materials of knowledge and moral growth, particular lessons
+      and modes of discipline have to be resorted to: knowledge is not
+      integrated into the usual springs of action and the outlook on life, while
+      morals become moralistic&mdash;a scheme of separate virtues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two theories chiefly associated with the separation of learning from
+      activity, and hence from morals, are those which cut off inner disposition
+      and motive&mdash;the conscious personal factor&mdash;and deeds as purely
+      physical and outer; and which set action from interest in opposition to
+      that from principle. Both of these separations are overcome in an
+      educational scheme where learning is the accompaniment of continuous
+      activities or occupations which have a social aim and utilize the
+      materials of typical social situations. For under such conditions, the
+      school becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community and one
+      in close interaction with other modes of associated experience beyond
+      school walls. All education which develops power to share effectively in
+      social life is moral. It forms a character which not only does the
+      particular deed socially necessary but one which is interested in that
+      continuous readjustment which is essential to growth. Interest in learning
+      from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
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+</html>
diff --git a/old/old-2024-03-11/852.txt b/old/old-2024-03-11/852.txt
new file mode 100644
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Democracy and Education
+
+Author: John Dewey
+
+Posting Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #852]
+Release Date: March, 1997
+Last Updated: August 1, 2015
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Reed
+
+
+
+
+
+DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION
+
+by John Dewey
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: I have tried to make this the most accurate text
+possible but I am sure that there are still mistakes. Please feel free
+to email me any errors or mistakes that you find. Citing the Chapter
+and paragraph. Haradda@aol.com and davidr@inconnect.com are my email
+addresses for now. David Reed
+
+I would like to dedicate this etext to my mother who was a elementary
+school teacher for more years than I can remember. Thanks.
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+     Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
+     Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
+     Chapter Three: Education as Direction
+     Chapter Four: Education as Growth
+     Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
+     Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
+     Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
+     Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
+     Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
+     Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
+     Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
+     Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
+     Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
+     Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
+     Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
+     Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
+     Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
+     Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
+     Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
+     Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
+     Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and
+             Humanism
+     Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
+     Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
+     Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
+     Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
+     Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals
+
+
+
+
+Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
+
+1. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between
+living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by
+renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than
+the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise,
+it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react
+in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so
+as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action.
+While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none
+the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its
+own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into
+smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its
+identity as a living thing.
+
+As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its
+own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To
+say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own
+conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus
+turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by
+the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this
+sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates
+and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would
+otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon
+the environment.
+
+In all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up indefinitely.
+After a while they succumb; they die. The creature is not equal to the
+task of indefinite self-renewal. But continuity of the life process
+is not dependent upon the prolongation of the existence of any one
+individual. Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous
+sequence. And though, as the geological record shows, not merely
+individuals but also species die out, the life process continues in
+increasingly complex forms. As some species die out, forms better
+adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain
+come into being. Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the
+environment to the needs of living organisms.
+
+We have been speaking of life in its lowest terms--as a physical thing.
+But we use the word "Life" to denote the whole range of experience,
+individual and racial. When we see a book called the Life of Lincoln
+we do not expect to find within its covers a treatise on physiology.
+We look for an account of social antecedents; a description of early
+surroundings, of the conditions and occupation of the family; of the
+chief episodes in the development of character; of signal struggles and
+achievements; of the individual's hopes, tastes, joys and sufferings. In
+precisely similar fashion we speak of the life of a savage tribe, of
+the Athenian people, of the American nation. "Life" covers customs,
+institutions, beliefs, victories and defeats, recreations and
+occupations.
+
+We employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense. And to it,
+as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the principle
+of continuity through renewal applies. With the renewal of physical
+existence goes, in the case of human beings, the recreation of beliefs,
+ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and practices. The continuity of any
+experience, through renewing of the social group, is a literal fact.
+Education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity
+of life. Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a
+modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without
+language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each
+unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time
+passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.
+
+The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of
+the constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of
+education. On one hand, there is the contrast between the immaturity of
+the new-born members of the group--its future sole representatives--and
+the maturity of the adult members who possess the knowledge and customs
+of the group. On the other hand, there is the necessity that these
+immature members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers,
+but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes, information,
+skill, and practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will
+cease its characteristic life. Even in a savage tribe, the achievements
+of adults are far beyond what the immature members would be capable of
+if left to themselves. With the growth of civilization, the gap between
+the original capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of
+the elders increases. Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare
+necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of
+the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are
+required. Beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent
+to, the aims and habits of the social group have to be rendered
+cognizant of them and actively interested. Education, and education
+alone, spans the gap.
+
+Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as
+biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of
+habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger.
+Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards,
+opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group
+life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive.
+If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they
+might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed
+by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of
+necessity.
+
+If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is
+obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of
+each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic took
+them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some
+are born as some die, makes possible through transmission of ideas and
+practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal
+is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and
+thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse
+into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the human young are so
+immature that if they were left to themselves without the guidance
+and succor of others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities
+necessary for physical existence. The young of human beings compare
+so poorly in original efficiency with the young of many of the lower
+animals, that even the powers needed for physical sustentation have to
+be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with
+respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral
+achievements of humanity!
+
+2. Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of
+teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we
+may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. But justification is found
+in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an
+unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are, indeed,
+one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions
+of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other
+agencies, a relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the
+necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we
+make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true context.
+
+Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication,
+but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.
+There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community,
+and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which
+they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to
+possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to
+form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a
+common understanding--like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such
+things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks;
+they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into
+physical pieces. The communication which insures participation in a
+common understanding is one which secures similar emotional and
+intellectual dispositions--like ways of responding to expectations and
+requirements.
+
+Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any
+more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet
+or miles removed from others. A book or a letter may institute a more
+intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles
+from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.
+Individuals do not even compose a social group because they all work
+for a common end. The parts of a machine work with a maximum of
+cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community.
+If, however, they were all cognizant of the common end and all
+interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity in
+view of it, then they would form a community. But this would involve
+communication. Each would have to know what the other was about and
+would have to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own
+purpose and progress. Consensus demands communication.
+
+We are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most social
+group there are many relations which are not as yet social. A large
+number of human relationships in any social group are still upon the
+machine-like plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired
+results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition
+and consent of those used. Such uses express physical superiority, or
+superiority of position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools,
+mechanical or fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and child,
+teacher and pupil, employer and employee, governor and governed, remain
+upon this level, they form no true social group, no matter how closely
+their respective activities touch one another. Giving and taking of
+orders modifies action and results, but does not of itself effect a
+sharing of purposes, a communication of interests.
+
+Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
+communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be
+a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed
+experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so
+far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one
+who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating,
+with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it
+be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward
+your experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and
+ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated in order to be
+communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as
+another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with
+the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can
+appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch
+phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's
+experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.
+All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that
+any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared,
+is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast
+in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.
+
+In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and
+learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together
+educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and
+enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and
+vividness of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone
+mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion
+to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. The
+inequality of achievement between the mature and the immature not only
+necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching
+gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form
+which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.
+
+3. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a marked
+difference between the education which every one gets from living
+with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to
+subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young. In the former case
+the education is incidental; it is natural and important, but it is not
+the express reason of the association. While it may be said, without
+exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution,
+economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in
+enlarging and improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of
+its original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.
+Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to secure the
+favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; family
+life in the desire to gratify appetites and secure family perpetuity;
+systematic labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others,
+etc. Only gradually was the by-product of the institution, its effect
+upon the quality and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more
+gradually still was this effect considered as a directive factor in the
+conduct of the institution. Even today, in our industrial life, apart
+from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and
+emotional reaction of the forms of human association under which the
+world's work is carried on receives little attention as compared with
+physical output.
+
+But in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as an
+immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy to ignore in
+our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition,
+or to subordinate that educative effect to some external and tangible
+result, it is not so easy as in dealing with adults. The need of
+training is too evident; the pressure to accomplish a change in their
+attitude and habits is too urgent to leave these consequences wholly
+out of account. Since our chief business with them is to enable them to
+share in a common life we cannot help considering whether or no we are
+forming the powers which will secure this ability. If humanity has made
+some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution
+is its distinctively human effect--its effect upon conscious
+experience--we may well believe that this lesson has been learned
+largely through dealings with the young.
+
+We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational
+process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of
+education--that of direct tuition or schooling. In undeveloped social
+groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups
+mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the
+same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They
+have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in
+connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted
+into full social membership. For the most part, they depend upon
+children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional
+set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing. In
+part, this sharing is direct, taking part in the occupations of adults
+and thus serving an apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the
+dramatic plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups
+and thus learn to know what they are like. To savages it would seem
+preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on
+in order that one might learn.
+
+But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the
+young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in
+the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the
+case of the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so
+remote in space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less
+adequate to reproduce its spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult
+activities thus depends upon a prior training given with this end in
+view. Intentional agencies--schools--and explicit material--studies--are
+devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special
+group of persons.
+
+Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the
+resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way to
+a kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if they
+were left to pick up their training in informal association with others,
+since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered.
+
+But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from
+indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether
+directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital. These
+qualities compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of available
+opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes
+remote and dead--abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of
+depreciation. What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies
+is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it
+exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within
+urgent daily interests.
+
+But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in
+symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. Such
+material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the ordinary
+standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this measure is
+connection with practical concerns. Such material exists in a world by
+itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression.
+There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction
+will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the
+subject matter of life-experience. The permanent social interests are
+likely to be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over
+into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters
+of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous
+in schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion
+which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human
+association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with
+imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning
+through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy.
+
+Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
+education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between
+the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional,
+modes of education. When the acquiring of information and of technical
+intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social
+disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while
+schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in learning--that is,
+egoistic specialists. To avoid a split between what men consciously
+know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of
+learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it
+in the formation of their characters by intercourse with others,
+becomes an increasingly delicate task with every development of special
+schooling.
+
+Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being.
+Since this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life
+is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to
+physiological life, education is to social life. This education consists
+primarily in transmission through communication. Communication is a
+process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It
+modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it. That
+the ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in
+the contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality
+of experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the
+immature. That is to say, while every social arrangement is educative
+in effect, the educative effect first becomes an important part of the
+purpose of the association in connection with the association of the
+older with the younger. As societies become more complex in structure
+and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning
+increases. As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the
+danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in
+more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was
+never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth
+in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.
+
+Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
+
+1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a community
+or social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and
+that this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the
+immature members of the group. By various agencies, unintentional and
+designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings
+into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus
+a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. All of these words
+mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth. We also
+speak of rearing, raising, bringing up--words which express the
+difference of level which education aims to cover. Etymologically, the
+word education means just a process of leading or bringing up. When
+we have the outcome of the process in mind, we speak of education as
+shaping, forming, molding activity--that is, a shaping into the standard
+form of social activity. In this chapter we are concerned with the
+general features of the way in which a social group brings up its
+immature members into its own social form.
+
+Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience
+till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the
+social group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical forming.
+Things can be physically transported in space; they may be bodily
+conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically extracted and
+inserted. How then are they communicated? Given the impossibility of
+direct contagion or literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the
+method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or
+the older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves. The
+answer, in general formulation, is: By means of the action of the
+environment in calling out certain responses. The required beliefs
+cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on. But
+the particular medium in which an individual exists leads him to see and
+feel one thing rather than another; it leads him to have certain plans
+in order that he may act successfully with others; it strengthens some
+beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval of
+others. Thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior,
+a certain disposition of action. The words "environment," "medium"
+denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual.
+They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own
+active tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course, continuous with
+its surroundings; but the environing circumstances do not, save
+metaphorically, constitute an environment. For the inorganic being is
+not concerned in the influences which affect it. On the other hand,
+some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature,
+especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly
+than some of the things close to him. The things with which a man varies
+are his genuine environment. Thus the activities of the astronomer vary
+with the stars at which he gazes or about which he calculates. Of
+his immediate surroundings, his telescope is most intimately his
+environment. The environment of an antiquarian, as an antiquarian,
+consists of the remote epoch of human life with which he is concerned,
+and the relics, inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes connections
+with that period.
+
+In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or
+hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living
+being. Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the
+fish's activities--to its life. The north pole is a significant element
+in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in
+reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what
+they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive
+existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting,
+environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a
+sustaining or frustrating condition.
+
+2. The Social Environment. A being whose activities are associated with
+others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend
+upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.
+A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities
+without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the
+indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he
+moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as well try to imagine a
+business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to
+conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms
+of his isolated actions. The manufacturer moreover is as truly socially
+guided in his activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his
+own counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling
+his finished goods. Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in
+association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the
+most overt cooperative or hostile act.
+
+What we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium
+nurtures its immature members. There is no great difficulty in seeing
+how it shapes the external habits of action. Even dogs and horses have
+their actions modified by association with human beings; they form
+different habits because human beings are concerned with what they do.
+Human beings control animals by controlling the natural stimuli which
+influence them; by creating a certain environment in other words. Food,
+bits and bridles, noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in
+which the natural or instinctive responses of horses occur. By operating
+steadily to call out certain acts, habits are formed which function with
+the same uniformity as the original stimuli. If a rat is put in a
+maze and finds food only by making a given number of turns in a given
+sequence, his activity is gradually modified till he habitually takes
+that course rather than another when he is hungry.
+
+Human actions are modified in a like fashion. A burnt child dreads the
+fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every time a child touched
+a certain toy he got burned, the child would learn to avoid that toy
+as automatically as he avoids touching fire. So far, however, we are
+dealing with what may be called training in distinction from educative
+teaching. The changes considered are in outer action rather than in
+mental and emotional dispositions of behavior. The distinction is not,
+however, a sharp one. The child might conceivably generate in time a
+violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class
+of toys resembling it. The aversion might even persist after he had
+forgotten about the original burns; later on he might even invent some
+reason to account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases,
+altering the external habit of action by changing the environment to
+affect the stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition
+concerned in the action. Yet this does not always happen; a person
+trained to dodge a threatening blow, dodges automatically with
+no corresponding thought or emotion. We have to find, then, some
+differentia of training from education.
+
+A clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really share in
+the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the horse
+to secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous
+to the horse to perform the act--he gets food, etc. But the horse,
+presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains interested in
+food, not in the service he is rendering. He is not a partner in a
+shared activity. Were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging
+in the conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment
+which others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.
+
+Now in many cases--too many cases--the activity of the immature human
+being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is
+trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His
+instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure.
+But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in
+a way agreeable to others. In other cases, he really shares or
+participates in the common activity. In this case, his original impulse
+is modified. He not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of
+others, but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused
+in him that animate the others. A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The
+successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets
+store, are connected with fighting and victory. The presence of this
+medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then
+in fact when he is strong enough. As he fights he wins approval and
+advancement; as he refrains, he is disliked, ridiculed, shut out
+from favorable recognition. It is not surprising that his original
+belligerent tendencies and emotions are strengthened at the expense of
+others, and that his ideas turn to things connected with war. Only in
+this way can he become fully a recognized member of his group. Thus his
+mental habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his group.
+
+If we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we shall
+perceive that the social medium neither implants certain desires and
+ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular
+habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow.
+Setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways
+of acting is the first step. Making the individual a sharer or partner
+in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success,
+its failure as his failure, is the completing step. As soon as he is
+possessed by the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to
+recognize the special ends at which it aims and the means employed to
+secure success. His beliefs and ideas, in other words, will take a form
+similar to those of others in the group. He will also achieve pretty
+much the same stock of knowledge since that knowledge is an ingredient
+of his habitual pursuits.
+
+The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief
+cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from
+one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an
+idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus
+imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process. But
+learning from language will be found, when analyzed, to confirm the
+principle just laid down. It would probably be admitted with little
+hesitation that a child gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as
+other persons do; by covering the head with it, giving it to others
+to wear, having it put on by others when going out, etc. But it may be
+asked how this principle of shared activity applies to getting through
+speech or reading the idea of, say, a Greek helmet, where no direct use
+of any kind enters in. What shared activity is there in learning from
+books about the discovery of America?
+
+Since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about
+many things, let us see how it works. The baby begins of course with
+mere sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning, expressing, that is,
+no idea. Sounds are just one kind of stimulus to direct response, some
+having a soothing effect, others tending to make one jump, and so on.
+The sound h-a-t would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a
+seemingly inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection
+with an action which is participated in by a number of people. When the
+mother is taking the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she puts
+something on the baby's head. Being taken out becomes an interest to the
+child; mother and child not only go out with each other physically,
+but both are concerned in the going out; they enjoy it in common. By
+conjunction with the other factors in activity the sound "hat" soon gets
+the same meaning for the child that it has for the parent; it becomes a
+sign of the activity into which it enters. The bare fact that language
+consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of
+itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared
+experience.
+
+In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way that
+the thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. And they acquire
+the same meaning with the child which they have with the adult because
+they are used in a common experience by both. The guarantee for the
+same manner of use is found in the fact that the thing and the sound are
+first employed in a joint activity, as a means of setting up an active
+connection between the child and a grownup. Similar ideas or meanings
+spring up because both persons are engaged as partners in an action
+where what each does depends upon and influences what the other does. If
+two savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a certain signal
+meant "move to the right" to the one who uttered it, and "move to the
+left" to the one who heard it, they obviously could not successfully
+carry on their hunt together. Understanding one another means that
+objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to
+carrying on a common pursuit.
+
+After sounds have got meaning through connection with other things
+employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with
+other like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for
+which they stand are combined. Thus the words in which a child
+learns about, say, the Greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were
+understood) by use in an action having a common interest and end. They
+now arouse a new meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads to
+rehearse imaginatively the activities in which the helmet has its use.
+For the time being, the one who understands the words "Greek helmet"
+becomes mentally a partner with those who used the helmet. He engages,
+through his imagination, in a shared activity. It is not easy to get
+the full meaning of words. Most persons probably stop with the idea that
+"helmet" denotes a queer kind of headgear a people called the Greeks
+once wore. We conclude, accordingly, that the use of language to convey
+and acquire ideas is an extension and refinement of the principle
+that things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint
+action; in no sense does it contravene that principle. When words do
+not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or
+imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having
+a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given
+groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.
+Thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act of
+writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the person
+performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless he
+realizes the meaning of what he does.
+
+3. The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that
+social environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of
+behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse
+and strengthen certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail
+certain consequences. A child growing up in a family of musicians will
+inevitably have whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and,
+relatively, stimulated more than other impulses which might have been
+awakened in another environment. Save as he takes an interest in music
+and gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he is unable
+to share in the life of the group to which he belongs. Some kinds of
+participation in the life of those with whom the individual is connected
+are inevitable; with respect to them, the social environment exercises
+an educative or formative influence unconsciously and apart from any set
+purpose.
+
+In savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
+(constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we have
+spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the young into
+the practices and beliefs of the group. Even in present-day societies,
+it furnishes the basic nurture of even the most insistently schooled
+youth. In accord with the interests and occupations of the group,
+certain things become objects of high esteem; others of aversion.
+Association does not create impulses or affection and dislike, but it
+furnishes the objects to which they attach themselves. The way our group
+or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention,
+and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation
+and memory. What is strange or foreign (that is to say outside
+the activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and
+intellectually suspect. It seems almost incredible to us, for example,
+that things which we know very well could have escaped recognition
+in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital
+stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native
+intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes
+of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds
+riveted to other things. Just as the senses require sensible objects
+to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and
+imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the
+demands set up by current social occupations. The main texture of
+disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences.
+What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the
+capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of
+their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more
+productive of meaning.
+
+While this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so subtle and
+pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and mind, it may
+be worth while to specify a few directions in which its effect is most
+marked. First, the habits of language. Fundamental modes of speech, the
+bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life,
+carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.
+The babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech
+habits thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious
+teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes of
+speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into their really native
+tongue. Secondly, manners. Example is notoriously more potent than
+precept. Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are
+good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response
+to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information. Despite the never
+ending play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding
+atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners.
+And manners are but minor morals. Moreover, in major morals, conscious
+instruction is likely to be efficacious only in the degree in which
+it falls in with the general "walk and conversation" of those who
+constitute the child's social environment. Thirdly, good taste and
+esthetic appreciation. If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious
+objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste
+naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry, unarranged, and
+over-decorated environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as
+meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty. Against
+such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than convey second-hand
+information as to what others think. Such taste never becomes
+spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a labored reminder of
+what those think to whom one has been taught to look up. To say that the
+deeper standards of judgments of value are framed by the situations
+into which a person habitually enters is not so much to mention a fourth
+point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned. We
+rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is
+worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not
+conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we
+take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which
+determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these
+habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which
+have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with
+others.
+
+4. The School as a Special Environment. The chief importance of this
+foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on willy-nilly
+is to lead us to note that the only way in which adults consciously
+control the kind of education which the immature get is by controlling
+the environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. We never
+educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether
+we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design
+environments for the purpose makes a great difference. And any
+environment is a chance environment so far as its educative influence
+is concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with reference to
+its educative effect. An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent
+one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are
+chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the
+development of children. But schools remain, of course, the typical
+instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing
+the mental and moral disposition of their members.
+
+Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are
+so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed
+to writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are
+even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked
+up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form
+tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign
+to everyday life. The achievements accumulated from generation to
+generation are deposited in it even though some of them have fallen
+temporarily out of use. Consequently as soon as a community depends to
+any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its
+own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools
+to insure adequate transmission of all its resources. To take an obvious
+illustration: The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly
+influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not
+present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences. In
+similar fashion, peoples still existing, but remote in space, British,
+Germans, Italians, directly concern our own social affairs, but
+the nature of the interaction cannot be understood without explicit
+statement and attention. In precisely similar fashion, our daily
+associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part
+played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible
+structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted,
+the school, to care for such matters.
+
+This mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific,
+as compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. First, a
+complex civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. It has to
+be broken up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a
+gradual and graded way. The relationships of our present social life are
+so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable
+position could not readily share in many of the most important of them.
+Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to him,
+would not become a part of his own mental disposition. There would be
+no seeing the trees because of the forest. Business, politics, art,
+science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention;
+confusion would be the outcome. The first office of the social organ we
+call the school is to provide a simplified environment. It selects the
+features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to
+by the young. Then it establishes a progressive order, using the
+factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more
+complicated.
+
+In the second place, it is the business of the school environment to
+eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing
+environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a
+purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but at
+weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what
+is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively
+perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things from the
+environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to
+counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. By
+selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the
+power of this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes
+that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of
+its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future
+society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this
+end.
+
+In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to
+balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it
+that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations
+of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living
+contact with a broader environment. Such words as "society" and
+"community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to
+make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.
+As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less
+loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension of
+friends makes a society; the village or street group of playmates is a
+community; each business group, each club, is another. Passing beyond
+these more intimate groups, there is in a country like our own a variety
+of races, religious affiliations, economic divisions. Inside the modern
+city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably more
+communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms
+of government or control, than existed in an entire continent at an
+earlier epoch.
+
+Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active
+dispositions of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's
+household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative
+environments for those who enter into their collective or conjoint
+activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership,
+or a political party. Each of them is a mode of associated or community
+life, quite as much as is a family, a town, or a state. There are also
+communities whose members have little or no direct contact with one
+another, like the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the members
+of the professional learned class scattered over the face of the
+earth. For they have aims in common, and the activity of each member is
+directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing.
+
+In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical
+matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory,
+was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce,
+transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the
+United States are composed of a combination of different groups with
+different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps
+more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational
+institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and
+balanced environment for the young. Only in this way can the centrifugal
+forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and the
+same political unit be counteracted. The intermingling in the school
+of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs
+creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter
+accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than
+is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The
+assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony
+to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal.
+
+The school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition
+of each individual the diverse influences of the various social
+environments into which he enters. One code prevails in the family;
+another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth,
+in the religious association. As a person passes from one of the
+environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and
+is in danger of being split into a being having different standards of
+judgment and emotion for different occasions. This danger imposes upon
+the school a steadying and integrating office.
+
+
+Summary. The development within the young of the attitudes and
+dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a
+society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and
+knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary of the environment.
+The environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are
+concerned in the execution of the activity characteristic of a living
+being. The social environment consists of all the activities of fellow
+beings that are bound up in the carrying on of the activities of any
+one of its members. It is truly educative in its effect in the degree in
+which an individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity. By
+doing his share in the associated activity, the individual appropriates
+the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and
+subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its
+emotional spirit.
+
+The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition
+comes, without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the
+activities of the various groups to which they may belong. As a society
+becomes more complex, however, it is found necessary to provide a
+special social environment which shall especially look after nurturing
+the capacities of the immature. Three of the more important functions
+of this special environment are: simplifying and ordering the factors
+of the disposition it is wished to develop; purifying and idealizing
+the existing social customs; creating a wider and better balanced
+environment than that by which the young would be likely, if left to
+themselves, to be influenced.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Three: Education as Direction
+
+1. The Environment as Directive.
+
+We now pass to one of the special forms which the general function of
+education assumes: namely, that of direction, control, or guidance.
+Of these three words, direction, control, and guidance, the last best
+conveys the idea of assisting through cooperation the natural capacities
+of the individuals guided; control conveys rather the notion of an
+energy brought to bear from without and meeting some resistance from the
+one controlled; direction is a more neutral term and suggests the
+fact that the active tendencies of those directed are led in a certain
+continuous course, instead of dispersing aimlessly. Direction expresses
+the basic function, which tends at one extreme to become a guiding
+assistance and at another, a regulation or ruling. But in any case, we
+must carefully avoid a meaning sometimes read into the term "control."
+It is sometimes assumed, explicitly or unconsciously, that an
+individual's tendencies are naturally purely individualistic or
+egoistic, and thus antisocial. Control then denotes the process by which
+he is brought to subordinate his natural impulses to public or common
+ends. Since, by conception, his own nature is quite alien to this
+process and opposes it rather than helps it, control has in this view
+a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it. Systems of government
+and theories of the state have been built upon this notion, and it has
+seriously affected educational ideas and practices. But there is no
+ground for any such view. Individuals are certainly interested, at
+times, in having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to
+the ways of others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested
+upon the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking
+part in conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as
+a community would be possible. And there would not even be any one
+interested in furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of harmony
+unless he thought that thereby he could gain some personal advantage.
+Control, in truth, means only an emphatic form of direction of powers,
+and covers the regulation gained by an individual through his own
+efforts quite as much as that brought about when others take the lead.
+
+In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite
+it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object. Put the other way
+around, a response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were,
+against being disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. It
+meets the stimulus, and corresponds with it. There is an adaptation of
+the stimulus and response to each other. A light is the stimulus to the
+eye to see something, and the business of the eye is to see. If the
+eyes are open and there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a
+condition of the fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an
+outside interruption. To some extent, then, all direction or control is
+a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an assistance in doing fully
+what some organ is already tending to do.
+
+This general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two respects.
+In the first place, except in the case of a small number of instincts,
+the stimuli to which an immature human being is subject are not
+sufficiently definite to call out, in the beginning, specific responses.
+There is always a great deal of superfluous energy aroused. This energy
+may be wasted, going aside from the point; it may also go against the
+successful performance of an act. It does harm by getting in the way.
+Compare the behavior of a beginner in riding a bicycle with that of the
+expert. There is little axis of direction in the energies put forth;
+they are largely dispersive and centrifugal. Direction involves
+a focusing and fixating of action in order that it may be truly a
+response, and this requires an elimination of unnecessary and confusing
+movements. In the second place, although no activity can be produced in
+which the person does not cooperate to some extent, yet a response may
+be of a kind which does not fit into the sequence and continuity of
+action. A person boxing may dodge a particular blow successfully, but in
+such a way as to expose himself the next instant to a still harder
+blow. Adequate control means that the successive acts are brought into
+a continuous order; each act not only meets its immediate stimulus but
+helps the acts which follow.
+
+In short, direction is both simultaneous and successive. At a given
+time, it requires that, from all the tendencies that are partially
+called out, those be selected which center energy upon the point of
+need. Successively, it requires that each act be balanced with those
+which precede and come after, so that order of activity is achieved.
+Focusing and ordering are thus the two aspects of direction, one
+spatial, the other temporal. The first insures hitting the mark; the
+second keeps the balance required for further action. Obviously, it is
+not possible to separate them in practice as we have distinguished them
+in idea. Activity must be centered at a given time in such a way as to
+prepare for what comes next. The problem of the immediate response is
+complicated by one's having to be on the lookout for future occurrences.
+
+Two conclusions emerge from these general statements. On the one hand,
+purely external direction is impossible. The environment can at most
+only supply stimuli to call out responses. These responses proceed from
+tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even when a person
+is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only
+because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though
+having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence
+upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.
+While the customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli which direct
+as well as evoke the activities of the young, the young, after all,
+participate in the direction which their actions finally take. In the
+strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into them. To overlook
+this fact means to distort and pervert human nature. To take into
+account the contribution made by the existing instincts and habits
+of those directed is to direct them economically and wisely. Speaking
+accurately, all direction is but re-direction; it shifts the activities
+already going on into another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the
+energies which are already in operation, one's attempts at direction
+will almost surely go amiss.
+
+On the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and regulations
+of others may be short-sighted. It may accomplish its immediate effect,
+but at the expense of throwing the subsequent action of the person
+out of balance. A threat may, for example, prevent a person from
+doing something to which he is naturally inclined by arousing fear of
+disagreeable consequences if he persists. But he may be left in the
+position which exposes him later on to influences which will lead him
+to do even worse things. His instincts of cunning and slyness may be
+aroused, so that things henceforth appeal to him on the side of evasion
+and trickery more than would otherwise have been the case. Those engaged
+in directing the actions of others are always in danger of overlooking
+the importance of the sequential development of those they direct.
+
+2. Modes of Social Direction. Adults are naturally most conscious of
+directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so
+to do. As a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find
+themselves resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish them
+to do. But the more permanent and influential modes of control are those
+which operate from moment to moment continuously without such deliberate
+intention on our part.
+
+1. When others are not doing what we would like them to or are
+threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of
+controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled. In
+such cases, our control becomes most direct, and at this point we are
+most likely to make the mistakes just spoken of. We are even likely to
+take the influence of superior force for control, forgetting that while
+we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we
+can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. In
+all such cases of immediate action upon others, we need to discriminate
+between physical results and moral results. A person may be in such a
+condition that forcible feeding or enforced confinement is necessary for
+his own good. A child may have to be snatched with roughness away from
+a fire so that he shall not be burnt. But no improvement of disposition,
+no educative effect, need follow. A harsh and commanding tone may be
+effectual in keeping a child away from the fire, and the same desirable
+physical effect will follow as if he had been snatched away. But there
+may be no more obedience of a moral sort in one case than in the other.
+A man can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by
+shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to
+commit burglary. When we confuse a physical with an educative result,
+we always lose the chance of enlisting the person's own participating
+disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing
+within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way.
+
+In general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control should
+be limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive that the one
+performing them has no means of foreseeing their outcome. If a person
+cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of
+understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more
+experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In
+such a state, every act is alike to him. Whatever moves him does move
+him, and that is all there is to it. In some cases, it is well to permit
+him to experiment, and to discover the consequences for himself in order
+that he may act intelligently next time under similar circumstances. But
+some courses of action are too discommoding and obnoxious to others to
+allow of this course being pursued. Direct disapproval is now resorted
+to. Shaming, ridicule, disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used. Or
+contrary tendencies in the child are appealed to to divert him from his
+troublesome line of behavior. His sensitiveness to approbation, his hope
+of winning favor by an agreeable act, are made use of to induce action
+in another direction.
+
+2. These methods of control are so obvious (because so intentionally
+employed) that it would hardly be worth while to mention them if it were
+not that notice may now be taken, by way of contrast, of the other more
+important and permanent mode of control. This other method resides in
+the ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is associated,
+use things; the instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own
+ends. The very existence of the social medium in which an individual
+lives, moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of
+directing his activity.
+
+This fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail what
+is meant by the social environment. We are given to separating from
+each other the physical and social environments in which we live. The
+separation is responsible on one hand for an exaggeration of the moral
+importance of the more direct or personal modes of control of which
+we have been speaking; and on the other hand for an exaggeration, in
+current psychology and philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of
+contact with a purely physical environment. There is not, in fact, any
+such thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart
+from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a
+frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some
+physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to
+alter the attitude of another. Comparatively speaking, such modes of
+influence may be regarded as personal. The physical medium is reduced to
+a mere means of personal contact. In contrast with such direct modes of
+mutual influence, stand associations in common pursuits involving the
+use of things as means and as measures of results. Even if the mother
+never told her daughter to help her, or never rebuked her for not
+helping, the child would be subjected to direction in her activities
+by the mere fact that she was engaged, along with the parent, in the
+household life. Imitation, emulation, the need of working together,
+enforce control.
+
+If the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must reach
+the thing in order to get it. Where there is giving there must be
+taking. The way the child handles the thing after it is got, the use
+to which it is put, is surely influenced by the fact that the child
+has watched the mother. When the child sees the parent looking for
+something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to
+give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to
+receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily
+intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring
+method of giving direction to the activities of the young.
+
+In saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously
+about participating in a joint activity as the chief way of forming
+disposition. We have explicitly added, however, the recognition of the
+part played in the joint activity by the use of things. The philosophy
+of learning has been unduly dominated by a false psychology. It is
+frequently stated that a person learns by merely having the qualities of
+things impressed upon his mind through the gateway of the senses. Having
+received a store of sensory impressions, association or some power of
+mental synthesis is supposed to combine them into ideas--into things
+with a meaning. An object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is supposed to
+convey different impressions of color, shape, size, hardness, smell,
+taste, etc., which aggregated together constitute the characteristic
+meaning of each thing. But as matter of fact, it is the characteristic
+use to which the thing is put, because of its specific qualities, which
+supplies the meaning with which it is identified. A chair is a thing
+which is put to one use; a table, a thing which is employed for another
+purpose; an orange is a thing which costs so much, which is grown in
+warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable odor and
+refreshing taste, etc.
+
+The difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental
+act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning;
+the former does not. A noise may make me jump without my mind being
+implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get water and put out a
+blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant
+need of being extinguished. I bump into a stone, and kick it to one side
+purely physically. I put it to one side for fear some one will stumble
+upon it, intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has. I am
+startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not--more likely, if
+I do not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud or to myself, that
+is thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a meaning. My behavior has
+a mental quality. When things have a meaning for us, we mean (intend,
+propose) what we do: when they do not, we act blindly, unconsciously,
+unintelligently.
+
+In both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or
+controlled. But in the merely blind response, direction is also blind.
+There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated responses to
+recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain way. All of us
+have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware, since they were
+formed without our knowing what we were about. Consequently they possess
+us, rather than we them. They move us; they control us. Unless we become
+aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the worth of the
+result, we do not control them. A child might be made to bow every time
+he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing
+would finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of
+recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end
+in view--as having a certain meaning. And not till he knew what he was
+about and performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said
+to be "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an idea
+of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from it. It is
+to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive
+scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of
+the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it. To have the
+same ideas about things which others have, to be like-minded with them,
+and thus to be really members of a social group, is therefore to attach
+the same meanings to things and to acts which others attach. Otherwise,
+there is no common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared
+activity, each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing
+and vice-versa. That is, the activity of each is placed in the same
+inclusive situation. To pull at a rope at which others happen to be
+pulling is not a shared or conjoint activity, unless the pulling is
+done with knowledge that others are pulling and for the sake of either
+helping or hindering what they are doing. A pin may pass in the course
+of its manufacture through the hands of many persons. But each may do
+his part without knowledge of what others do or without any reference
+to what they do; each may operate simply for the sake of a separate
+result--his own pay. There is, in this case, no common consequence to
+which the several acts are referred, and hence no genuine intercourse
+or association, in spite of juxtaposition, and in spite of the fact
+that their respective doings contribute to a single outcome. But if each
+views the consequences of his own acts as having a bearing upon what
+others are doing and takes into account the consequences of their
+behavior upon himself, then there is a common mind; a common intent
+in behavior. There is an understanding set up between the different
+contributors; and this common understanding controls the action of each.
+Suppose that conditions were so arranged that one person automatically
+caught a ball and then threw it to another person who caught and
+automatically returned it; and that each so acted without knowing where
+the ball came from or went to. Clearly, such action would be without
+point or meaning. It might be physically controlled, but it would not be
+socially directed. But suppose that each becomes aware of what the
+other is doing, and becomes interested in the other's action and thereby
+interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the action of
+the other. The behavior of each would then be intelligent; and socially
+intelligent and guided. Take one more example of a less imaginary kind.
+An infant is hungry, and cries while food is prepared in his presence.
+If he does not connect his own state with what others are doing, nor
+what they are doing with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with
+increasing impatience to his own increasing discomfort. He is physically
+controlled by his own organic state. But when he makes a back and forth
+reference, his whole attitude changes. He takes an interest, as we say;
+he takes note and watches what others are doing. He no longer reacts
+just to his own hunger, but behaves in the light of what others are
+doing for its prospective satisfaction. In that way, he also no
+longer just gives way to hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or
+recognizes, or identifies his own state. It becomes an object for him.
+His attitude toward it becomes in some degree intelligent. And in such
+noting of the meaning of the actions of others and of his own state, he
+is socially directed.
+
+It will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. One of them
+has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do not influence
+mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are implicated in action
+for prospective consequences. The other point is persons modify one
+another's dispositions only through the special use they make of
+physical conditions. Consider first the case of so-called expressive
+movements to which others are sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning,
+clinching of fists, natural gestures of all kinds. In themselves, these
+are not expressive. They are organic parts of a person's attitude. One
+does not blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but because
+the capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli. But others
+use the blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of the muscles of
+a person with whom they are associated, as a sign of the state in
+which that person finds himself, and as an indication of what course
+to pursue. The frown signifies an imminent rebuke for which one must
+prepare, or an uncertainty and hesitation which one must, if possible,
+remove by saying or doing something to restore confidence. A man at some
+distance is waving his arms wildly. One has only to preserve an attitude
+of detached indifference, and the motions of the other person will be on
+the level of any remote physical change which we happen to note. If we
+have no concern or interest, the waving of the arms is as meaningless
+to us as the gyrations of the arms of a windmill. But if interest is
+aroused, we begin to participate. We refer his action to something we
+are doing ourselves or that we should do. We have to judge the meaning
+of his act in order to decide what to do. Is he beckoning for help? Is
+he warning us of an explosion to be set off, against which we should
+guard ourselves? In one case, his action means to run toward him; in the
+other case, to run away. In any case, it is the change he effects in
+the physical environment which is a sign to us of how we should conduct
+ourselves. Our action is socially controlled because we endeavor to
+refer what we are to do to the same situation in which he is acting.
+
+Language is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this joint
+reference of our own action and that of another to a common situation.
+Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social direction. But
+language would not be this efficacious instrument were it not that
+it takes place upon a background of coarser and more tangible use of
+physical means to accomplish results. A child sees persons with whom he
+lives using chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws, plows, horses, money in
+certain ways. If he has any share at all in what they are doing, he is
+led thereby to use things in the same way, or to use other things in a
+way which will fit in. If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign
+that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he is to
+extend his; and so on in a never ending stream of detail. The prevailing
+habits of using the products of human art and the raw materials of
+nature constitute by all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode
+of social control. When children go to school, they already have
+"minds"--they have knowledge and dispositions of judgment which may
+be appealed to through the use of language. But these "minds" are the
+organized habits of intelligent response which they have previously
+required by putting things to use in connection with the way
+other persons use things. The control is inescapable; it saturates
+disposition. The net outcome of the discussion is that the fundamental
+means of control is not personal but intellectual. It is not "moral" in
+the sense that a person is moved by direct personal appeal from others,
+important as is this method at critical junctures. It consists in
+the habits of understanding, which are set up in using objects in
+correspondence with others, whether by way of cooperation and assistance
+or rivalry and competition. Mind as a concrete thing is precisely
+the power to understand things in terms of the use made of them; a
+socialized mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to
+which they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this
+sense is the method of social control.
+
+3. Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the defects of
+a psychology of learning which places the individual mind naked, as
+it were, in contact with physical objects, and which believes that
+knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from their interaction. Only
+comparatively recently has the predominating influence of association
+with fellow beings in the formation of mental and moral disposition been
+perceived. Even now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an
+alleged method of learning by direct contact with things, and as merely
+supplementing knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of persons.
+The purport of our discussion is that such a view makes an absurd and
+impossible separation between persons and things. Interaction with
+things may form habits of external adjustment. But it leads to activity
+having a meaning and conscious intent only when things are used to
+produce a result. And the only way one person can modify the mind of
+another is by using physical conditions, crude or artificial, so as
+to evoke some answering activity from him. Such are our two main
+conclusions. It is desirable to amplify and enforce them by placing them
+in contrast with the theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct
+relationships of human beings to one another as an adjunct to the
+psychology of the supposed direct relation of an individual to physical
+objects. In substance, this so-called social psychology has been built
+upon the notion of imitation. Consequently, we shall discuss the nature
+and role of imitation in the formation of mental disposition.
+
+According to this theory, social control of individuals rests upon the
+instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of
+others. The latter serve as models. The imitative instinct is so strong
+that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by
+others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behavior. According
+to our theory, what is here called imitation is a misleading name for
+partaking with others in a use of things which leads to consequences of
+common interest. The basic error in the current notion of imitation is
+that it puts the cart before the horse. It takes an effect for the
+cause of the effect. There can be no doubt that individuals in forming a
+social group are like-minded; they understand one another. They tend
+to act with the same controlling ideas, beliefs, and intentions, given
+similar circumstances. Looked at from without, they might be said to
+be engaged in "imitating" one another. In the sense that they are doing
+much the same sort of thing in much the same sort of way, this would be
+true enough. But "imitation" throws no light upon why they so act; it
+repeats the fact as an explanation of itself. It is an explanation of
+the same order as the famous saying that opium puts men to sleep because
+of its dormitive power.
+
+Objective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in being in
+conformity with others are baptized by the name imitation. This social
+fact is then taken for a psychological force, which produced the
+likeness. A considerable portion of what is called imitation is simply
+the fact that persons being alike in structure respond in the same way
+to like stimuli. Quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted
+get angry and attack the insulter. This statement may be met by citing
+the undoubted fact that response to an insult takes place in different
+ways in groups having different customs. In one group, it may be met by
+recourse to fisticuffs, in another by a challenge to a duel, in a third
+by an exhibition of contemptuous disregard. This happens, so it is said,
+because the model set for imitation is different. But there is no need
+to appeal to imitation. The mere fact that customs are different means
+that the actual stimuli to behavior are different. Conscious instruction
+plays a part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a large influence.
+Still more effective is the fact that unless an individual acts in the
+way current in his group, he is literally out of it. He can associate
+with others on intimate and equal terms only by behaving in the way in
+which they behave. The pressure that comes from the fact that one is
+let into the group action by acting in one way and shut out by acting
+in another way is unremitting. What is called the effect of imitation
+is mainly the product of conscious instruction and of the selective
+influence exercised by the unconscious confirmations and ratifications
+of those with whom one associates.
+
+Suppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls
+it back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not just the
+sight of the ball, or the sight of the other rolling it. It is the
+situation--the game which is playing. The response is not merely rolling
+the ball back; it is rolling it back so that the other one may catch and
+return it,--that the game may continue. The "pattern" or model is not
+the action of the other person. The whole situation requires that each
+should adapt his action in view of what the other person has done and is
+to do. Imitation may come in but its role is subordinate. The child has
+an interest on his own account; he wants to keep it going. He may then
+note how the other person catches and holds the ball in order to improve
+his own acts. He imitates the means of doing, not the end or thing to be
+done. And he imitates the means because he wishes, on his own behalf, as
+part of his own initiative, to take an effective part in the game. One
+has only to consider how completely the child is dependent from his
+earliest days for successful execution of his purposes upon fitting his
+acts into those of others to see what a premium is put upon behaving as
+others behave, and of developing an understanding of them in order that
+he may so behave. The pressure for likemindedness in action from this
+source is so great that it is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation.
+As matter of fact, imitation of ends, as distinct from imitation of
+means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and transitory affair
+which leaves little effect upon disposition. Idiots are especially apt
+at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts but not the meaning
+of their performance. When we find children engaging in this sort of
+mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as we would do if it were an
+important means of social control) we are more likely to rebuke them
+as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy cats. Imitation of means of
+accomplishment is, on the other hand, an intelligent act. It involves
+close observation, and judicious selection of what will enable one to do
+better something which he already is trying to do. Used for a purpose,
+the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become a factor in
+the development of effective action.
+
+This excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing the
+conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of a certain
+mental disposition; a way of understanding objects, events, and acts
+which enables one to participate effectively in associated activities.
+Only the friction engendered by meeting resistance from others leads
+to the view that it takes place by forcing a line of action contrary to
+natural inclinations. Only failure to take account of the situations
+in which persons are mutually concerned (or interested in acting
+responsively to one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief
+agent in promoting social control.
+
+4. Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group perpetuate
+savagery, and a civilized group civilization? Doubtless the first answer
+to occur to mind is because savages are savages; being of low-grade
+intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. But careful study
+has made it doubtful whether their native capacities are appreciably
+inferior to those of civilized man. It has made it certain that native
+differences are not sufficient to account for the difference in culture.
+In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause,
+of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to
+restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit
+the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come
+within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest
+observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the
+mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of
+natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of
+natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are
+worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural
+forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of
+action, into means for securing ends. We start not so much with superior
+capacities as with superior stimuli for evocation and direction of
+our capacities. The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have
+weighted stimuli. Prior human efforts have made over natural conditions.
+As they originally existed they were indifferent to human endeavors.
+Every domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every
+appliance, every manufactured article, every esthetic decoration,
+every work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile
+or indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and
+favoring conditions. Because the activities of children today are
+controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are able to
+traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow, tortured
+ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes which
+have preceded.
+
+Stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our
+system of roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat,
+light, and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every
+purpose, do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a
+civilization. But the uses to which they are put are civilization,
+and without the things the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise
+necessarily devoted to wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment
+and securing a precarious protection against its inclemencies is
+freed. A body of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which
+is guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is
+incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of nature.
+Thus these appliances of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief
+protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs,
+those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so
+much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we
+add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used,
+but used in the interests of a truly shared or associated life, then
+the appliances become the positive resources of civilization. If Greece,
+with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a worthy and
+noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because Greece operated
+for social ends such resources as it had. But whatever the situation,
+whether one of barbarism or civilization, whether one of stinted control
+of physical forces, or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet
+made tributary to a shared experience, things as they enter into action
+furnish the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation
+of mental and moral disposition.
+
+Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially
+selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials
+and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. Since
+language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected
+to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life--physical
+things which have lost their original quality in becoming social
+tools--it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared
+with other appliances. By it we are led to share vicariously in past
+human experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of the
+present. We are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate
+situations. In countless ways, language condenses meanings that record
+social outcomes and presage social outlooks. So significant is it of
+a liberal share in what is worth while in life that unlettered and
+uneducated have become almost synonymous.
+
+The emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its
+dangers--dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in practice.
+Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by
+a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so
+entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of "telling"
+and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle
+almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not
+this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself
+merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. But
+its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be
+equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical materials, to
+an extent rarely attained. It requires that methods of instruction and
+administration be modified to allow and to secure direct and continuous
+occupations with things. Not that the use of language as an educational
+resource should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and
+fruitful by having its normal connection with shared activities. "These
+things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others
+undone." And for the school "these things" mean equipment with the
+instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.
+
+For when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in
+the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a
+pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go to
+school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most
+adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When treating
+it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which
+comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the
+effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim. We may
+secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an individual by
+himself, but we cannot thereby get him to understand the meaning which
+things have in the life of which he is a part. We may secure technical
+specialized ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of
+intelligence which directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in
+a joint activity, where one person's use of material and tools is
+consciously referred to the use other persons are making of their
+capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition
+attained.
+
+Summary. The natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with
+the life-customs of the group into which they are born. Consequently
+they have to be directed or guided. This control is not the same thing
+as physical compulsion; it consists in centering the impulses acting
+at any one time upon some specific end and in introducing an order of
+continuity into the sequence of acts. The action of others is always
+influenced by deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions. But
+in some cases as in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and disapprovals,
+the stimuli proceed from persons with a direct view to influencing
+action. Since in such cases we are most conscious of controlling the
+action of others, we are likely to exaggerate the importance of this
+sort of control at the expense of a more permanent and effective method.
+The basic control resides in the nature of the situations in which the
+young take part. In social situations the young have to refer their
+way of acting to what others are doing and make it fit in. This directs
+their action to a common result, and gives an understanding common to
+the participants. For all mean the same thing, even when performing
+different acts. This common understanding of the means and ends of
+action is the essence of social control. It is indirect, or emotional
+and intellectual, not direct or personal. Moreover it is intrinsic to
+the disposition of the person, not external and coercive. To achieve
+this internal control through identity of interest and understanding
+is the business of education. While books and conversation can do much,
+these agencies are usually relied upon too exclusively. Schools require
+for their full efficiency more opportunity for conjoint activities in
+which those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social
+sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances used.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Four: Education as Growth
+
+1. The Conditions of Growth.
+
+In directing the activities of the young, society determines its own
+future in determining that of the young. Since the young at a given time
+will at some later date compose the society of that period, the latter's
+nature will largely turn upon the direction children's activities were
+given at an earlier period. This cumulative movement of action toward a
+later result is what is meant by growth.
+
+The primary condition of growth is immaturity. This may seem to be a
+mere truism--saying that a being can develop only in some point in which
+he is undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the word immaturity means
+something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is noteworthy that the
+terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one
+sense being negative, the other positive. Capacity may denote mere
+receptivity, like the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by
+potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent state--a capacity to become
+something different under external influences. But we also mean by
+capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency, force. Now
+when we say that immaturity means the possibility of growth, we are
+not referring to absence of powers which may exist at a later time; we
+express a force positively present--the ability to develop.
+
+Our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something
+which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to
+regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat
+it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a
+fixed standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not, and
+will not have till he becomes a man. This comparative standpoint is
+legitimate enough for some purposes, but if we make it final, the
+question arises whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption.
+Children, if they could express themselves articulately and sincerely,
+would tell a different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for
+the conviction that for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults
+must become as little children. The seriousness of the assumption of the
+negative quality of the possibilities of immaturity is apparent when
+we reflect that it sets up as an ideal and standard a static end. The
+fulfillment of growing is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is
+to say, an Ungrowth, something which is no longer growing. The futility
+of the assumption is seen in the fact that every adult resents the
+imputation of having no further possibilities of growth; and so far
+as he finds that they are closed to him mourns the fact as evidence of
+loss, instead of falling back on the achieved as adequate manifestation
+of power. Why an unequal measure for child and man?
+
+Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a
+positive force or ability,--the pouter to grow. We do not have to draw
+out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational
+doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager
+and impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is
+something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility
+gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity,
+dependence and plasticity.
+
+(1) It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive,
+still more absurd as a power. Yet if helplessness were all there were
+in dependence, no development could ever take place. A merely impotent
+being has to be carried, forever, by others. The fact that dependence is
+accompanied by growth in ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into
+parasitism, suggests that it is already something constructive. Being
+merely sheltered by others would not promote growth. For
+
+(2) it would only build a wall around impotence. With reference to the
+physical world, the child is helpless. He lacks at birth and for a
+long time thereafter power to make his way physically, to make his own
+living. If he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive an
+hour. On this side his helplessness is almost complete. The young of
+the brutes are immeasurably his superiors. He is physically weak and not
+able to turn the strength which he possesses to coping with the physical
+environment.
+
+1. The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however,
+some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
+animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an
+early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound
+up with the life of those about them. They are compelled, so to speak,
+to have physical gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. Human
+infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
+because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk and think as if they
+simply happened to be physically in a social environment; as if social
+forces exclusively existed in the adults who take care of them, they
+being passive recipients. If it were said that children are themselves
+marvelously endowed with power to enlist the cooperative attention of
+others, this would be thought to be a backhanded way of saying
+that others are marvelously attentive to the needs of children. But
+observation shows that children are gifted with an equipment of the
+first order for social intercourse. Few grown-up persons retain all
+of the flexible and sensitive ability of children to vibrate
+sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about them.
+Inattention to physical things (going with incapacity to control them)
+is accompanied by a corresponding intensification of interest and
+attention as to the doings of people. The native mechanism of the child
+and his impulses all tend to facile social responsiveness. The statement
+that children, before adolescence, are egotistically self-centered, even
+if it were true, would not contradict the truth of this statement. It
+would simply indicate that their social responsiveness is employed on
+their own behalf, not that it does not exist. But the statement is not
+true as matter of fact. The facts which are cited in support of the
+alleged pure egoism of children really show the intensity and directness
+with which they go to their mark. If the ends which form the mark seem
+narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because adults (by means of a
+similar engrossment in their day) have mastered these ends, which
+have consequently ceased to interest them. Most of the remainder of
+children's alleged native egoism is simply an egoism which runs counter
+to an adult's egoism. To a grown-up person who is too absorbed in
+his own affairs to take an interest in children's affairs, children
+doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own affairs.
+
+From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a
+weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that
+increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of
+an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more
+self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often
+makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to
+develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone--an
+unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the
+remediable suffering of the world.
+
+2. The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
+constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different from the
+plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a capacity to take on change
+of form in accord with external pressure. It lies near the pliable
+elasticity by which some persons take on the color of their surroundings
+while retaining their own bent. But it is something deeper than this. It
+is essentially the ability to learn from experience; the power to retain
+from one experience something which is of avail in coping with the
+difficulties of a later situation. This means power to modify actions
+on the basis of the results of prior experiences, the power to develop
+dispositions. Without it, the acquisition of habits is impossible.
+
+It is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and
+especially the human young, have to learn to utilize their instinctive
+reactions. The human being is born with a greater number of instinctive
+tendencies than other animals. But the instincts of the lower animals
+perfect themselves for appropriate action at an early period after
+birth, while most of those of the human infant are of little account
+just as they stand. An original specialized power of adjustment secures
+immediate efficiency, but, like a railway ticket, it is good for one
+route only. A being who, in order to use his eyes, ears, hands,
+and legs, has to experiment in making varied combinations of their
+reactions, achieves a control that is flexible and varied. A chick,
+for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few hours after
+hatching. This means that definite coordinations of activities of the
+eyes in seeing and of the body and head in striking are perfected in a
+few trials. An infant requires about six months to be able to gauge with
+approximate accuracy the action in reaching which will coordinate with
+his visual activities; to be able, that is, to tell whether he can reach
+a seen object and just how to execute the reaching. As a result, the
+chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original endowment.
+The infant has the advantage of the multitude of instinctive tentative
+reactions and of the experiences that accompany them, even though he is
+at a temporary disadvantage because they cross one another. In learning
+an action, instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity
+learns to vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them,
+according to change of circumstances. A possibility of continuing
+progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are
+developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the
+fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to
+learn.
+
+The importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and
+variable control has been summed up in the doctrine of the significance
+of prolonged infancy. 1 This prolongation is significant from the
+standpoint of the adult members of the group as well as from that of the
+young. The presence of dependent and learning beings is a stimulus to
+nurture and affection. The need for constant continued care was probably
+a chief means in transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent
+unions. It certainly was a chief influence in forming habits of
+affectionate and sympathetic watchfulness; that constructive interest
+in the well-being of others which is essential to associated life.
+Intellectually, this moral development meant the introduction of many
+new objects of attention; it stimulated foresight and planning for the
+future. Thus there is a reciprocal influence. Increasing complexity of
+social life requires a longer period of infancy in which to acquire the
+needed powers; this prolongation of dependence means prolongation of
+plasticity, or power of acquiring variable and novel modes of control.
+Hence it provides a further push to social progress.
+
+2. Habits as Expressions of Growth. We have already noted that
+plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior
+experience factors which modify subsequent activities. This signifies
+the capacity to acquire habits, or develop definite dispositions. We
+have now to consider the salient features of habits. In the first place,
+a habit is a form of executive skill, of efficiency in doing. A habit
+means an ability to use natural conditions as means to ends. It is
+an active control of the environment through control of the organs of
+action. We are perhaps apt to emphasize the control of the body at the
+expense of control of the environment. We think of walking, talking,
+playing the piano, the specialized skills characteristic of the etcher,
+the surgeon, the bridge-builder, as if they were simply ease, deftness,
+and accuracy on the part of the organism. They are that, of course; but
+the measure of the value of these qualities lies in the economical and
+effective control of the environment which they secure. To be able to
+walk is to have certain properties of nature at our disposal--and so
+with all other habits.
+
+Education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the acquisition
+of those habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his
+environment. The definition expresses an essential phase of growth. But
+it is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense of
+control of means for achieving ends. If we think of a habit simply as
+a change wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change
+consists in ability to effect subsequent changes in the environment, we
+shall be led to think of "adjustment" as a conformity to environment as
+wax conforms to the seal which impresses it. The environment is thought
+of as something fixed, providing in its fixity the end and standard
+of changes taking place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting
+ourselves to this fixity of external conditions. 2 Habit as
+habituation is indeed something relatively passive; we get used to our
+surroundings--to our clothing, our shoes, and gloves; to the atmosphere
+as long as it is fairly equable; to our daily associates, etc.
+Conformity to the environment, a change wrought in the organism without
+reference to ability to modify surroundings, is a marked trait of such
+habituations. Aside from the fact that we are not entitled to carry
+over the traits of such adjustments (which might well be called
+accommodations, to mark them off from active adjustments) into habits of
+active use of our surroundings, two features of habituations are worth
+notice. In the first place, we get used to things by first using them.
+
+Consider getting used to a strange city. At first, there is excessive
+stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response. Gradually certain
+stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are
+degraded. We can say either that we do not respond to them any longer,
+or more truly that we have effected a persistent response to them--an
+equilibrium of adjustment. This means, in the second place, that this
+enduring adjustment supplies the background upon which are made specific
+adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never interested in changing
+the whole environment; there is much that we take for granted and accept
+just as it already is. Upon this background our activities focus at
+certain points in an endeavor to introduce needed changes. Habituation
+is thus our adjustment to an environment which at the time we are not
+concerned with modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active
+habits. Adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the
+environment to our own activities as of our activities to the
+environment. A savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain. It adapts
+itself. But its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating,
+putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence,
+and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use. A civilized
+people enters upon the scene. It also adapts itself. It introduces
+irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will
+flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those
+which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as
+a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits
+which transform the environment.
+
+The significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its executive
+and motor phase. It means formation of intellectual and emotional
+disposition as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency of
+action. Any habit marks an inclination--an active preference and choice
+for the conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not wait,
+Micawber-like, for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy;
+it actively seeks for occasions to pass into full operation. If its
+expression is unduly blocked, inclination shows itself in uneasiness and
+intense craving. A habit also marks an intellectual disposition. Where
+there is a habit, there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment
+to which action is applied. There is a definite way of understanding the
+situations in which the habit operates. Modes of thought, of observation
+and reflection, enter as forms of skill and of desire into the habits
+that make a man an engineer, an architect, a physician, or a merchant.
+In unskilled forms of labor, the intellectual factors are at minimum
+precisely because the habits involved are not of a high grade. But there
+are habits of judging and reasoning as truly as of handling a tool,
+painting a picture, or conducting an experiment. Such statements are,
+however, understatements. The habits of mind involved in habits of the
+eye and hand supply the latter with their significance. Above all,
+the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of the habit to
+varied and elastic use, and hence to continued growth. We speak of fixed
+habits. Well, the phrase may mean powers so well established that their
+possessor always has them as resources when needed. But the phrase
+is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness,
+open-mindedness, and originality. Fixity of habit may mean that
+something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold
+upon things. This fact explains two points in a common notion about
+habits: their identification with mechanical and external modes of
+action to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the tendency
+to give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad habits." Many
+a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his chosen
+profession called a habit, and would naturally think of his use of
+tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the meaning of habit.
+A habit is to him something which has a hold on him, something not
+easily thrown off even though judgment condemn it.
+
+Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into
+ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which
+intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking
+habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that they are
+opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation and decision. As we
+have seen, the acquiring of habits is due to an original plasticity
+of our natures: to our ability to vary responses till we find an
+appropriate and efficient way of acting. Routine habits, and habits that
+possess us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end
+to plasticity. They mark the close of power to vary. There can be no
+doubt of the tendency of organic plasticity, of the physiological basis,
+to lessen with growing years. The instinctively mobile and eagerly
+varying action of childhood, the love of new stimuli and new
+developments, too easily passes into a "settling down," which means
+aversion to change and a resting on past achievements. Only an
+environment which secures the full use of intelligence in the process
+of forming habits can counteract this tendency. Of course, the same
+hardening of the organic conditions affects the physiological structures
+which are involved in thinking. But this fact only indicates the need
+of persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is
+invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted method which falls
+back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure external efficiency
+of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought, marks a deliberate
+closing in of surroundings upon growth.
+
+3. The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development. We have
+had so far but little to say in this chapter about education. We have
+been occupied with the conditions and implications of growth. If our
+conclusions are justified, they carry with them, however, definite
+educational consequences. When it is said that education is development,
+everything depends upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion
+is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is life.
+Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the
+educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and
+that (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing,
+reconstructing, transforming.
+
+1. Development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that is,
+with respect to the special traits of child and adult life, means
+the direction of power into special channels: the formation of habits
+involving executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific
+objects of observation and thought. But the comparative view is not
+final. The child has specific powers; to ignore that fact is to stunt
+or distort the organs upon which his growth depends. The adult uses his
+powers to transform his environment, thereby occasioning new stimuli
+which redirect his powers and keep them developing. Ignoring this fact
+means arrested development, a passive accommodation. Normal child
+and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. The
+difference between them is not the difference between growth and
+no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different
+conditions. With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping
+with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child
+should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity,
+unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult
+should be growing in childlikeness. One statement is as true as the
+other.
+
+Three ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely privative
+nature of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and
+rigidity of habit, are all connected with a false idea of growth or
+development,--that it is a movement toward a fixed goal. Growth is
+regarded as having an end, instead of being an end. The educational
+counterparts of the three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take
+account of the instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly,
+failure to develop initiative in coping with novel situations; thirdly,
+an undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure automatic
+skill at the expense of personal perception. In all cases, the adult
+environment is accepted as a standard for the child. He is to be brought
+up to it.
+
+Natural instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances--as
+obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be brought into
+conformity with external standards. Since conformity is the aim, what is
+distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or regarded
+as a source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to
+uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the
+novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown.
+Since the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process of growing,
+external agents have to be resorted to to induce movement toward it.
+Whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be
+sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end.
+
+2. Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save
+more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save
+more education. It is a commonplace to say that education should not
+cease when one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that the
+purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by
+organizing the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from
+life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn
+in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.
+
+When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed
+comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up
+thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. Abandoning this
+notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of
+instruction as a method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge into
+a mental and moral hole which awaits filling. Since life means growth,
+a living creature lives as truly and positively at one stage as at
+another, with the same intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims.
+Hence education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which
+insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age. We first look
+with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as something to be got
+over as rapidly as possible. Then the adult formed by such educative
+methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood and youth as a
+scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers. This ironical situation
+will endure till it is recognized that living has its own intrinsic
+quality and that the business of education is with that quality.
+Realization that life is growth protects us from that so-called
+idealizing of childhood which in effect is nothing but lazy indulgence.
+Life is not to be identified with every superficial act and interest.
+Even though it is not always easy to tell whether what appears to be
+mere surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained power,
+we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as ends in
+themselves. They are signs of possible growth. They are to be turned
+into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or
+cultivated for their own sake. Excessive attention to surface phenomena
+(even in the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to
+their fixation and thus to arrested development. What impulses are
+moving toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for
+parent and teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity cannot
+be better put than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the child. Be not
+too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry
+which replies to this suggestion: Would you verily throw up the reins
+of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to
+the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy
+a respect for the child's nature? I answer,--Respect the child, respect
+him to the end, but also respect yourself.... The two points in a boy's
+training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that; to keep
+his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling, and horseplay; keep
+his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it
+points." And as Emerson goes on to show this reverence for childhood
+and youth instead of opening up an easy and easy-going path to the
+instructors, "involves at once, immense claims on the time, the thought,
+on the life of the teacher. It requires time, use, insight, event, all
+the great lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it
+implies character and profoundness."
+
+Summary. Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity.
+Both of these conditions are at their height in childhood and youth.
+Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of
+habits. Habits give control over the environment, power to utilize
+it for human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or
+a general and persistent balance of organic activities with the
+surroundings, and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new
+conditions. The former furnishes the background of growth; the latter
+constitute growing. Active habits involve thought, invention, and
+initiative in applying capacities to new aims. They are opposed
+to routine which marks an arrest of growth. Since growth is the
+characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no
+end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the
+extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies
+means for making the desire effective in fact.
+
+1 Intimations of its significance are found in a number of writers, but
+John Fiske, in his Excursions of an Evolutionist, is accredited with its
+first systematic exposition.
+
+2 This conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the conceptions
+of the external relation of stimulus and response, considered in
+the last chapter, and of the negative conceptions of immaturity and
+plasticity noted in this chapter.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
+
+1. Education as Preparation. We have laid it down that the educative
+process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every
+stage an added capacity of growth. This conception contrasts sharply
+with other ideas which have influenced practice. By making the contrast
+explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to
+light. The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process
+of preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared for is, of
+course, the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. Children are
+not regarded as social members in full and regular standing. They are
+looked upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list. The
+conception is only carried a little farther when the life of adults
+is considered as not having meaning on its own account, but as a
+preparatory probation for "another life." The idea is but another form
+of the notion of the negative and privative character of growth already
+criticized; hence we shall not repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the
+evil consequences which flow from putting education on this basis.
+In the first place, it involves loss of impetus. Motive power is not
+utilized. Children proverbially live in the present; that is not only
+a fact not to be evaded, but it is an excellence. The future just as
+future lacks urgency and body. To get ready for something, one knows not
+what nor why, is to throw away the leverage that exists, and to seek for
+motive power in a vague chance. Under such circumstances, there is, in
+the second place, a premium put on shilly-shallying and procrastination.
+The future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of time will intervene
+before it becomes a present. Why be in a hurry about getting ready for
+it? The temptation to postpone is much increased because the present
+offers so many wonderful opportunities and proffers such invitations to
+adventure. Naturally attention and energy go to them; education accrues
+naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education than if the full stress
+of effort had been put upon making conditions as educative as possible.
+A third undesirable result is the substitution of a conventional average
+standard of expectation and requirement for a standard which concerns
+the specific powers of the individual under instruction. For a severe
+and definite judgment based upon the strong and weak points of the
+individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion concerning what
+youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some more or less
+remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions are to take
+place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to enter
+upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as the
+serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the loss
+which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point
+to a comparatively unproductive point. It fails most just where it
+thinks it is succeeding--in getting a preparation for the future.
+
+Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a
+large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The
+future having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the
+possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make
+it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy
+work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely
+unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is
+actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to
+be told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
+accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future,
+rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely
+systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems
+which neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a
+future. Then, in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this
+method, the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of
+information required against some later day is sugar-coated, so that
+pupils may be fooled into taking something which they do not care for.
+
+It is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the
+future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present
+possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with
+later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd
+moments; it is a continuous leading into the future. If the environment,
+in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the
+present capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of
+the present is surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching
+importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the
+mainspring of present effort. Because the need of preparation for a
+continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every energy
+should be bent to making the present experience as rich and significant
+as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the
+future is taken care of.
+
+2. Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education which
+professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it takes back
+with one hand what it proffers with the other. Development is conceived
+not as continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent powers toward
+a definite goal. The goal is conceived of as completion,--perfection.
+Life at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an
+unfolding toward it. Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the
+preparation theory. Practically the two differ in that the adherents of
+the latter make much of the practical and professional duties for which
+one is preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal
+and spiritual qualities of the principle which is unfolding.
+
+The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to
+a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its
+transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life. It
+simulates the style of the latter. It pays the tribute of speaking
+much of development, process, progress. But all of these operations
+are conceived to be merely transitional; they lack meaning on their own
+account. They possess significance only as movements toward something
+away from what is now going on. Since growth is just a movement toward a
+completed being, the final ideal is immobile. An abstract and indefinite
+future is in control with all which that connotes in depreciation of
+present power and opportunity.
+
+Since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is very far
+away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is unattainable.
+Consequently, in order to be available for present guidance it must be
+translated into something which stands for it. Otherwise we should
+be compelled to regard any and every manifestation of the child as an
+unfolding from within, and hence sacred. Unless we set up some definite
+criterion representing the ideal end by which to judge whether a given
+attitude or act is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is
+to withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere with
+proper development. Since that is not practicable, a working substitute
+is set up. Usually, of course, this is some idea which an adult would
+like to have a child acquire. Consequently, by "suggestive questioning"
+or some other pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out"
+from the pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that
+is evidence that the child is unfolding properly. But as the pupil
+generally has no initiative of his own in this direction, the result is
+a random groping after what is wanted, and the formation of habits of
+dependence upon the cues furnished by others. Just because such methods
+simulate a true principle and claim to have its sanction they may do
+more harm than would outright "telling," where, at least, it remains
+with the child how much will stick.
+
+Within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two typical
+attempts to provide a working representative of the absolute goal. Both
+start from the conception of a whole--an absolute--which is "immanent"
+in human life. The perfect or complete ideal is not a mere ideal; it
+is operative here and now. But it is present only implicitly,
+"potentially," or in an enfolded condition. What is termed development
+is the gradual making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up.
+Froebel and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes
+referred to, have different ideas of the path by which the progressive
+realization of manifestation of the complete principle is effected.
+According to Hegel, it is worked out through a series of historical
+institutions which embody the different factors in the Absolute.
+According to Froebel, the actuating force is the presentation of
+symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding to the essential traits
+of the Absolute. When these are presented to the child, the Whole,
+or perfection, sleeping within him, is awakened. A single example
+may indicate the method. Every one familiar with the kindergarten is
+acquainted with the circle in which the children gather. It is not
+enough that the circle is a convenient way of grouping the children. It
+must be used "because it is a symbol of the collective life of mankind
+in general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the native
+capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his influence
+in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the most effective
+single force in modern educational theory in effecting widespread
+acknowledgment of the idea of growth. But his formulation of the notion
+of development and his organization of devices for promoting it were
+badly hampered by the fact that he conceived development to be the
+unfolding of a ready-made latent principle. He failed to see that
+growing is growth, developing is development, and consequently placed
+the emphasis upon the completed product. Thus he set up a goal which
+meant the arrest of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to
+immediate guidance of powers, save through translation into abstract and
+symbolic formulae.
+
+A remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical philosophic
+language, transcendental. That is, it is something apart from direct
+experience and perception. So far as experience is concerned, it is
+empty; it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything
+which can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be
+compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection
+between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of
+development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To
+regard known things as symbols, according to some arbitrary a priori
+formula--and every a priori conception must be arbitrary--is an
+invitation to romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal
+to it and treat them as laws. After the scheme of symbolism has been
+settled upon, some definite technique must be invented by which the
+inner meaning of the sensible symbols used may be brought home to
+children. Adults being the formulators of the symbolism are naturally
+the authors and controllers of the technique. The result was that
+Froebel's love of abstract symbolism often got the better of his
+sympathetic insight; and there was substituted for development as
+arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation as the history of
+instruction has ever seen.
+
+With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of
+the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional, rather than symbolic,
+form. His philosophy, like Froebel's, marks in one direction an
+indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the process of life.
+The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident
+to him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical
+institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and
+nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated
+the efforts of a whole series of German writers--Lessing, Herder, Kant,
+Schiller, Goethe--to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great
+collective institutional products of humanity. For those who learned
+the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive
+of institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely--in
+idea, not in fact--the psychology that regarded "mind" as a ready-made
+possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of
+"objective mind"--language, government, art, religion--in the formation
+of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the conception of an
+absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as they concretely
+exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each in its time
+and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing
+process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its
+existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an integral
+element in the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as they are,
+individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and nurture,
+consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions.
+Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education.
+Institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and
+fall of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the
+great "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have
+no share or lot in it. In the later nineteenth century, this type of
+idealism was amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution.
+
+"Evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end. As against
+it, or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of
+individuals are impotent. Or, rather, they are but the means by which
+it works itself out. Social progress is an "organic growth," not an
+experimental selection. Reason is all powerful, but only Absolute Reason
+has any power.
+
+The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the
+Greeks) that great historic institutions are active factors in the
+intellectual nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational
+philosophy. It indicated a genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had
+marred his assertion that education must be a natural development and
+not something forced or grafted upon individuals from without, by the
+notion that social conditions are not natural. But in its notion of
+a complete and all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory
+swallowed up concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual
+in the abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the
+claims of the Whole and of individuality by the conception of society as
+an organic whole, or organism. That social organization is presupposed
+in the adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted.
+But the social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of
+the body to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual
+has a certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented
+by the place and functions of the other organs. As one portion of the
+bodily tissue is differentiated so that it can be the hand and the
+hand only, another, the eye, and so on, all taken together making the
+organism, so one individual is supposed to be differentiated for the
+exercise of the mechanical operations of society, another for those of
+a statesman, another for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion
+of "organism" is thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class
+distinctions in social organization--a notion which in its educational
+application again means external dictation instead of growth.
+
+3. Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had great
+vogue and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much
+influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." It has in view
+a correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of
+specific powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do
+the chief things which it is important for him to do better than he
+could without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency,
+economy, promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education was
+indicated in what was said about habits as the product of educative
+development. But the theory in question takes, as it were, a short
+cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named) as the direct and
+conscious aims of instruction, and not simply as the results of growth.
+There is a definite number of powers to be trained, as one might
+enumerate the kinds of strokes which a golfer has to master.
+Consequently education should get directly at the business of training
+them. But this implies that they are already there in some untrained
+form; otherwise their creation would have to be an indirect product of
+other activities and agencies. Being there already in some crude form,
+all that remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions,
+and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase "formal
+discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline" refers both
+to the outcome of trained power and to the method of training through
+repeated exercise.
+
+The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of
+perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing,
+feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise
+upon material presented. In its classic form, this theory was expressed
+by Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the material or
+content of knowledge through passively received sensations. On the
+other hand, the mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation,
+retention, comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. Knowledge results
+if the mind discriminates and combines things as they are united and
+divided in nature itself. But the important thing for education is
+the exercise or practice of the faculties of the mind till they become
+thoroughly established habitudes. The analogy constantly employed is
+that of a billiard player or gymnast, who by repeated use of certain
+muscles in a uniform way at last secures automatic skill. Even the
+faculty of thinking was to be formed into a trained habit by repeated
+exercises in making and combining simple distinctions, for which, Locke
+thought, mathematics affords unrivaled opportunity.
+
+Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to
+do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of
+the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which mind
+should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which were few
+in number and which might be trained by specific exercises. The scheme
+appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and
+yet it insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception
+and storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of
+attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization. It
+was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material whatever is
+received from without; it was idealistic in that final stress fell upon
+the formation of intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal
+in its assertion that the individual cannot possess or generate any true
+ideas on his own account; it was individualistic in placing the end of
+education in the perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset
+by the individual. This kind of distribution of values expressed with
+nicety the state of opinion in the generations following upon Locke.
+It became, without explicit reference to Locke, a common-place of
+educational theory and of psychology. Practically, it seemed to provide
+the educator with definite, instead of vague, tasks. It made the
+elaboration of a technique of instruction relatively easy. All that was
+necessary was to provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers.
+This practice consists in repeated acts of attending, observing,
+memorizing, etc. By grading the difficulty of the acts, making each set
+of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set which preceded it,
+a complete scheme of instruction is evolved. There are various ways,
+equally conclusive, of criticizing this conception, in both its alleged
+foundations and in its educational application. (1) Perhaps the most
+direct mode of attack consists in pointing out that the supposed
+original faculties of observation, recollection, willing, thinking,
+etc., are purely mythological. There are no such ready-made powers
+waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. There are, indeed, a great
+number of original native tendencies, instinctive modes of action, based
+on the original connections of neurones in the central nervous system.
+There are impulsive tendencies of the eyes to follow and fixate light;
+of the neck muscles to turn toward light and sound; of the hands to
+reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to
+make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant substances; to gag
+and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number. But these
+tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off from
+one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with one another
+in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent intellectual
+powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they are
+tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment
+so as to bring about other changes. Something in the throat makes one
+cough; the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus
+modify the subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a hot thing; it is
+impulsively, wholly unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal
+alters the stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with
+the needs of the organism. It is by such specific changes of organic
+activities in response to specific changes in the medium that that
+control of the environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is
+effected. Now all of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and
+smellings and tastings are of this kind. In any legitimate sense of the
+words mental or intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these
+qualities, and no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any
+intellectual properties of observation, judgment, or intentional action
+(volition) upon them.
+
+(2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is
+not a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one might
+strengthen a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in selecting
+from the diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which
+are especially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to
+say, among the reactions of the body in general occur upon stimulation
+of the eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to
+reaching, grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are
+gradually eliminated--or else no training occurs. As we have already
+noted, the primary reactions, with a very few exceptions are too
+diffused and general to be practically of much use in the case of the
+human infant. Hence the identity of training with selective response.
+(Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important is the specific coordination of
+different factors of response which takes place. There is not merely a
+selection of the hand reactions which effect grasping, but of the
+particular visual stimuli which call out just these reactions and no
+others, and an establishment of connection between the two. But the
+coordinating does not stop here. Characteristic temperature reactions
+may take place when the object is grasped. These will also be brought
+in; later, the temperature reaction may be connected directly with the
+optical stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed--as a bright flame,
+independent of close contact, may steer one away. Or the child in
+handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues.
+The ear response is then brought into the system of response. If a
+certain sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies
+the activity, response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected
+with auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the
+complex response.
+
+(3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each
+other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the stimuli
+are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the more rigid
+and the less generally available is the training secured. In equivalent
+language, less intellectual or educative quality attaches to the
+training. The usual way of stating this fact is that the more
+specialized the reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing
+and perfecting it transferable to other modes of behavior. According
+to the orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his
+spelling lesson acquires, besides ability to spell those particular
+words, an increase of power of observation, attention, and recollection
+which may be employed whenever these powers are needed. As matter of
+fact, the more he confines himself to noticing and fixating the forms of
+words, irrespective of connection with other things (such as the
+meaning of the words, the context in which they are habitually used, the
+derivation and classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely
+is he to acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the
+mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not even be increasing his
+ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to say
+nothing of ability to observe in general. He is merely selecting the
+stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the motor reactions
+of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination (to use
+our prior terminology) is extremely limited. The connections which are
+employed in other observations and recollections (or reproductions) are
+deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon forms
+of letters and words. Having been excluded, they cannot be restored when
+needed. The ability secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is
+not available for perceiving and recalling other things. In the ordinary
+phraseology, it is not transferable. But the wider the context--that is
+to say, the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated--the more
+the ability acquired is available for the effective performance of
+other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any "transfer,"
+but because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is
+equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to a
+narrow and rigid, coordination. (4) Going to the root of the matter, the
+fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its
+separation of activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no
+such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there
+is only the ability to see or hear or remember something. To talk about
+training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject
+matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. Exercise may react
+upon circulation, breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigor or
+strength, but this reservoir is available for specific ends only by use
+in connection with the material means which accomplish them. Vigor will
+enable a man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he
+would if he were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and
+club, sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one
+of them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far
+as it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordinations or as
+the same kind of coordination is involved in all of them. Moreover, the
+difference between the training of ability to spell which comes from
+taking visual forms in a narrow context and one which takes them in
+connection with the activities required to grasp meaning, such
+as context, affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the
+difference between exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to
+"develop" certain muscles, and a game or sport. The former is uniform
+and mechanical; it is rigidly specialized. The latter is varied from
+moment to moment; no two acts are quite alike; novel emergencies have to
+be met; the coordinations forming have to be kept flexible and elastic.
+Consequently, the training is much more "general"; that is to say, it
+covers a wider territory and includes more factors. Exactly the same
+thing holds of special and general education of the mind.
+
+A monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one
+special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping or
+calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. One may be
+an authority in a particular field and yet of more than usually poor
+judgment in matters not closely allied, unless the training in the
+special field has been of a kind to ramify into the subject matter
+of the other fields. (5) Consequently, such powers as observation,
+recollection, judgment, esthetic taste, represent organized results of
+the occupation of native active tendencies with certain subject matters.
+A man does not observe closely and fully by pressing a button for
+the observing faculty to get to work (in other words by "willing"
+to observe); but if he has something to do which can be accomplished
+successfully only through intensive and extensive use of eye and hand,
+he naturally observes. Observation is an outcome, a consequence, of
+the interaction of sense organ and subject matter. It will vary,
+accordingly, with the subject matter employed.
+
+It is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of
+faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first determined
+what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become expert in
+observing and recalling and for what purpose. And it is only repeating
+in another form what has already been said, to declare that the
+criterion here must be social. We want the person to note and recall and
+judge those things which make him an effective competent member of the
+group in which he is associated with others. Otherwise we might as well
+set the pupil to observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to
+memorizing meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue--which is
+about what we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of formal
+discipline. If the observing habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer
+are better habits than those which are thus formed, it is because
+they deal with subject matter which is more significant in life. In
+concluding this portion of the discussion, we note that the distinction
+between special and general education has nothing to do with the
+transferability of function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer
+is miraculous and impossible. But some activities are broad; they
+involve a coordination of many factors. Their development demands
+continuous alternation and readjustment. As conditions change, certain
+factors are subordinated, and others which had been of minor importance
+come to the front. There is constant redistribution of the focus of the
+action, as is seen in the illustration of a game as over against pulling
+a fixed weight by a series of uniform motions. Thus there is practice in
+prompt making of new combinations with the focus of activity shifted to
+meet change in subject matter. Wherever an activity is broad in
+scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of
+sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to change
+direction in its progressive development, general education is bound
+to result. For this is what "general" means; broad and flexible. In
+practice, education meets these conditions, and hence is general, in the
+degree in which it takes account of social relationships. A person may
+become expert in technical philosophy, or philology, or mathematics or
+engineering or financiering, and be inept and ill-advised in his action
+and judgment outside of his specialty. If however his concern with
+these technical subject matters has been connected with human activities
+having social breadth, the range of active responses called into play
+and flexibly integrated is much wider. Isolation of subject matter
+from a social context is the chief obstruction in current practice to
+securing a general training of mind. Literature, art, religion, when
+thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the technical things which
+the professional upholders of general education strenuously oppose.
+
+Summary. The conception that the result of the educative process is
+capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other
+ideas which have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting
+conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some
+future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which
+result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher
+and taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully
+directed--namely, taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the
+immediate present. Consequently it defeats its own professed purpose.
+The notion that education is an unfolding from within appears to have
+more likeness to the conception of growth which has been set forth. But
+as worked out in the theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves
+ignoring the interaction of present organic tendencies with the present
+environment, just as much as the notion of preparation. Some implicit
+whole is regarded as given ready-made and the significance of growth
+is merely transitory; it is not an end in itself, but simply a means
+of making explicit what is already implicit. Since that which is not
+explicit cannot be made definite use of, something has to be found to
+represent it. According to Froebel, the mystic symbolic value of certain
+objects and acts (largely mathematical) stand for the Absolute
+Whole which is in process of unfolding. According to Hegel, existing
+institutions are its effective actual representatives. Emphasis upon
+symbols and institutions tends to divert perception from the direct
+growth of experience in richness of meaning. Another influential but
+defective theory is that which conceives that mind has, at birth,
+certain mental faculties or powers, such as perceiving, remembering,
+willing, judging, generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is
+the training of these faculties through repeated exercise. This theory
+treats subject matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its
+value residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of
+the general powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of the
+alleged powers from one another and from the material upon which they
+act. The outcome of the theory in practice was shown to be an undue
+emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized modes of skill at the
+expense of initiative, inventiveness, and readaptability--qualities
+which depend upon the broad and consecutive interaction of specific
+activities with one another. 1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is
+so great, there are so many paths of construction, that every stimulus
+brings about some change in all of the organs of response. We are
+accustomed however to ignore most of these modifications of the total
+organic activity, concentrating upon that one which is most specifically
+adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the moment. 2 This statement
+should be compared with what was said earlier about the sequential
+ordering of responses (p. 25). It is merely a more explicit statement of
+the way in which that consecutive arrangement occurs.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
+
+1. Education as Formation. We now come to a type of theory which denies
+the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique role of subject
+matter in the development of mental and moral disposition. According to
+it, education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it
+a training of faculties resident in mind itself. It is rather the
+formation of mind by setting up certain associations or connections of
+content by means of a subject matter presented from without. Education
+proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a building
+into the mind from without. That education is formative of mind is not
+questioned; it is the conception already propounded. But formation here
+has a technical meaning dependent upon the idea of something operating
+from without. Herbart is the best historical representative of this type
+of theory. He denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties. The
+mind is simply endowed with the power of producing various qualities in
+reaction to the various realities which act upon it. These qualitatively
+different reactions are called presentations (Vorstellungen). Every
+presentation once called into being persists; it may be driven below the
+"threshold" of consciousness by new and stronger presentations, produced
+by the reaction of the soul to new material, but its activity continues
+by its own inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness. What
+are termed faculties--attention, memory, thinking, perception, even the
+sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and complications, formed
+by the interaction of these submerged presentations with one another and
+with new presentations. Perception, for example, is the complication of
+presentations which result from the rise of old presentations to greet
+and combine with new ones; memory is the evoking of an old presentation
+above the threshold of consciousness by getting entangled with another
+presentation, etc. Pleasure is the result of reinforcement among the
+independent activities of presentations; pain of their pulling different
+ways, etc.
+
+The concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the various
+arrangements formed by the various presentations in their different
+qualities. The "furniture" of the mind is the mind. Mind is wholly a
+matter of "contents." The educational implications of this doctrine are
+threefold.
+
+(1) This or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects which
+evoke this or that kind of reaction and which produce this or that
+arrangement among the reactions called out. The formation of mind is
+wholly a matter of the presentation of the proper educational materials.
+
+(2) Since the earlier presentations constitute the "apperceiving organs"
+which control the assimilation of new presentations, their character is
+all important. The effect of new presentations is to reinforce groupings
+previously formed. The business of the educator is, first, to select the
+proper material in order to fix the nature of the original reactions,
+and, secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations
+on the basis of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions. The
+control is from behind, from the past, instead of, as in the unfolding
+conception, in the ultimate goal.
+
+(3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down.
+Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the central thing,
+but since knowing consists in the way in which this interacts with the
+contents already submerged below consciousness, the first thing is
+the step of "preparation,"--that is, calling into special activity and
+getting above the floor of consciousness those older presentations which
+are to assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation, follow the
+processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the application of
+the newly formed content to the performance of some task. Everything
+must go through this course; consequently there is a perfectly uniform
+method in instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages.
+
+Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of
+the region of routine and accident. He brought it into the sphere of
+conscious method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim
+and procedure, instead of being a compound of casual inspiration
+and subservience to tradition. Moreover, everything in teaching and
+discipline could be specified, instead of our having to be content with
+vague and more or less mystic generalities about ultimate ideals and
+speculative spiritual symbols. He abolished the notion of ready-made
+faculties, which might be trained by exercise upon any sort of
+material, and made attention to concrete subject matter, to the content,
+all-important. Herbart undoubtedly has had a greater influence in
+bringing to the front questions connected with the material of study
+than any other educational philosopher. He stated problems of method
+from the standpoint of their connection with subject matter: method
+having to do with the manner and sequence of presenting new subject
+matter to insure its proper interaction with old.
+
+The fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring the
+existence in a living being of active and specific functions which are
+developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they are
+occupied with their environment. The theory represents the Schoolmaster
+come to his own. This fact expresses at once its strength and its
+weakness. The conception that the mind consists of what has been
+taught, and that the importance of what has been taught consists in
+its availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue's view
+of life. The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in
+instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of
+learning. It emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment
+upon the mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves a
+personal sharing in common experiences. It exaggerates beyond reason
+the possibilities of consciously formulated and used methods, and
+underestimates the role of vital, unconscious, attitudes. It insists
+upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the operation of the
+genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It takes, in brief, everything
+educational into account save its essence,--vital energy seeking
+opportunity for effective exercise. All education forms character,
+mental and moral, but formation consists in the selection and
+coordination of native activities so that they may utilize the subject
+matter of the social environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a
+formation of native activities, but it takes place through them. It is a
+process of reconstruction, reorganization.
+
+2. Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar combination
+of the ideas of development and formation from without has given rise
+to the recapitulation theory of education, biological and cultural. The
+individual develops, but his proper development consists in repeating in
+orderly stages the past evolution of animal life and human history. The
+former recapitulation occurs physiologically; the latter should be made
+to occur by means of education. The alleged biological truth that the
+individual in his growth from the simple embryo to maturity repeats the
+history of the evolution of animal life in the progress of forms
+from the simplest to the most complex (or expressed technically, that
+ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis) does not concern us, save as it is
+supposed to afford scientific foundation for cultural recapitulation
+of the past. Cultural recapitulation says, first, that children at a
+certain age are in the mental and moral condition of savagery; their
+instincts are vagrant and predatory because their ancestors at one time
+lived such a life. Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper subject
+matter of their education at this time is the material--especially the
+literary material of myths, folk-tale, and song--produced by humanity
+in the analogous stage. Then the child passes on to something
+corresponding, say, to the pastoral stage, and so on till at the time
+when he is ready to take part in contemporary life, he arrives at the
+present epoch of culture.
+
+In this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a small
+school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part), has had
+little currency. But the idea which underlies it is that education
+is essentially retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past
+and especially to the literary products of the past, and that mind
+is adequately formed in the degree in which it is patterned upon the
+spiritual heritage of the past. This idea has had such immense influence
+upon higher instruction especially, that it is worth examination in its
+extreme formulation.
+
+In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embyronic growth
+of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of
+lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of
+past stages. If there were any strict "law" of repetition, evolutionary
+development would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation
+would simply have repeated its predecessors' existence. Development, in
+short, has taken place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in
+the prior scheme of growth. And this suggests that the aim of education
+is to facilitate such short-circuited growth. The great advantage of
+immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate
+the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown past. The business of
+education is rather to liberate the young from reviving and retraversing
+the past than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The social
+environment of the young is constituted by the presence and action
+of the habits of thinking and feeling of civilized men. To ignore the
+directive influence of this present environment upon the young is simply
+to abdicate the educational function. A biologist has said: "The history
+of development in different animals. . . offers to us. . . a series of
+ingenious, determined, varied but more or less unsuccessful efforts to
+escape from the necessity of recapitulating, and to substitute for the
+ancestral method a more direct method." Surely it would be foolish if
+education did not deliberately attempt to facilitate similar efforts in
+conscious experience so that they become increasingly successful.
+
+The two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled
+from association with the false context which perverts them. On the
+biological side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with
+precisely the assortment of impulsive activities with which he does
+start, they being blind, and many of them conflicting with one another,
+casual, sporadic, and unadapted to their immediate environment. The
+other point is that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products
+of past history so far as they are of help for the future. Since they
+represent the results of prior experience, their value for future
+experience may, of course, be indefinitely great. Literatures produced
+in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and use of them, a
+part of the present environment of individuals; but there is an enormous
+difference between availing ourselves of them as present resources and
+taking them as standards and patterns in their retrospective character.
+
+(1) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through misuse
+of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity means that past
+life has somehow predetermined the main traits of an individual, and
+that they are so fixed that little serious change can be introduced into
+them. Thus taken, the influence of heredity is opposed to that of
+the environment, and the efficacy of the latter belittled. But for
+educational purposes heredity means neither more nor less than the
+original endowment of an individual. Education must take the being as he
+is; that a particular individual has just such and such an equipment of
+native activities is a basic fact. That they were produced in such
+and such a way, or that they are derived from one's ancestry, is not
+especially important for the educator, however it may be with the
+biologist, as compared with the fact that they now exist. Suppose one
+had to advise or direct a person regarding his inheritance of
+property. The fallacy of assuming that the fact it is an inheritance,
+predetermines its future use, is obvious. The advisor is concerned with
+making the best use of what is there--putting it at work under the most
+favorable conditions. Obviously he cannot utilize what is not there;
+neither can the educator. In this sense, heredity is a limit of
+education. Recognition of this fact prevents the waste of energy and the
+irritation that ensue from the too prevalent habit of trying to make
+by instruction something out of an individual which he is not naturally
+fitted to become. But the doctrine does not determine what use shall
+be made of the capacities which exist. And, except in the case of the
+imbecile, these original capacities are much more varied and potential,
+even in the case of the more stupid, than we as yet know properly how to
+utilize. Consequently, while a careful study of the native aptitudes
+and deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary necessity, the
+subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment which will
+adequately function whatever activities are present. The relation of
+heredity and environment is well expressed in the case of language. If a
+being had no vocal organs from which issue articulate sounds, if he had
+no auditory or other sense-receptors and no connections between the two
+sets of apparatus, it would be a sheer waste of time to try to teach him
+to converse. He is born short in that respect, and education must accept
+the limitation. But if he has this native equipment, its possession in
+no way guarantees that he will ever talk any language or what language
+he will talk. The environment in which his activities occur and by which
+they are carried into execution settles these things. If he lived in a
+dumb unsocial environment where men refused to talk to one another and
+used only that minimum of gestures without which they could not get
+along, vocal language would be as unachieved by him as if he had no
+vocal organs. If the sounds which he makes occur in a medium of persons
+speaking the Chinese language, the activities which make like sounds
+will be selected and coordinated. This illustration may be applied to
+the entire range of the educability of any individual. It places the
+heritage from the past in its right connection with the demands and
+opportunities of the present.
+
+(2) The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is found
+in the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or more
+specifically in the particular literatures which were produced in
+the culture epoch which is supposed to correspond with the stage of
+development of those taught) affords another instance of that divorce
+between the process and product of growth which has been criticized. To
+keep the process alive, to keep it alive in ways which make it easier
+to keep it alive in the future, is the function of educational subject
+matter. But an individual can live only in the present. The present
+is not just something which comes after the past; much less something
+produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind it. The
+study of past products will not help us understand the present, because
+the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they
+were the products. A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great
+significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise. And the
+mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main material
+of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and past,
+and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the present a more
+or less futile imitation of the past. Under such circumstances, culture
+becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge and an asylum. Men escape
+from the crudities of the present to live in its imagined refinements,
+instead of using what the past offers as an agency for ripening these
+crudities. The present, in short, generates the problems which lead us
+to search the past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we
+find when we search. The past is the past precisely because it does
+not include what is characteristic in the present. The moving present
+includes the past on condition that it uses the past to direct its own
+movement. The past is a great resource for the imagination; it adds a
+new dimension to life, but OD condition that it be seen as the past of
+the present, and not as another and disconnected world. The principle
+which makes little of the present act of living and operation of
+growing, the only thing always present, naturally looks to the past
+because the future goal which it sets up is remote and empty. But having
+turned its back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it laden
+with the spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive to the
+needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the liveliest of
+motives for interest in the background of the present, and will never
+have to hunt for a way back because it will never have lost connection.
+
+3. Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas both
+of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the formation from
+without, whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the
+past, the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is
+a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. It has all the
+time an immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches
+that end--the direct transformation of the quality of experience.
+Infancy, youth, adult life,--all stand on the same educative level
+in the sense that what is really learned at any and every stage of
+experience constitutes the value of that experience, and in the sense
+that it is the chief business of life at every point to make living thus
+contribute to an enrichment of its own perceptible meaning.
+
+We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
+reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning
+of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of
+subsequent experience. (1) The increment of meaning corresponds to
+the increased perception of the connections and continuities of the
+activities in which we are engaged. The activity begins in an impulsive
+form; that is, it is blind. It does not know what it is about; that is
+to say, what are its interactions with other activities. An activity
+which brings education or instruction with it makes one aware of some
+of the connections which had been imperceptible. To recur to our simple
+example, a child who reaches for a bright light gets burned. Henceforth
+he knows that a certain act of touching in connection with a certain
+act of vision (and vice-versa) means heat and pain; or, a certain
+light means a source of heat. The acts by which a scientific man in his
+laboratory learns more about flame differ no whit in principle. By doing
+certain things, he makes perceptible certain connections of heat with
+other things, which had been previously ignored. Thus his acts in
+relation to these things get more meaning; he knows better what he
+is doing or "is about" when he has to do with them; he can intend
+consequences instead of just letting them happen--all synonymous ways
+of saying the same thing. At the same stroke, the flame has gained in
+meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation, about light and
+temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its intellectual content.
+
+(2) The other side of an educative experience is an added power of
+subsequent direction or control. To say that one knows what he is about,
+or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of course, that he can
+better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can, therefore, get
+ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial consequences and
+avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative experience, then, one
+in which instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is
+contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a
+capricious activity on the other. (a) In the latter one "does not
+care what happens"; one just lets himself go and avoids connecting the
+consequences of one's act (the evidences of its connections with other
+things) with the act. It is customary to frown upon such aimless
+random activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or
+lawlessness. But there is a tendency to seek the cause of such aimless
+activities in the youth's own disposition, isolated from everything
+else. But in fact such activity is explosive, and due to maladjustment
+with surroundings. Individuals act capriciously whenever they act under
+external dictation, or from being told, without having a purpose of
+their own or perceiving the bearing of the deed upon other acts. One may
+learn by doing something which he does not understand; even in the most
+intelligent action, we do much which we do not mean, because the largest
+portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend are not
+perceived or anticipated. But we learn only because after the act is
+performed we note results which we had not noted before. But much work
+in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of
+such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to
+see the connection between the result--say the answer--and the method
+pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and
+a kind of miracle. Such action is essentially capricious, and leads to
+capricious habits. (b) Routine action, action which is automatic, may
+increase skill to do a particular thing. In so far, it might be said
+to have an educative effect. But it does not lead to new perceptions
+of bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens the
+meaning-horizon. And since the environment changes and our way of acting
+has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced connection
+with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at
+some critical moment. The vaunted "skill" turns out gross ineptitude.
+
+The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
+reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been
+criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the
+end (the result) and the process. This is verbally self-contradictory,
+but only verbally. It means that experience as an active process
+occupies time and that its later period completes its earlier portion;
+it brings to light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived.
+The later outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the
+experience as a whole establishes a bent or disposition toward the
+things possessing this meaning. Every such continuous experience
+or activity is educative, and all education resides in having such
+experiences.
+
+It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention
+later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as
+personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken in the earlier
+chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them
+with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of
+catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult
+group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of
+established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in
+the main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the
+experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits,
+better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be
+an improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of the
+extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious
+social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce
+these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made
+an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless
+far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive
+agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only
+a development of children and youth but also of the future society of
+which they will be the constituents.
+
+Summary. Education may be conceived either retrospectively or
+prospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as process of
+accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the past
+for a resource in a developing future. The former finds its standards
+and patterns in what has gone before. The mind may be regarded as a
+group of contents resulting from having certain things presented. In
+this case, the earlier presentations constitute the material to which
+the later are to be assimilated. Emphasis upon the value of the early
+experiences of immature beings is most important, especially because of
+the tendency to regard them as of little account. But these experiences
+do not consist of externally presented material, but of interaction of
+native activities with the environment which progressively modifies both
+the activities and the environment. The defect of the Herbartian theory
+of formation through presentations consists in slighting this constant
+interaction and change. The same principle of criticism applies to
+theories which find the primary subject matter of study in the cultural
+products--especially the literary products--of man's history. Isolated
+from their connection with the present environment in which individuals
+have to act, they become a kind of rival and distracting environment.
+Their value lies in their use to increase the meaning of the things with
+which we have actively to do at the present time. The idea of education
+advanced in these chapters is formally summed up in the idea of
+continuous reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off
+from education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as
+external formation, and as recapitulation of the past.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
+
+For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned
+with education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to
+make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of
+education as it operates in different types of community life. To say
+that education is a social function, securing direction and development
+in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to
+which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the
+quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that
+a society which not only changes but-which has the ideal of such
+change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods
+of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its
+own customs. To make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own
+educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer
+quarters with the nature of present social life.
+
+1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word, but many
+things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds
+of purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in
+which his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they
+had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life.
+Within every larger social organization there are numerous minor groups:
+not only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious,
+associations. There are political parties with differing aims, social
+sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely
+together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. In many modern
+states and in some ancient, there is great diversity of populations,
+of varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
+standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for
+example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an
+inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (See ante, p.
+20.)
+
+The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a
+eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning
+de jure and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy, the former
+connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one by
+its very nature. The qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy
+community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of
+sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at the facts which the term
+denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation,
+we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. Men
+banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that
+prey upon the public while serving it, political machines held together
+by the interest of plunder, are included. If it is said that such
+organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal
+requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the
+conception of society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having
+no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations,
+no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of
+the praiseworthy qualities of "Society" which hold it together. There
+is honor among thieves, and a band of robbers has a common interest as
+respects its members. Gangs are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow
+cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes. Family life may be marked
+by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and yet
+be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education given by a
+group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the
+socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once
+more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social
+life. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes. We cannot
+set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We
+must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order
+to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we
+have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are
+actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms
+of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize
+undesirable features and suggest improvement. Now in any social group
+whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in
+common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative
+intercourse with other groups. From these two traits we derive
+our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are
+consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms
+of association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal
+band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members together
+are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and
+that they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other
+groups with respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence, the
+education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on
+the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard,
+we find that there are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in
+which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth for
+the experience of other members--it is readily communicable--and
+that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into
+relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies
+of culture, as well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a
+due part in the political organization and in return receives support
+from it. In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and
+shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes
+of association.
+
+I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically
+governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an
+organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command
+must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects, must
+call some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government
+could do everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical
+declaration is at least a recognition that the bond of union is
+not merely one of coercive force. It may be said, however, that the
+activities appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading--that such
+a government calls into functioning activity simply capacity for fear.
+In a way, this statement is true. But it overlooks the fact that
+fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience. Caution,
+circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert
+what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling
+the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission. The
+real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread
+and hope of specific tangible reward--say comfort and ease--many other
+capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such
+a way as to pervert them. Instead of operating on their own account they
+are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
+
+This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common
+interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of
+the social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. In
+order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of
+the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take
+from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and
+experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters,
+educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party loses in
+meaning, when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience
+is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject-class prevents
+social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the superior class are
+less material and less perceptible, but equally real. Their culture
+tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art
+becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their
+knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.
+
+Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety
+of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity
+of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought.
+The more activity is restricted to a few definite lines--as it is
+when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of
+experiences--the more action tends to become routine on the part of the
+class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on
+the part of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato
+defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which
+control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no
+slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in
+activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do
+not understand and have no personal interest in. Much is said about
+scientific management of work. It is a narrow view which restricts
+the science which secures efficiency of operation to movements of the
+muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the
+relations of a man to his work--including his relations to others who
+take part--which will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is
+doing. Efficiency in production often demands division of labor. But
+it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the technical,
+intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they do,
+and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such
+perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as efficiency of
+activity and scientific management to purely technical externals is
+evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in
+control of industry--those who supply its aims. Because of their lack
+of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not sufficient
+stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in
+industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
+technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and
+intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the
+failure to take into account the significant social factors means none
+the less an absence of mind, and a corresponding distortion of emotional
+life. II. This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all
+associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second
+point. The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its
+antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever
+one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out from full
+interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the
+protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress
+through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from
+one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they
+had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the
+interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned
+and unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity
+and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals
+within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as
+synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact that they have
+identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs.
+On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others,
+for such contact might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion
+reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding mental
+life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical
+environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the
+field where we are apt to ignore it--the sphere of social contacts.
+Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the
+operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between
+peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the
+alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
+fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between
+them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another,
+and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial
+tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers;
+to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible
+connection with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the
+intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of
+space.
+
+2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point
+to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more
+varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon
+the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The
+second means not only freer interaction between social groups (once
+isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change
+in social habit--its continuous readjustment through meeting the new
+situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are
+precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society.
+
+Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form
+of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and
+where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a
+democratic community more interested than other communities have cause
+to be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of democracy
+to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that
+a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless
+those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a
+democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it
+must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these
+can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A
+democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of
+associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension
+in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so
+that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to
+consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own,
+is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race,
+and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import
+of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact
+denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to
+respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action.
+They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as
+the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which
+in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.
+
+The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a
+greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy,
+are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort.
+On the contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of
+manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication
+which flowed from the command of science over natural energy. But
+after greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community
+of interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of
+deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously a society to
+which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must see to
+it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable
+and easy terms. A society marked off into classes need he specially
+attentive only to the education of its ruling elements. A society which
+is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change
+occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated
+to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will
+be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose
+significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be a
+confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of
+the blind and externally directed activities of others.
+
+3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be
+devoted to making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas in
+education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider
+the educational theories which have been evolved in three epochs when
+the social import of education was especially conspicuous. The first one
+to be considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than did
+he the fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is
+doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be
+useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs);
+and that it is the business of education to discover these aptitudes and
+progressively to train them for social use. Much which has been said so
+far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But
+conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict
+these ideas in their application. He never got any conception of the
+indefinite plurality of activities which may characterize an individual
+and a social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited
+number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements. Plato's
+starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately
+upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we
+shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end,
+the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the
+possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements
+are to be ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and
+distribution of activities--what he called justice--as a trait of both
+individual and social organization. But how is the knowledge of the
+final and permanent good to be achieved? In dealing with this question
+we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is
+not possible save in a just and harmonious social order. Everywhere
+else the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false
+perspectives. A disorganized and factional society sets up a number of
+different models and standards. Under such conditions it is impossible
+for the individual to attain consistency of mind. Only a complete whole
+is fully self-consistent. A society which rests upon the supremacy of
+some factor over another irrespective of its rational or proportionate
+claims, inevitably leads thought astray. It puts a premium on certain
+things and slurs over others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is
+forced and distorted. Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns
+furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just state will
+these be such as to give the right education; and only those who have
+rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering
+principle of things. We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle.
+However, Plato suggested a way out. A few men, philosophers or lovers
+of wisdom--or truth--may by study learn at least in outline the proper
+patterns of true existence. If a powerful ruler should form a state
+after these patterns, then its regulations could be preserved. An
+education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what
+they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the
+work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part,
+and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
+maintained.
+
+It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a
+more adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance
+of social arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those
+arrangements upon the means used to educate the young. It would be
+impossible to find a deeper sense of the function of education in
+discovering and developing personal capacities, and training them so
+that they would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society
+in which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato could
+not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he clearly saw.
+
+While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in
+society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional
+status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education,
+he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall
+by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.
+Consequently the testing and sifting function of education only shows
+to which one of three classes an individual belongs. There being no
+recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could
+be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
+combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable. There
+were only three types of faculties or powers in the individual's
+constitution. Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each
+class, for only diversity makes change and progress.
+
+In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned
+to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human
+wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites,
+they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition.
+They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its
+internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of
+reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess
+this are capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time
+the legislators of the state--for laws are the universals which control
+the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in intent, Plato
+subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that
+lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his
+incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a
+society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers
+and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of
+individuality. We cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is
+happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those
+activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that
+it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its
+possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in
+knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping
+of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off
+classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely
+numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say
+that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social
+organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities
+of individuals, not stratification by classes. Although his educational
+philosophy was revolutionary, it was none the less in bondage to static
+ideals. He thought that change or alteration was evidence of lawless
+flux; that true reality was unchangeable. Hence while he would radically
+change the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state
+in which change would subsequently have no place. The final end of life
+is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even
+minor details are to be altered. Though they might not be inherently
+important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds of men to the
+idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic. The breakdown of
+his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to
+gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which
+should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education
+could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after
+that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the
+existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident
+by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of
+ruling power in the state.
+
+4. The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In the
+eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very different
+circle of ideas. "Nature" still means something antithetical to existing
+social organization; Plato exercised a great influence upon Rousseau.
+But the voice of nature now speaks for the diversity of individual
+talent and for the need of free development of individuality in all
+its variety. Education in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the
+method of instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original
+endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even as
+antisocial. Social arrangements were thought of as mere external
+expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might secure a greater
+amount of private happiness for themselves. Nevertheless, these
+statements convey only an inadequate idea of the true significance
+of the movement. In reality its chief interest was in progress and
+in social progress. The seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat
+transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society--toward
+cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was humanity. In membership in
+humanity, as distinct from a state, man's capacities would be liberated;
+while in existing political organizations his powers were hampered and
+distorted to meet the requirements and selfish interests of the
+rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme individualism was but the
+counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite perfectibility of
+man and of a social organization having a scope as wide as humanity.
+The emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a
+comprehensive and progressive society.
+
+The heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the
+social estate in which they found themselves. They attributed these
+evils to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. Such
+limitation was both distorting and corrupting. Their impassioned
+devotion to emancipation of life from external restrictions which
+operated to the exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past feudal
+system consigned power, found intellectual formulation in a worship
+of nature. To give "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial,
+corrupt, and inequitable social order by a new and better kingdom of
+humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a working
+power was strengthened by the advances of natural science. Inquiry
+freed from prejudice and artificial restraints of church and state had
+revealed that the world is a scene of law. The Newtonian solar system,
+which expressed the reign of natural law, was a scene of wonderful
+harmony, where every force balanced with every other. Natural law would
+accomplish the same result in human relations, if men would only get rid
+of the artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.
+
+Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in
+insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen that economic
+and political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of
+thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external chains
+was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and
+ideals. What was called social life, existing institutions, were too
+false and corrupt to be intrusted with this work. How could it
+be expected to undertake it when the undertaking meant its own
+destruction? "Nature" must then be the power to which the enterprise was
+to be left. Even the extreme sensationalistic theory of knowledge which
+was current derived itself from this conception. To insist that mind is
+originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the possibilities
+of education. If the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by
+objects, there were no limits to the possibility of education by means
+of the natural environment. And since the natural world of objects is
+a scene of harmonious "truth," this education would infallibly produce
+minds filled with the truth.
+
+5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm
+for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the constructive side
+became obvious. Merely to leave everything to nature was, after all, but
+to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the accidents
+of circumstance. Not only was some method required but also some
+positive organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the process
+of instruction. The "complete and harmonious development of all
+powers," having as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive
+humanity, required definite organization for its realization. Private
+individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could
+not execute the work. A Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort
+philanthropically inclined persons having wealth and power to follow his
+example. But even Pestalozzi saw that any effective pursuit of the new
+educational ideal required the support of the state. The realization
+of the new education destined to produce a new society was, after all,
+dependent upon the activities of existing states. The movement for the
+democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and
+administered schools.
+
+So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the
+movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement
+in political life--a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent
+movements. Under the influence of German thought in particular,
+education became a civic function and the civic function was identified
+with the realization of the ideal of the national state. The "state" was
+substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To
+form the citizen, not the "man," became the aim of education. 1 The
+historic situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of
+the Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt
+(and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that
+systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and
+maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they were
+weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen they
+made this condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and
+thoroughly grounded system of public education.
+
+This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory.
+The individualistic theory receded into the background. The state
+furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also
+its goal. When the actual practice was such that the school system, from
+the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied
+the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and
+administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and
+political defense and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to
+emphasize the aim of social efficiency. And with the immense importance
+attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and
+more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret
+social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism.
+Since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required
+subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state
+both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy
+in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like
+subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of
+disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since,
+however, the ideal of culture as complete development of personality
+persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the
+two ideas. The reconciliation took the form of the conception of the
+"organic" character of the state. The individual in his isolation is
+nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and meaning of
+organized institutions does he attain true personality. What appears to
+be his subordination to political authority and the demand for sacrifice
+of himself to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his
+own the objective reason manifested in the state--the only way in which
+he can become truly rational. The notion of development which we have
+seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the Hegelian
+philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine the two ideas
+of complete realization of personality and thoroughgoing "disciplinary"
+subordination to existing institutions. The extent of the transformation
+of educational philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation
+occupied by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence,
+may be gathered from Kant, who well expresses the earlier
+individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics, consisting
+of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth century, he
+defines education as the process by which man becomes man. Mankind
+begins its history submerged in nature--not as Man who is a creature of
+reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and appetite. Nature
+offers simply the germs which education is to develop and perfect. The
+peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create himself by his
+own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational,
+and free being. This creative effort is carried on by the educational
+activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon men
+consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing
+state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity.
+But there is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to
+educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of
+with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best
+possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their
+children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as
+instruments of their own purposes.
+
+Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must
+depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity.
+"All culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them.
+Simply through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who
+are capable of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the
+gradual approximation of human nature to its end possible. Rulers are
+simply interested in such training as will make their subjects better
+tools for their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of privately
+conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. For the rulers'
+interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is best
+for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the schools, wish
+to draw their plans. We have in this view an express statement of
+the points characteristic of the eighteenth century individualistic
+cosmopolitanism. The full development of private personality is
+identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with the idea
+of progress. In addition we have an explicit fear of the hampering
+influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the
+attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time,
+Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea
+that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular
+the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education
+carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
+individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to
+his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the
+educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit,
+Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and
+compulsory system of education extending from the primary school
+through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and
+supervision all private educational enterprises. Two results should
+stand out from this brief historical survey. The first is that such
+terms as the individual and the social conceptions of education are
+quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato had
+the ideal of an education which should equate individual realization and
+social coherency and stability. His situation forced his ideal into
+the notion of a society organized in stratified classes, losing the
+individual in the class. The eighteenth century educational philosophy
+was highly individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a
+noble and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include
+humanity, and providing for the indefinite perfectibility of mankind.
+The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early nineteenth century
+endeavored again to equate the ideals of a free and complete
+development of cultured personality with social discipline and political
+subordination. It made the national state an intermediary between the
+realization of private personality on one side and of humanity on the
+other. Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating
+principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of "harmonious
+development of all the powers of personality" or in the more recent
+terminology of "social efficiency." All this reinforces the statement
+which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a social
+process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind
+of society we have in mind. These considerations pave the way for our
+second conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in and
+for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a
+wider social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian" conception
+suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite organs of
+execution and agencies of administration. In Europe, in the Continental
+states particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for
+human welfare and progress was captured by national interests and
+harnessed to do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and
+exclusive. The social aim of education and its national aim were
+identified, and the result was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a
+social aim.
+
+This confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human
+intercourse. On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend
+national boundaries. They are largely international in quality and
+method. They involve interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples
+inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of national
+sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the
+present time. Each nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and
+incipient war with its neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme
+judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as matter of course that
+each has interests which are exclusively its own. To question this is
+to question the very idea of national sovereignty which is assumed to
+be basic to political practice and political science. This contradiction
+(for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere of associated and
+mutually helpful social life and the narrower sphere of exclusive and
+hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational
+theory a clearer conception of the meaning of "social" as a function
+and test of education than has yet been attained. Is it possible for an
+educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full
+social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and
+corrupted? Internally, the question has to face the tendencies, due to
+present economic conditions, which split society into classes some
+of which are made merely tools for the higher culture of others.
+Externally, the question is concerned with the reconciliation of
+national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior devotion to the things
+which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national political
+boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be worked out by merely
+negative means. It is not enough to see to it that education is not
+actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one
+class by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude
+and efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the
+effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the
+nation equality of equipment for their future careers. Accomplishment
+of this end demands not only adequate administrative provision of school
+facilities, and such supplementation of family resources as will
+enable youth to take advantage of them, but also such modification
+of traditional ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and
+traditional methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the
+youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be masters
+of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem remote
+of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet
+tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public
+system of education. The same principle has application on the side of
+the considerations which concern the relations of one nation to another.
+It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything
+which would stimulate international jealousy and animosity. The emphasis
+must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative human
+pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations. The secondary
+and provisional character of national sovereignty in respect to the
+fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all
+human beings with one another must be instilled as a working disposition
+of mind. If these applications seem to be remote from a consideration
+of the philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning
+of the idea of education previously developed has not been adequately
+grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education
+as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to
+social aims. Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be
+inconsistently applied.
+
+Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds
+of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction
+implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to
+measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the
+interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness
+and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable
+society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up
+barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society
+which makes provision for participation in its good of all its
+members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its
+institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated
+life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of
+education which gives individuals a personal interest in social
+relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure
+social changes without introducing disorder. Three typical historic
+philosophies of education were considered from this point of view.
+The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that
+stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class
+rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called individualism
+of the eighteenth-century enlightenment was found to involve the notion
+of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual was
+to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the development
+of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature. The
+institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied
+this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so doing
+narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of
+the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination
+of the individual to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain
+in Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the
+existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the
+citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he preferred to try for
+the latter rather than for the former. But there are many sayings of his
+which point to the formation of the citizen as ideally the higher, and
+which indicate that his own endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was
+simply the best makeshift the corruption of the times permitted him to
+sketch.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
+
+1. The Nature of an Aim.
+
+The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
+anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
+education in a democratic community. For it assumed that the aim of
+education is to enable individuals to continue their education--or that
+the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now
+this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except
+where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there
+is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and
+institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably
+distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our
+search for aims in education, we are not concerned, therefore, with
+finding an end outside of the educative process to which education is
+subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are rather concerned with
+the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which
+they operate and when they are set up from without. And the latter
+state of affairs must obtain when social relationships are not equitably
+balanced. For in that case, some portions of the whole social group will
+find their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will not
+arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal
+aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly
+their own.
+
+Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls
+within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. We approach
+the definition by a contrast of mere results with ends. Any exhibition
+of energy has results. The wind blows about the sands of the desert; the
+position of the grains is changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not
+an end. For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills
+what went before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One state
+of affairs is just as good as any other. Consequently there is no basis
+upon which to select an earlier state of affairs as a beginning, a
+later as an end, and to consider what intervenes as a process of
+transformation and realization.
+
+Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes
+in the sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees'
+actions may be called ends not because they are designed or consciously
+intended, but because they are true terminations or completions of what
+has preceded. When the bees gather pollen and make wax and build cells,
+each step prepares the way for the next. When cells are built, the queen
+lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood
+them and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them. When they
+are hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of themselves.
+Now we are so familiar with such facts, that we are apt to dismiss them
+on the ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing
+anyway. Thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the
+event is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of
+each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while
+the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other
+stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and
+finishes off the process. Since aims relate always to results, the first
+thing to look to when it is a question of aims, is whether the work
+assigned possesses intrinsic continuity. Or is it a mere serial
+aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and then another? To talk about
+an educational aim when approximately each act of a pupil is dictated
+by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that
+which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions
+by another, is to talk nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to
+permit capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous
+self-expression. An aim implies an orderly and ordered activity, one
+in which the order consists in the progressive completing of a process.
+Given an activity having a time span and cumulative growth within
+the time succession, an aim means foresight in advance of the end or
+possible termination. If bees anticipated the consequences of their
+activity, if they perceived their end in imaginative foresight, they
+would have the primary element in an aim. Hence it is nonsense to talk
+about the aim of education--or any other undertaking--where conditions
+do not permit of foresight of results, and do not stimulate a person to
+look ahead to see what the outcome of a given activity is to be. In the
+next place the aim as a foreseen end gives direction to the activity; it
+is not an idle view of a mere spectator, but influences the steps taken
+to reach the end. The foresight functions in three ways. In the first
+place, it involves careful observation of the given conditions to see
+what are the means available for reaching the end, and to discover the
+hindrances in the way. In the second place, it suggests the proper order
+or sequence in the use of means. It facilitates an economical selection
+and arrangement. In the third place, it makes choice of alternatives
+possible. If we can predict the outcome of acting this way or that, we
+can then compare the value of the two courses of action; we can pass
+judgment upon their relative desirability. If we know that stagnant
+water breeds mosquitoes and that they are likely to carry disease, we
+can, disliking that anticipated result, take steps to avert it. Since we
+do not anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons
+concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which produces
+the result. We intervene to bring about this result or that.
+
+Of course these three points are closely connected with one another.
+We can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny
+of present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the
+motive for observations. The more adequate our observations, the more
+varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents itself,
+and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be
+made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the
+situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen
+activity possess, and the more flexibly controllable is it. Where only
+a single outcome has been thought of, the mind has nothing else to think
+of; the meaning attaching to the act is limited. One only steams ahead
+toward the mark. Sometimes such a narrow course may be effective. But if
+unexpected difficulties offer themselves, one has not as many resources
+at command as if he had chosen the same line of action after a broader
+survey of the possibilities of the field. He cannot make needed
+readjustments readily.
+
+The net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting
+intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis
+upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own
+capacities. To do these things means to have a mind--for mind is
+precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of
+facts and their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a
+thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its
+accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan capable of
+execution and the obstructions in the way,--or, if it is really a mind
+to do the thing and not a vague aspiration--it is to have a plan which
+takes account of resources and difficulties. Mind is capacity to refer
+present conditions to future results, and future consequences to present
+conditions. And these traits are just what is meant by having an aim
+or a purpose. A man is stupid or blind or unintelligent--lacking in
+mind--just in the degree in which in any activity he does not know what
+he is about, namely, the probable consequences of his acts. A man is
+imperfectly intelligent when he contents himself with looser guesses
+about the outcome than is needful, just taking a chance with his luck,
+or when he forms plans apart from study of the actual conditions,
+including his own capacities. Such relative absence of mind means to
+make our feelings the measure of what is to happen. To be intelligent we
+must "stop, look, listen" in making the plan of an activity.
+
+To identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to
+show its value--its function in experience. We are only too given to
+making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness." We forget
+that it comes from the adjective "conscious." To be conscious is to
+be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate,
+observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing
+which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or which has
+impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a name for the
+purposeful quality of an activity, for the fact that it is directed by
+an aim. Put the other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning,
+not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to
+perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent.
+
+2. The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our discussion
+to a consideration of the criteria involved in a correct establishing of
+aims. (1) The aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing conditions. It
+must be based upon a consideration of what is already going on; upon the
+resources and difficulties of the situation. Theories about the proper
+end of our activities--educational and moral theories--often violate
+this principle. They assume ends lying outside our activities; ends
+foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which issue from
+some outside source. Then the problem is to bring our activities to
+bear upon the realization of these externally supplied ends. They are
+something for which we ought to act. In any case such "aims" limit
+intelligence; they are not the expression of mind in foresight,
+observation, and choice of the better among alternative possibilities.
+They limit intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed
+by some authority external to intelligence, leaving to the latter
+nothing but a mechanical choice of means.
+
+(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the
+attempt to realize them. This impression must now be qualified. The aim
+as it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch. The act of striving
+to realize it tests its worth. If it suffices to direct activity
+successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole function is
+to set a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may suffice. But
+usually--at least in complicated situations--acting upon it brings to
+light conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision
+of the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. An
+aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet
+circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is
+always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed
+to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the
+situation. What happens in the course of action neither confirms,
+refutes, nor alters it. Such an end can only be insisted upon. The
+failure that results from its lack of adaptation is attributed simply
+to the perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the end is not
+reasonable under the circumstances. The value of a legitimate aim, on
+the contrary, lies in the fact that we can use it to change conditions.
+It is a method for dealing with conditions so as to effect desirable
+alterations in them. A farmer who should passively accept things just as
+he finds them would make as great a mistake as he who framed his plans
+in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the
+evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its
+very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard
+snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present state
+of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment,
+keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions
+develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly
+growing as it is tested in action.
+
+(3) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The term end
+in view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination
+or conclusion of some process. The only way in which we can define
+an activity is by putting before ourselves the objects in which it
+terminates--as one's aim in shooting is the target. But we must remember
+that the object is only a mark or sign by which the mind specifies the
+activity one desires to carry out. Strictly speaking, not the target
+but hitting the target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the
+target, but also by the sight on the gun. The different objects which
+are thought of are means of directing the activity. Thus one aims at,
+say, a rabbit; what he wants is to shoot straight: a certain kind of
+activity. Or, if it is the rabbit he wants, it is not rabbit apart from
+his activity, but as a factor in activity; he wants to eat the rabbit,
+or to show it as evidence of his marksmanship--he wants to do something
+with it. The doing with the thing, not the thing in isolation, is
+his end. The object is but a phase of the active end,--continuing the
+activity successfully. This is what is meant by the phrase, used above,
+"freeing activity."
+
+In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go
+on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed from without
+the activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be
+attained and possessed. When one has such a notion, activity is a mere
+unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important
+on its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil;
+something which must be gone through before one can reach the object
+which is alone worth while. In other words, the external idea of the
+aim leads to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows
+up within an activity as plan for its direction is always both ends and
+means, the distinction being only one of convenience. Every means is a
+temporary end until we have attained it. Every end becomes a means of
+carrying activity further as soon as it is achieved. We call it end
+when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which we are
+engaged; means when it marks off the present direction. Every divorce of
+end from means diminishes by that much the significance of the activity
+and tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he
+could. A farmer has to use plants and animals to carry on his farming
+activities. It certainly makes a great difference to his life whether he
+is fond of them, or whether he regards them merely as means which he has
+to employ to get something else in which alone he is interested. In the
+former case, his entire course of activity is significant; each phase
+of it has its own value. He has the experience of realizing his end at
+every stage; the postponed aim, or end in view, being merely a sight
+ahead by which to keep his activity going fully and freely. For if he
+does not look ahead, he is more likely to find himself blocked. The
+aim is as definitely a means of action as is any other portion of an
+activity.
+
+3. Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about
+educational aims. They are just like aims in any directed occupation.
+The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain
+resources with which to do, and certain obstacles with which to contend.
+The conditions with which the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or
+resources, have their own structure and operation independently of
+any purpose of his. Seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects
+devour, blight comes, the seasons change. His aim is simply to utilize
+these various conditions; to make his activities and their energies
+work together, instead of against one another. It would be absurd if
+the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any reference to these
+conditions of soil, climate, characteristic of plant growth, etc.
+His purpose is simply a foresight of the consequences of his energies
+connected with those of the things about him, a foresight used to direct
+his movements from day to day. Foresight of possible consequences leads
+to more careful and extensive observation of the nature and performances
+of the things he had to do with, and to laying out a plan--that is, of a
+certain order in the acts to be performed.
+
+It is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as
+absurd for the latter to set up his "own" aims as the proper objects of
+the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an
+ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Aims mean acceptance of
+responsibility for the observations, anticipations, and arrangements
+required in carrying on a function--whether farming or educating. Any
+aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and planning
+in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it
+gets in the way of the individual's own common sense (as it will surely
+do if imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm.
+
+And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims.
+Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract
+idea like education. And consequently their purposes are indefinitely
+varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and
+with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even
+the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more
+harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather
+suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and
+how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of the concrete
+situations in which they find themselves. As a recent writer has
+said: "To lead this boy to read Scott's novels instead of old Sleuth's
+stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying
+from John's make-up; to prepare this class to study medicine,--these
+are samples of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the
+concrete work of education." Bearing these qualifications in mind, we
+shall proceed to state some of the characteristics found in all good
+educational aims. (1) An educational aim must be founded upon the
+intrinsic activities and needs (including original instincts and
+acquired habits) of the given individual to be educated. The tendency of
+such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers,
+and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or responsibility. In
+general, there is a disposition to take considerations which are dear
+to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends irrespective of the
+capacities of those educated. There is also an inclination to propound
+aims which are so uniform as to neglect the specific powers and
+requirements of an individual, forgetting that all learning is something
+which happens to an individual at a given time and place. The larger
+range of perception of the adult is of great value in observing the
+abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they may amount
+to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what certain
+tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have the adult
+achievements we should be without assurance as to the significance of
+the drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring activities of childhood.
+So if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to see the
+import of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use
+adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the
+doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up as a
+fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those educated.
+
+(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating
+with the activities of those undergoing instruction. It must suggest the
+kind of environment needed to liberate and to organize their capacities.
+Unless it lends itself to the construction of specific procedures, and
+unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter
+is worthless. Instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it
+prevents the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the
+situation. It operates to exclude recognition of everything except what
+squares up with the fixed end in view. Every rigid aim just because
+it is rigidly given seems to render it unnecessary to give careful
+attention to concrete conditions. Since it must apply anyhow, what is
+the use of noting details which do not count?
+
+The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive
+them from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what
+is current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As
+a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is
+confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is
+the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative
+supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that
+he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and
+the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher's experience is then
+reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The latter
+receive their aims through a double or treble external imposition,
+and are constantly confused by the conflict between the aims which are
+natural to their own experience at the time and those in which they are
+taught to acquiesce. Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic
+significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall be
+intellectually confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims.
+
+(3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged
+to be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific, is,
+of course, general in its ramified connections, for it leads out
+indefinitely into other things. So far as a general idea makes us more
+alive to these connections, it cannot be too general. But "general"
+also means "abstract," or detached from all specific context. And such
+abstractness means remoteness, and throws us back, once more, upon
+teaching and learning as mere means of getting ready for an end
+disconnected from the means. That education is literally and all
+the time its own reward means that no alleged study or discipline is
+educative unless it is worth while in its own immediate having. A
+truly general aim broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to take more
+consequences (connections) into account. This means a wider and more
+flexible observation of means. The more interacting forces, for example,
+the farmer takes into account, the more varied will be his immediate
+resources. He will see a greater number of possible starting places, and
+a greater number of ways of getting at what he wants to do. The fuller
+one's conception of possible future achievements, the less his present
+activity is tied down to a small number of alternatives. If one knew
+enough, one could start almost anywhere and sustain his activities
+continuously and fruitfully.
+
+Understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the
+sense of a broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall
+take up some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational
+theories of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the
+immediate concrete and diversified aims which are always the educator's
+real concern. We premise (as indeed immediately follows from what
+has been said) that there is no need of making a choice among them or
+regarding them as competitors. When we come to act in a tangible way we
+have to select or choose a particular act at a particular time, but any
+number of comprehensive ends may exist without competition, since they
+mean simply different ways of looking at the same scene. One cannot
+climb a number of different mountains simultaneously, but the views had
+when different mountains are ascended supplement one another: they do
+not set up incompatible, competing worlds. Or, putting the matter in
+a slightly different way, one statement of an end may suggest certain
+questions and observations, and another statement another set of
+questions, calling for other observations. Then the more general ends we
+have, the better. One statement will emphasize what another slurs over.
+What a plurality of hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a
+plurality of stated aims may do for the instructor.
+
+Summary. An aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to
+consciousness and made a factor in determining present observation
+and choice of ways of acting. It signifies that an activity has
+become intelligent. Specifically it means foresight of the alternative
+consequences attendant upon acting in a given situation in different
+ways, and the use of what is anticipated to direct observation and
+experiment. A true aim is thus opposed at every point to an aim which is
+imposed upon a process of action from without. The latter is fixed and
+rigid; it is not a stimulus to intelligence in the given situation, but
+is an externally dictated order to do such and such things. Instead of
+connecting directly with present activities, it is remote, divorced from
+the means by which it is to be reached. Instead of suggesting a
+freer and better balanced activity, it is a limit set to activity. In
+education, the currency of these externally imposed aims is responsible
+for the emphasis put upon the notion of preparation for a remote future
+and for rendering the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and
+slavish.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
+
+1. Nature as Supplying the Aim. We have just pointed out the futility
+of trying to establish the aim of education--some one final aim which
+subordinates all others to itself. We have indicated that since general
+aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey the
+existing conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might have any
+number of them, all consistent with one another. As matter of fact, a
+large number have been stated at different times, all having great local
+value. For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time.
+And we do not emphasize things which do not require emphasis--that is,
+such things as are taking care of themselves fairly well. We tend rather
+to frame our statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the
+contemporary situation; we take for granted, without explicit statement
+which would be of no use, whatever is right or approximately so. We
+frame our explicit aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about.
+It is, then, DO paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or
+generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just the
+things which it has least of in actual fact. A time of domination by
+authority will call out as response the desirability of great individual
+freedom; one of disorganized individual activities the need of social
+control as an educational aim.
+
+The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus
+balance each other. At different times such aims as complete living,
+better methods of language study, substitution of things for words,
+social efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete
+development of personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, a
+esthetic contemplation, utility, etc., have served. The following
+discussion takes up three statements of recent influence; certain others
+have been incidentally discussed in the previous chapters, and others
+will be considered later in a discussion of knowledge and of the values
+of studies. We begin with a consideration that education is a process
+of development in accordance with nature, taking Rousseau's statement,
+which opposed natural to social (See ante, p. 91); and then pass over
+to the antithetical conception of social efficiency, which often opposes
+social to natural.
+
+(1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and
+artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone
+to resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the
+law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her
+ways. The positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way
+in which it calls attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have
+regard to the natural endowment of those educated. Its weakness is the
+ease with which natural in the sense of normal is confused with the
+physical. The constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and
+contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out of the way and
+allow nature to do the work. Since no one has stated in the doctrine
+both its truth and falsity better than Rousseau, we shall turn to him.
+
+"Education," he says, "we receive from three sources--Nature, men,
+and things. The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities
+constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which we are taught to
+put this development constitutes that education given us by Men. The
+acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects constitutes
+that of things. Only when these three kinds of education are consonant
+and make for the same end, does a man tend towards his true goal. If we
+are asked what is this end, the answer is that of Nature. For since
+the concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their
+completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our control must
+necessarily regulate us in determining the other two." Then he defines
+Nature to mean the capacities and dispositions which are inborn, "as
+they exist prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the
+influence of the opinion of others."
+
+The wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as
+fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction
+with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say better what is said
+in the first sentences. The three factors of educative development
+are (a) the native structure of our bodily organs and their functional
+activities; (b) the uses to which the activities of these organs are put
+under the influence of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with
+the environment. This statement certainly covers the ground. His other
+two propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the
+three factors of education are consonant and cooperative does adequate
+development of the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities
+of the organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But
+it requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other
+statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these
+three things as factors which must work together to some extent in
+order that any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as
+separate and independent operations. Especially does he believe that
+there is an independent and, as he says, "spontaneous" development of
+the native organs and faculties. He thinks that this development can
+go on irrespective of the use to which they are put. And it is to this
+separate development that education coming from social contact is to be
+subordinated. Now there is an immense difference between a use of native
+activities in accord with those activities themselves--as distinct from
+forcing them and perverting them--and supposing that they have a normal
+development apart from any use, which development furnishes the standard
+and norm of all learning by use. To recur to our previous illustration,
+the process of acquiring language is a practically perfect model of
+proper educative growth. The start is from native activities of the
+vocal apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose
+that these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself
+would evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle
+would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and
+noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the development
+of articulate speech--which they are--but as furnishing language
+itself--the standard for all teaching of language.
+
+The point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right,
+introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the
+structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all
+teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating
+that they supply not only the conditions but also the ends of their
+development. As matter of fact, the native activities develop, in
+contrast with random and capricious exercise, through the uses to which
+they are put. And the office of the social medium is, as we have seen,
+to direct growth through putting powers to the best possible use. The
+instinctive activities may be called, metaphorically, spontaneous,
+in the sense that the organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of
+operation,--a bias so strong that we cannot go contrary to it, though by
+trying to go contrary we may pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. But the
+notion of a spontaneous normal development of these activities is pure
+mythology. The natural, or native, powers furnish the initiating and
+limiting forces in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims.
+There is no learning except from a beginning in unlearned powers, but
+learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the unlearned
+powers. Rousseau's contrary opinion is doubtless due to the fact that he
+identified God with Nature; to him the original powers are wholly good,
+coming directly from a wise and good creator. To paraphrase the old
+saying about the country and the town, God made the original human
+organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put.
+Consequently the development of the former furnishes the standard to
+which the latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to determine the
+uses to which the original activities shall be put, they interfere with
+a divine plan. The interference by social arrangements with Nature,
+God's work, is the primary source of corruption in individuals.
+
+Rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all natural
+tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total
+depravity of innate human nature, and has had a powerful influence in
+modifying the attitude towards children's interests. But it is hardly
+necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good
+nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects for which
+they are employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing
+of some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many
+avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not to leave
+them alone to follow their own "spontaneous development," but to provide
+an environment which shall organize them.
+
+Returning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's statements,
+we find that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point the
+means of correcting many evils in current practices, and to indicate
+a number of desirable specific aims. (1) Natural development as an aim
+fixes attention upon the bodily organs and the need of health and vigor.
+The aim of natural development says to parents and teachers: Make health
+an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of
+the body--an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due recognition
+in practice would almost automatically revolutionize many of our
+educational practices. "Nature" is indeed a vague and metaphorical
+term, but one thing that "Nature" may be said to utter is that there are
+conditions of educational efficiency, and that till we have learned what
+these conditions are and have learned to make our practices accord with
+them, the noblest and most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer--are
+verbal and sentimental rather than efficacious.
+
+(2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect
+for physical mobility. In Rousseau's words: "Children are always in
+motion; a sedentary life is injurious." When he says that "Nature's
+intention is to strengthen the body before exercising the mind"
+he hardly states the fact fairly. But if he had said that nature's
+"intention" (to adopt his poetical form of speech) is to develop the
+mind especially by exercise of the muscles of the body he would have
+stated a positive fact. In other words, the aim of following nature
+means, in the concrete, regard for the actual part played by use of the
+bodily organs in explorations, in handling of materials, in plays
+and games. (3) The general aim translates into the aim of regard for
+individual differences among children. Nobody can take the principle of
+consideration of native powers into account without being struck by the
+fact that these powers differ in different individuals. The difference
+applies not merely to their intensity, but even more to their quality
+and arrangement. As Rouseau said: "Each individual is born with
+a distinctive temperament. We indiscriminately employ children of
+different bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the
+special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we have
+wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the
+short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while
+the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive."
+
+Lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the
+waxing, and waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and
+bloom irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. We must
+strike while the iron is hot. Especially precious are the first dawnings
+of power. More than we imagine, the ways in which the tendencies of
+early childhood are treated fix fundamental dispositions and condition
+the turn taken by powers that show themselves later. Educational concern
+with the early years of life--as distinct from inculcation of useful
+arts--dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi
+and Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth.
+The irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in the
+following passage of a student of the growth of the nervous system.
+"While growth continues, things bodily and mental are lopsided, for
+growth is never general, but is accentuated now at one spot, now at
+another. The methods which shall recognize in the presence of these
+enormous differences of endowment the dynamic values of natural
+inequalities of growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity to the
+rounding out gained by pruning will most closely follow that which
+takes place in the body and thus prove most effective." 1 Observation of
+natural tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint. They
+show themselves most readily in a child's spontaneous sayings and
+doings,--that is, in those he engages in when not put at set tasks and
+when not aware of being under observation. It does not follow that
+these tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but it does
+follow that since they are there, they are operative and must be
+taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones have an
+environment which keeps them active, and that their activity shall
+control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of
+the latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble
+parents when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too
+much direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them.
+At all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes as
+standards, and regard all deviations of children's impulses as evils
+to be eliminated. That artificiality against which the conception of
+following nature is so largely a protest, is the outcome of attempts to
+force children directly into the mold of grown-up standards.
+
+In conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following
+nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one
+another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been
+inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically
+unlimited power to it. All the differences between peoples and between
+classes and persons among the same people were said to be due to
+differences of training, of exercise, and practice. Originally, mind,
+reason, understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all.
+This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and
+the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As a protest
+against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less
+formal and abstract view of mind and its powers. It substituted specific
+instincts and impulses and physiological capacities, differing from
+individual to individual (just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out,
+even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment,
+memory, and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative
+accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of modern
+biology, physiology, and psychology. It means, in effect, that great
+as is the significance of nurture, of modification, and transformation
+through direct educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities,
+affords the foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. On the
+other hand, the doctrine of following nature was a political dogma. It
+meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs, and
+ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau's statement that everything is good
+as it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification only in
+its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence: "Everything
+degenerates in the hands of man." And again he says: "Natural man has
+an absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a complete integer and has no
+relation save to himself and to his fellow man. Civilized man is only a
+relative unit, the numerator of a fraction whose value depends upon its
+dominator, its relation to the integral body of society. Good political
+institutions are those which make a man unnatural." It is upon this
+conception of the artificial and harmful character of organized social
+life as it now exists 2 that he rested the notion that nature not merely
+furnishes prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan and goal.
+That evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a
+wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is
+true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart from the
+environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers will
+be put to better uses.
+
+2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the
+end of a true education and society the end of an evil one, could hardly
+fail to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the form of a
+doctrine that the business of education is to supply precisely what
+nature fails to secure; namely, habituation of an individual to social
+control; subordination of natural powers to social rules. It is not
+surprising to find that the value in the idea of social efficiency
+resides largely in its protest against the points at which the doctrine
+of natural development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is
+employed to slur over the truth in that conception. It is a fact that we
+must look to the activities and achievements of associated life to find
+what the development of power--that is to say, efficiency--means. The
+error is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather
+than of utilization to secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered
+adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by
+negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities
+in occupations having a social meaning. (1) Translated into specific
+aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial
+competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways
+in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence
+upon all the relationships of persons to one another. If an individual
+is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent
+upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He
+misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. If he
+is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there
+is grave danger that he may deprave himself and injure others in his
+possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect
+such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual
+ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only
+neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of
+educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic
+society, it is natural that the significance of an education which
+should have as a result ability to make one's way economically in the
+world, and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere
+display and luxury, should receive emphasis.
+
+There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end,
+existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final.
+A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of
+competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated
+when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite
+industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original
+capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a
+matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt
+changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring
+up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train
+for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. When the
+occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left behind
+with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had a less
+definite training. But, most of all, the present industrial constitution
+of society is, like every society which has ever existed, full of
+inequities. It is the aim of progressive education to take part in
+correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate
+them. Wherever social control means subordination of individual
+activities to class authority, there is danger that industrial education
+will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo. Differences
+of economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of
+individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the defects
+of the Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened method of
+selection.
+
+(2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary
+to separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. But
+the latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications which
+are vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from whatever make
+an individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political
+sense: it denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take
+a determining part in making as well as obeying laws. The aim of civic
+efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the notion of a
+training of mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that
+power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the
+things which most need to be done are things which involve one's
+relationships with others.
+
+Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too
+narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain periods have
+excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last
+analysis security of social progress depends upon them. For scientific
+men would have been thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally
+lacking in social efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately
+social efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share
+in a give and take of experience. It covers all that makes one's own
+experience more worth while to others, and all that enables one to
+participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of others. Ability
+to produce and to enjoy art, capacity for recreation, the significant
+utilization of leisure, are more important elements in it than elements
+conventionally associated oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest
+sense, social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind
+which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable;
+in breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make
+individuals impervious to the interests of others. When social
+efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its
+chief constituent (because its only guarantee) is omitted,--intelligent
+sympathy or good will. For sympathy as a desirable quality is something
+more than mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have
+in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.
+What is sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an
+unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall
+be, instead of an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find
+the good of their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service,
+are hard and metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgment
+of the diversity of goods which life may afford to different persons,
+and from faith in the social utility of encouraging every individual to
+make his own choice intelligent.
+
+3. Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is
+consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means
+at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to
+the raw and crude. When the "natural" is identified with this rawness,
+culture is opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is
+also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation
+of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is
+identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and
+meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency. Whether called
+culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is identical
+with the true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given
+to what is unique in an individual--and he would not be an individual if
+there were not something incommensurable about him. Its opposite is
+the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed,
+distinction of personality results, and with it greater promise for
+a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material
+commodities. For how can there be a society really worth serving unless
+it is constituted of individuals of significant personal qualities?
+
+The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social
+efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its rigid
+division of inferior and superior. The latter are supposed to have time
+and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the former are
+confined to providing external products. When social efficiency as
+measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be
+democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the
+masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and
+carried over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is
+that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for
+development of distinctive capacities be afforded all. The separation
+of the two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of
+the narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential
+justification.
+
+The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within
+the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external
+products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable
+experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities
+which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the
+strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are
+inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. To set up an
+external aim strengthens by reaction the false conception of culture
+which identifies it with something purely "inner." And the idea of
+perfecting an "inner" personality is a sure sign of social divisions.
+What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with
+others--which is not capable of free and full communication. What is
+termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten
+about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man
+might have internally--and therefore exclusively. What one is as a
+person is what one is as associated with others, in a free give and take
+of intercourse. This transcends both the efficiency which consists
+in supplying products to others and the culture which is an exclusive
+refinement and polish.
+
+Any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher,
+student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value
+to others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently
+worth while. Why then should it be thought that one must take his
+choice between sacrificing himself to doing useful things for others,
+or sacrificing them to pursuit of his own exclusive ends, whether the
+saving of his own soul or the building of an inner spiritual life and
+personality? What happens is that since neither of these things is
+persistently possible, we get a compromise and an alternation. One tries
+each course by turns. There is no greater tragedy than that so much
+of the professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world
+has emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual
+self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this dualism of
+life. The dualism is too deeply established to be easily overthrown; for
+that reason, it is the particular task of education at the present time
+to struggle in behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal
+culture are synonyms instead of antagonists.
+
+Summary. General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying
+the specific problems of education. Consequently it is a test of the
+value of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it
+will translate readily and consistently into the procedures which are
+suggested by another. We have applied this test to three general aims:
+Development according to nature, social efficiency, and culture or
+personal mental enrichment. In each case we have seen that the aims
+when partially stated come into conflict with each other. The partial
+statement of natural development takes the primitive powers in an
+alleged spontaneous development as the end-all. From this point of view
+training which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint;
+one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is
+corrupting. But when we recognize that natural activities mean native
+activities which develop only through the uses in which they are
+nurtured, the conflict disappears. Similarly a social efficiency which
+is defined in terms of rendering external service to others is of
+necessity opposed to the aim of enriching the meaning of experience,
+while a culture which is taken to consist in an internal refinement of a
+mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But social efficiency as an
+educational purpose should mean cultivation of power to join freely
+and fully in shared or common activities. This is impossible without
+culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because one cannot share
+in intercourse with others without learning--without getting a broader
+point of view and perceiving things of which one would otherwise be
+ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that
+it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of
+one's perception of meanings.
+
+1 Donaldson, Growth of Brain, p. 356.
+
+2 We must not forget that Rousseau had the idea of a radically different
+sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should be identical with
+the good of all its members, which he thought to be as much better than
+existing states as these are worse than the state of nature.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
+
+1. The Meaning of the Terms. We have already noticed the difference in
+the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The former
+is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as
+another, since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound
+up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him. His
+fortunes are more or less at stake in the issue of events. Consequently
+he does whatever he can to influence the direction present occurrences
+take. One is like a man in a prison cell watching the rain out of the
+window; it is all the same to him. The other is like a man who has
+planned an outing for the next day which continuing rain will frustrate.
+He cannot, to be sure, by his present reactions affect to-morrow's
+weather, but he may take some steps which will influence future
+happenings, if only to postpone the proposed picnic. If a man sees a
+carriage coming which may run over him, if he cannot stop its movement,
+he can at least get out of the way if he foresees the consequence
+in time. In many instances, he can intervene even more directly. The
+attitude of a participant in the course of affairs is thus a double
+one: there is solicitude, anxiety concerning future consequences, and a
+tendency to act to assure better, and avert worse, consequences. There
+are words which denote this attitude: concern, interest. These words
+suggest that a person is bound up with the possibilities inhering in
+objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout for what they are likely
+to do to him; and that, on the basis of his expectation or foresight,
+he is eager to act so as to give things one turn rather than another.
+Interest and aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily connected. Such
+words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the results which are wanted and
+striven for; they take for granted the personal attitude of solicitude
+and attentive eagerness. Such words as interest, affection, concern,
+motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is foreseen upon the
+individual's fortunes, and his active desire to act to secure a possible
+result. They take for granted the objective changes. But the difference
+is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in one set of words
+is illuminated in the other. What is anticipated is objective and
+impersonal; to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being run over. But
+for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of
+standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response.
+The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference,
+which finds expression in solicitude and effort. While such words
+as affection, concern, and motive indicate an attitude of personal
+preference, they are always attitudes toward objects--toward what is
+foreseen. We may call the phase of objective foresight intellectual, and
+the phase of personal concern emotional and volitional, but there is no
+separation in the facts of the situation.
+
+Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran their
+course in a world by themselves. But they are always responses to
+what is going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their
+successful or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction
+with other changes. Life activities flourish and fail only in connection
+with changes of the environment. They are literally bound up with these
+changes; our desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in
+which our doings are tied up with the doings of things and persons about
+us. Instead of marking a purely personal or subjective realm, separated
+from the objective and impersonal, they indicate the non-existence of
+such a separate world. They afford convincing evidence that changes in
+things are not alien to the activities of a self, and that the career
+and welfare of the self are bound up with the movement of persons and
+things. Interest, concern, mean that self and world are engaged with
+each other in a developing situation.
+
+The word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole state
+of active development, (ii) the objective results that are foreseen and
+wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional inclination.
+
+(I) An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often referred to
+as an interest. Thus we say that a man's interest is politics, or
+journalism, or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting Japanese
+prints, or banking.
+
+(ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object touches
+or engages a man; the point where it influences him. In some legal
+transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to have a standing
+at court. He has to show that some proposed step concerns his affairs.
+A silent partner has an interest in a business, although he takes no
+active part in its conduct because its prosperity or decline affects his
+profits and liabilities.
+
+(iii) When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the emphasis
+falls directly upon his personal attitude. To be interested is to be
+absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an
+interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. We say
+of an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and
+that he has found himself in it. Both terms express the engrossment of
+the self in an object.
+
+When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory
+way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first
+exaggerated and then isolated. Interest is taken to mean merely the
+effect of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or
+failure. Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are
+reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain. Educationally, it
+then follows that to attach importance to interest means to attach some
+feature of seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure
+attention and effort by offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is
+properly stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of
+education.
+
+But the objection is based upon the fact--or assumption--that the forms
+of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be appropriated have
+no interest on their own account: in other words, they are supposed to
+be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils. The remedy is not
+in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to
+search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material.
+It is to discover objects and modes of action, which are connected with
+present powers. The function of this material in engaging activity and
+carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest. If the
+material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for
+devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary,
+semi-coerced effort.
+
+The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,--that
+which connects two things otherwise distant. In education, the distance
+covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a process takes
+time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. We
+overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between
+an initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is
+something intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are
+the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
+Between the two lie means--that is middle conditions:--acts to be
+performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used. Only
+through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial activities
+reach a satisfactory consummation.
+
+These intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because the
+development of existing activities into the foreseen and desired end
+depends upon them. To be means for the achieving of present tendencies,
+to be "between" the agent and his end, to be of interest, are different
+names for the same thing. When material has to be made interesting,
+it signifies that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and
+present power: or that if the connection be there, it is not perceived.
+To make it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that
+exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous
+and artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which have been
+applied to the doctrine of interest in education.
+
+So much for the meaning of the term interest. Now for that of
+discipline. Where an activity takes time, where many means and obstacles
+lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation and persistence
+are required. It is obvious that a very large part of the everyday
+meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or conscious disposition
+to persist and endure in a planned course of action in spite of
+difficulties and contrary solicitations. A man of strong will, in
+the popular usage of the words, is a man who is neither fickle nor
+half-hearted in achieving chosen ends. His ability is executive; that
+is, he persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out
+his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.
+
+Clearly there are two factors in will. One has to do with the foresight
+of results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has
+upon the person.
+
+(I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition.
+Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps
+on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any
+clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally
+declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make
+clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if
+he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not
+be worth while. Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to
+criticize ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and
+energy in use of means to achieve the end. The really executive man is
+a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his
+actions as clear and full as possible. The people we called weak-willed
+or self-indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of
+their acts. They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect
+all attendant circumstances. When they begin to act, the disagreeable
+results they ignored begin to show themselves. They are discouraged,
+or complain of being thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and
+shift to some other line of action. That the primary difference between
+strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree
+of persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought
+out, cannot be over-emphasized.
+
+(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out
+of results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of
+a person. They are something to look at and for curiosity to play
+with rather than something to achieve. There is no such thing as
+over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-sided
+intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as we say in considering the
+consequences of proposed lines of action. A certain flabbiness of fiber
+prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in
+action. And most persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course
+of action by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of
+inducements to an action that is directly more agreeable.
+
+A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them
+deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability
+a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of
+distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of
+discipline. Discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources
+available for carrying through the action undertaken. To know what one
+is to do and to move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means
+is to be disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind.
+Discipline is positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to
+compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an
+uncongenial task--these things are or are not disciplinary according as
+they do or do not tend to the development of power to recognize what one
+is about and to persistence in accomplishment.
+
+It is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline
+are connected, not opposed.
+
+(i) Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained
+power--apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in
+consequences--is not possible without interest. Deliberation will be
+perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. Parents and
+teachers often complain--and correctly--that children "do not want
+to hear, or want to understand." Their minds are not upon the subject
+precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into their
+concerns. This is a state of things that needs to be remedied, but the
+remedy is not in the use of methods which increase indifference and
+aversion. Even punishing a child for inattention is one way of trying to
+make him realize that the matter is not a thing of complete unconcern;
+it is one way of arousing "interest," or bringing about a sense of
+connection. In the long run, its value is measured by whether it
+supplies a mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by the
+adult or whether it leads the child "to think"--that is, to reflect upon
+his acts and impregnate them with aims.
+
+(ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even more
+obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who are not interested
+in what they are doing. If one were engaging a lawyer or a doctor, it
+would never occur to one to reason that the person engaged would stick
+to his work more conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he
+did it merely from a sense of obligation. Interest measures--or rather
+is--the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one, moving
+one to act for its realization.
+
+2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education. Interest
+represents the moving force of objects--whether perceived or presented
+in imagination--in any experience having a purpose. In the concrete,
+the value of recognizing the dynamic place of interest in an educative
+development is that it leads to considering individual children in their
+specific capabilities, needs, and preferences. One who recognizes the
+importance of interest will not assume that all minds work in the same
+way because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook. Attitudes
+and methods of approach and response vary with the specific appeal
+the same material makes, this appeal itself varying with difference of
+natural aptitude, of past experience, of plan of life, and so on. But
+the facts of interest also supply considerations of general value to the
+philosophy of education. Rightly understood, they put us on our guard
+against certain conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have
+had great vogue in philosophic thought in the past, and which exercise
+a serious hampering influence upon the conduct of instruction and
+discipline. Too frequently mind is set over the world of things and
+facts to be known; it is regarded as something existing in isolation,
+with mental states and operations that exist independently. Knowledge is
+then regarded as an external application of purely mental existences
+to the things to be known, or else as a result of the impressions which
+this outside subject matter makes on mind, or as a combination of the
+two. Subject matter is then regarded as something complete in itself;
+it is just something to be learned or known, either by the voluntary
+application of mind to it or through the impressions it makes on mind.
+
+The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind
+appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the
+basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view
+to controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place. The
+things, the subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized
+as having a bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether
+assisting or retarding it. These statements are too formal to be very
+intelligible. An illustration may clear up their significance. You are
+engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a typewriter. If you
+are an expert, your formed habits take care of the physical movements
+and leave your thoughts free to consider your topic. Suppose, however,
+you are not skilled, or that, even if you are, the machine does not work
+well. You then have to use intelligence. You do not wish to strike the
+keys at random and let the consequences be what they may; you wish to
+record certain words in a given order so as to make sense. You attend to
+the keys, to what you have written, to your movements, to the ribbon
+or the mechanism of the machine. Your attention is not distributed
+indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail. It is
+centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective pursuit of
+your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are concerned to note
+the existing facts because and in so far as they are factors in the
+achievement of the result intended. You have to find out what your
+resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the difficulties
+and obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with reference to
+what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not involve such a
+forecast of results and such an examination of means and hindrances
+is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither case is
+it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended and
+careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to be, in
+that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
+
+If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical
+manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the
+case is the same. There is an activity in process; one is taken up with
+the development of a theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph talks,
+this means intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various
+conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending,
+together with continually renewed observation and recollection to
+get hold of the subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be
+reached. The whole attitude is one of concern with what is to be, and
+with what is so far as the latter enters into the movement toward the
+end. Leave out the direction which depends upon foresight of possible
+future results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let
+there be imaginative forecast but no attention to the conditions upon
+which its attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle
+dreaming--abortive intelligence.
+
+If this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something
+complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as
+that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims,
+ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the attainment
+of aims. Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns;
+but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he
+plays a part have the qualities mentioned. Nor are the activities
+in which a person engages, whether intelligently or not, exclusive
+properties of himself; they are something in which he engages and
+partakes. Other things, the independent changes of other things and
+persons, cooperate and hinder. The individual's act may be initial in
+a course of events, but the outcome depends upon the interaction of
+his response with energies supplied by other agencies. Conceive mind as
+anything but one factor partaking along with others in the production of
+consequences, and it becomes meaningless.
+
+The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will
+engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of
+moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic
+appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends. The remedy for
+the evils attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously
+spoken of, is not to be found by substituting a doctrine of specialized
+disciplines, but by reforming the notion of mind and its training.
+Discovery of typical modes of activity, whether play or useful
+occupations, in which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they
+recognize they have something at stake, and which cannot be carried
+through without reflection and use of judgment to select material of
+observation and recollection, is the remedy. In short, the root of the
+error long prevalent in the conception of training of mind consists in
+leaving out of account movements of things to future results in which
+an individual shares, and in the direction of which observation,
+imagination, and memory are enlisted. It consists in regarding mind as
+complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to a present material.
+
+In historic practice the error has cut two ways. On one hand, it has
+screened and protected traditional studies and methods of teaching
+from intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say that they are
+"disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all inquiry. It has not been
+enough to show that they were of no use in life or that they did
+not really contribute to the cultivation of the self. That they were
+"disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed
+the subject from the realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the
+allegation could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue
+as matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and
+lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not
+with the study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof
+that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining
+the old methods. The responsibility was transferred from the educator to
+the pupil because the material did not have to meet specific tests; it
+did not have to be shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served
+any specific end. It was designed to discipline in general, and if it
+failed, it was because the individual was unwilling to be disciplined.
+In the other direction, the tendency was towards a negative conception
+of discipline, instead of an identification of it with growth in
+constructive power of achievement. As we have already seen, will
+means an attitude toward the future, toward the production of possible
+consequences, an attitude involving effort to foresee clearly and
+comprehensively the probable results of ways of acting, and an active
+identification with some anticipated consequences. Identification
+of will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a mind is set up,
+endowed with powers that are only to be applied to existing material. A
+person just either will or will not apply himself to the matter in hand.
+The more indifferent the subject matter, the less concern it has for the
+habits and preferences of the individual, the more demand there is
+for an effort to bring the mind to bear upon it--and hence the more
+discipline of will. To attend to material because there is something
+to be done in which the person is concerned is not disciplinary in this
+view; not even if it results in a desirable increase of constructive
+power. Application just for the sake of application, for the sake of
+training, is alone disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if the
+subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive
+(so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of
+discipline. The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the
+words of an American humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a
+boy so long as he doesn't like it."
+
+The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing with
+objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject matter to be
+learned. In the traditional schemes of education, subject matter means
+so much material to be studied. Various branches of study represent so
+many independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement
+complete within itself. History is one such group of facts; algebra
+another; geography another, and so on till we have run through the
+entire curriculum. Having a ready-made existence on their own account,
+their relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire.
+This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program
+of school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists
+of "studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be
+complete by itself--for educational purposes at least.
+
+Later on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the
+meaning of the subject matter of instruction. At this point, we need
+only to say that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything
+which intelligence studies represents things in the part which they
+play in the carrying forward of active lines of interest. Just as one
+"studies" his typewriter as part of the operation of putting it to use
+to effect results, so with any fact or truth. It becomes an object of
+study--that is, of inquiry and reflection--when it figures as a factor
+to be reckoned with in the completion of a course of events in which one
+is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected. Numbers are not objects
+of study just because they are numbers already constituting a branch of
+learning called mathematics, but because they represent qualities and
+relations of the world in which our action goes on, because they are
+factors upon which the accomplishment of our purposes depends. Stated
+thus broadly, the formula may appear abstract. Translated into details,
+it means that the act of learning or studying is artificial and
+ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented with
+a lesson to be learned. Study is effectual in the degree in which the
+pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with
+in carrying to fruition activities in which he is concerned. This
+connection of an object and a topic with the promotion of an activity
+having a purpose is the first and the last word of a genuine theory of
+interest in education.
+
+3. Some Social Aspects of the Question. While the theoretical errors
+of which we have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of
+schools, they are themselves the outcome of conditions of social life.
+A change confined to the theoretical conviction of educators will not
+remove the difficulties, though it should render more effective efforts
+to modify social conditions. Men's fundamental attitudes toward the
+world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which
+they partake. The ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic
+attitude. Art is neither merely internal nor merely external; merely
+mental nor merely physical. Like every mode of action, it brings about
+changes in the world. The changes made by some actions (those which
+by contrast may be called mechanical) are external; they are shifting
+things about. No ideal reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect,
+accompanies them. Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and
+to its external adornment and display. Many of our existing social
+activities, industrial and political, fall in these two classes. Neither
+the people who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by
+them, are capable of full and free interest in their work. Because of
+the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing it, or because
+of the restricted character of its aim, intelligence is not adequately
+engaged. The same conditions force many people back upon themselves.
+They take refuge in an inner play of sentiment and fancies. They are
+aesthetic but not artistic, since their feelings and ideas are
+turned upon themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify
+conditions. Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an inner
+landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become an asylum of refuge
+from the hard conditions of life--not a temporary retreat for the sake
+of recuperation and clarification in future dealings with the world. The
+very word art may become associated not with specific transformation of
+things, making them more significant for mind, but with stimulations
+of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The separation and
+mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of theory or culture,
+the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are indications of this
+situation. Thus interest and mind are either narrowed, or else made
+perverse. Compare what was said in an earlier chapter about the
+one-sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of efficiency
+and of culture.
+
+This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a
+basis of division between laboring classes and leisure classes. The
+intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting
+struggle with things; that of those freed from the discipline of
+occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate. Moreover, the majority of
+human beings still lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are fixed
+by accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal
+expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and resources
+of the environment. Our economic conditions still relegate many men to
+a servile status. As a consequence, the intelligence of those in control
+of the practical situation is not liberal. Instead of playing freely
+upon the subjugation of the world for human ends, it is devoted to the
+manipulation of other men for ends that are non-human in so far as they
+are exclusive.
+
+This state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational
+traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in
+different portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian
+character of most elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary
+or cultural character of most higher education. It accounts for the
+tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic,
+academic, and professionally technical, and for the widespread
+conviction that liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an
+education which shall count in the vocations of life. But it also helps
+define the peculiar problem of present education. The school cannot
+immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social conditions. But
+it should contribute through the type of intellectual and emotional
+disposition which it forms to the improvement of those conditions. And
+just here the true conceptions of interest and discipline are full
+of significance. Persons whose interests have been enlarged and
+intelligence trained by dealing with things and facts in active
+occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those
+most likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof
+knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice. To
+organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully
+enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the doing
+requires observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of
+a constructive imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve
+social conditions. To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to
+attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and
+an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in
+itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as
+final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating
+them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place
+in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful
+activities is a slow work. It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a
+step at a time. But this is not a reason for nominally accepting one
+educational philosophy and accommodating ourselves in practice to
+another. It is a challenge to undertake the task of reorganization
+courageously and to keep at it persistently.
+
+Summary. Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity
+having an aim. Interest means that one is identified with the objects
+which define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to
+its realization. Any activity with an aim implies a distinction between
+an earlier incomplete phase and later completing phase; it implies also
+intermediate steps. To have an interest is to take things as entering
+into such a continuously developing situation, instead of taking them
+in isolation. The time difference between the given incomplete state of
+affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort in transformation, it
+demands continuity of attention and endurance. This attitude is what
+is practically meant by will. Discipline or development of power of
+continuous attention is its fruit. The significance of this doctrine for
+the theory of education is twofold. On the one hand it protects us
+from the notion that mind and mental states are something complete in
+themselves, which then happen to be applied to some ready-made objects
+and topics so that knowledge results. It shows that mind and intelligent
+or purposeful engagement in a course of action into which things
+enter are identical. Hence to develop and train mind is to provide an
+environment which induces such activity. On the other side, it protects
+us from the notion that subject matter on its side is something isolated
+and independent. It shows that subject matter of learning is identical
+with all the objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or
+obstacles into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of action.
+The developing course of action, whose end and conditions are perceived,
+is the unity which holds together what are often divided into an
+independent mind on one side and an independent world of objects and
+facts on the other.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
+
+1. The Nature of Experience. The nature of experience can be understood
+only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element
+peculiarly combined. On the active hand, experience is trying--a meaning
+which is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On the passive,
+it is undergoing. When we experience something we act upon it, we do
+something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. We do
+something to the thing and then it does something to us in return:
+such is the peculiar combination. The connection of these two phases of
+experience measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience. Mere
+activity does not constitute experience. It is dispersive, centrifugal,
+dissipating. Experience as trying involves change, but change is
+meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the
+return wave of consequences which flow from it. When an activity is
+continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made
+by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is
+loaded with significance. We learn something. It is not experience when
+a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience when the
+movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes in consequence.
+Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame means a burn. Being
+burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick of wood,
+if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action. Blind and
+capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. So
+far as this happens, everything is writ in water. There is none of that
+cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of that
+term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure
+and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own.
+They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is no before
+or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and consequently
+no meaning. We get nothing which may be carried over to foresee what
+is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves
+to what is coming--no added control. Only by courtesy can such an
+experience be called experience. To "learn from experience" is to make a
+backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we
+enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing
+becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is
+like; the undergoing becomes instruction--discovery of the connection of
+things.
+
+Two conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience is
+primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive. But
+(2) the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception
+of relationships or continuities to which it leads up. It includes
+cognition in the degree in which it is cumulative or amounts to
+something, or has meaning. In schools, those under instruction are
+too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical
+spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of
+intellect. The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is
+engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge
+directly. Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed
+from the physical organs of activity. The former is then thought to be
+purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an irrelevant and
+intruding physical factor. The intimate union of activity and undergoing
+its consequences which leads to recognition of meaning is broken;
+instead we have two fragments: mere bodily action on one side, and
+meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity on the other.
+
+It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have
+flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate them.
+Some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated. (a)
+In part bodily activity becomes an intruder. Having nothing, so it is
+thought, to do with mental activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil
+to be contended with. For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school
+along with his mind. And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of
+energy; it has to do something. But its activities, not being utilized
+in occupation with things which yield significant results, have to be
+frowned upon. They lead the pupil away from the lesson with which his
+"mind" ought to be occupied; they are sources of mischief. The chief
+source of the "problem of discipline" in schools is that the teacher
+has often to spend the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily
+activities which take the mind away from its material. A premium is put
+on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and
+movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent
+interest. The teachers' business is to hold the pupils up to these
+requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.
+
+The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil
+are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which
+bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning. Callous
+indifference and explosions from strain alternate. The neglected body,
+having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without
+knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into
+equally meaningless fooling--both very different from the normal play
+of children. Physically active children become restless and unruly; the
+more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend what energy they have
+in the negative task of keeping their instincts and active tendencies
+suppressed, instead of in a positive one of constructive planning
+and execution; they are thus educated not into responsibility for the
+significant and graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty
+not to give them free play. It may be seriously asserted that a chief
+cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that it was
+never misled by false notions into an attempted separation of mind and
+body.
+
+(b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned
+by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have to be used.
+The senses--especially the eye and ear--have to be employed to take in
+what the book, the map, the blackboard, and the teacher say. The lips
+and vocal organs, and the hands, have to be used to reproduce in speech
+and writing what has been stowed away. The senses are then regarded as
+a kind of mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from
+the external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways and
+avenues of knowledge. To keep the eyes on the book and the ears open
+to the teacher's words is a mysterious source of intellectual grace.
+Moreover, reading, writing, and figuring--important school arts--demand
+muscular or motor training. The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs
+accordingly have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge
+back out of the mind into external action. For it happens that using the
+muscles repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an automatic tendency
+to repeat.
+
+The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which
+(in spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering character of the
+body in mental action) have to be employed more or less. For the
+senses and muscles are used not as organic participants in having an
+instructive experience, but as external inlets and outlets of mind.
+Before the child goes to school, he learns with his hand, eye, and ear,
+because they are organs of the process of doing something from which
+meaning results. The boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite,
+and has to note the various pressures of the string on his hand. His
+senses are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow
+"conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing something
+with a purpose. The qualities of seen and touched things have a bearing
+on what is done, and are alertly perceived; they have a meaning. But
+when pupils are expected to use their eyes to note the form of words,
+irrespective of their meaning, in order to reproduce them in spelling or
+reading, the resulting training is simply of isolated sense organs and
+muscles. It is such isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it
+mechanical. It is customary for teachers to urge children to read with
+expression, so as to bring out the meaning. But if they originally
+learned the sensory-motor technique of reading--the ability to identify
+forms and to reproduce the sounds they stand for--by methods which did
+not call for attention to meaning, a mechanical habit was established
+which makes it difficult to read subsequently with intelligence. The
+vocal organs have been trained to go their own way automatically in
+isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will. Drawing, singing, and
+writing may be taught in the same mechanical way; for, we repeat, any
+way is mechanical which narrows down the bodily activity so that a
+separation of body from mind--that is, from recognition of meaning--is
+set up. Mathematics, even in its higher branches, when undue emphasis
+is put upon the technique of calculation, and science, when laboratory
+exercises are given for their own sake, suffer from the same evil.
+
+(c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from direct
+occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the expense of
+relations or connections. It is altogether too common to separate
+perceptions and even ideas from judgments. The latter are thought to
+come after the former in order to compare them. It is alleged that the
+mind perceives things apart from relations; that it forms ideas of them
+in isolation from their connections--with what goes before and comes
+after. Then judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated
+items of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection
+shall be brought out. As matter of fact, every perception and every idea
+is a sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a thing. We do not really
+know a chair or have an idea of it by inventorying and enumerating its
+various isolated qualities, but only by bringing these qualities into
+connection with something else--the purpose which makes it a chair and
+not a table; or its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed
+to, or the "period" which it represents, and so on. A wagon is not
+perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic
+connection of the parts which makes it a wagon. And these connections
+are not those of mere physical juxtaposition; they involve connection
+with the animals that draw it, the things that are carried on it, and so
+on. Judgment is employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is
+mere sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior
+judgment, as in the case of familiar objects.
+
+Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for ideas.
+And in just the degree in which mental activity is separated from active
+concern with the world, from doing something and connecting the doing
+with what is undergone, words, symbols, come to take the place of ideas.
+The substitution is the more subtle because some meaning is recognized.
+But we are very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning,
+and to fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations
+which confer significance. We get so thoroughly used to a kind of
+pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not aware how half-dead
+our mental action is, and how much keener and more extensive our
+observations and ideas would be if we formed them under conditions of
+a vital experience which required us to use judgment: to hunt for the
+connections of the thing dealt with. There is no difference of opinion
+as to the theory of the matter. All authorities agree that that
+discernment of relationships is the genuinely intellectual matter;
+hence, the educative matter. The failure arises in supposing that
+relationships can become perceptible without experience--without that
+conjoint trying and undergoing of which we have spoken. It is assumed
+that "mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that this
+attention may be given at will irrespective of the situation. Hence
+the deluge of half-observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated
+"knowledge" which afflicts the world. An ounce of experience is better
+than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any
+theory has vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very
+humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of
+theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience
+cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. It tends to become a mere
+verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine
+theorizing, unnecessary and impossible. Because of our education we use
+words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal
+being in reality simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us
+from seeing any longer the difficulty.
+
+2. Reflection in Experience. Thought or reflection, as we have already
+seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation
+between what we try to do and what happens in consequence. No experience
+having a meaning is possible without some element of thought. But we
+may contrast two types of experience according to the proportion of
+reflection found in them. All our experiences have a phase of "cut and
+try" in them--what psychologists call the method of trial and error. We
+simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and keep
+on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then we adopt
+that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent procedure. Some
+experiences have very little else in them than this hit and miss or
+succeed process. We see that a certain way of acting and a certain
+consequence are connected, but we do not see how they are. We do not see
+the details of the connection; the links are missing. Our discernment is
+very gross. In other cases we push our observation farther. We analyze
+to see just what lies between so as to bind together cause and effect,
+activity and consequence. This extension of our insight makes foresight
+more accurate and comprehensive. The action which rests simply upon the
+trial and error method is at the mercy of circumstances; they may change
+so that the act performed does not operate in the way it was expected
+to. But if we know in detail upon what the result depends, we can look
+to see whether the required conditions are there. The method extends our
+practical control. For if some of the conditions are missing, we may,
+if we know what the needed antecedents for an effect are, set to work to
+supply them; or, if they are such as to produce undesirable effects
+as well, we may eliminate some of the superfluous causes and economize
+effort.
+
+In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what
+happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience is
+made explicit. Its quantity increases so that its proportionate value is
+very different. Hence the quality of the experience changes; the
+change is so significant that we may call this type of experience
+reflective--that is, reflective par excellence. The deliberate
+cultivation of this phase of thought constitutes thinking as a
+distinctive experience. Thinking, in other words, is the intentional
+endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do
+and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous.
+Their isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary going together,
+is canceled; a unified developing situation takes its place. The
+occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is reasonable, as we
+say, that the thing should happen as it does.
+
+Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the intelligent
+element in our experience. It makes it possible to act with an end
+in view. It is the condition of our having aims. As soon as an infant
+begins to expect he begins to use something which is now going on as
+a sign of something to follow; he is, in however simple a fashion,
+judging. For he takes one thing as evidence of something else, and so
+recognizes a relationship. Any future development, however elaborate
+it may be, is only an extending and a refining of this simple act of
+inference. All that the wisest man can do is to observe what is going on
+more widely and more minutely and then select more carefully from what
+is noted just those factors which point to something to happen. The
+opposites, once more, to thoughtful action are routine and capricious
+behavior. The former accepts what has been customary as a full measure
+of possibility and omits to take into account the connections of the
+particular things done. The latter makes the momentary act a measure
+of value, and ignores the connections of our personal action with the
+energies of the environment. It says, virtually, "things are to be just
+as I happen to like them at this instant," as routine says in effect
+"let things continue just as I have found them in the past." Both refuse
+to acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which
+flow from present action. Reflection is the acceptance of such
+responsibility.
+
+The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on,
+something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled. Its
+point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it
+is going to turn out. As this is written, the world is filled with the
+clang of contending armies. For an active participant in the war, it is
+clear that the momentous thing is the issue, the future consequences, of
+this and that happening. He is identified, for the time at least, with
+the issue; his fate hangs upon the course things are taking. But even
+for an onlooker in a neutral country, the significance of every move
+made, of every advance here and retreat there, lies in what it portends.
+To think upon the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is
+indicated as probable or possible regarding an outcome. To fill our
+heads, like a scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and
+done-for thing, is not to think. It is to turn ourselves into a piece
+of registering apparatus. To consider the bearing of the occurrence
+upon what may be, but is not yet, is to think. Nor will the reflective
+experience be different in kind if we substitute distance in time for
+separation in space. Imagine the war done with, and a future historian
+giving an account of it. The episode is, by assumption, past. But he
+cannot give a thoughtful account of the war save as he preserves the
+time sequence; the meaning of each occurrence, as he deals with it, lies
+in what was future for it, though not for the historian. To take it by
+itself as a complete existence is to take it unreflectively.
+Reflection also implies concern with the issue--a certain sympathetic
+identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of
+the course of events. For the general in the war, or a common soldier,
+or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to thinking
+is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is indirect and dependent upon
+imagination. But the flagrant partisanship of human nature is evidence
+of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves with one possible
+course of events, and to reject the other as foreign. If we cannot take
+sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to help determine
+the final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively. We
+desire this or that outcome. One wholly indifferent to the outcome does
+not follow or think about what is happening at all. From this dependence
+of the act of thinking upon a sense of sharing in the consequences
+of what goes on, flows one of the chief paradoxes of thought. Born in
+partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain
+detached impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and desires to
+affect his observations and interpretations of the existing situation
+will surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes and fears may be
+the chief motive for a thoughtful following of the war on the part of
+an onlooker in a neutral country, he too will think ineffectively in the
+degree in which his preferences modify the stuff of his observations and
+reasonings. There is, however, no incompatibility between the fact that
+the occasion of reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is going
+on and the fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping one's
+self out of the data. The almost insurmountable difficulty of achieving
+this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in situations where
+the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of events and is
+designed to influence the result. Only gradually and with a widening of
+the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does thinking
+develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of
+great significance for education.
+
+To say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which are still
+going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking occurs when things are
+uncertain or doubtful or problematic. Only what is finished, completed,
+is wholly assured. Where there is reflection there is suspense. The
+object of thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to project a possible
+termination on the basis of what is already given. Certain other facts
+about thinking accompany this feature. Since the situation in which
+thinking occurs is a doubtful one, thinking is a process of inquiry, of
+looking into things, of investigating. Acquiring is always secondary,
+and instrumental to the act of inquiring. It is seeking, a quest,
+for something that is not at hand. We sometimes talk as if "original
+research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of
+advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is
+native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in
+the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
+
+It also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be
+guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of
+an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. The conclusions of thinking,
+till confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or
+hypothetical. Their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of
+the issue, in fact. The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we
+learn? For either we know already what we are after, or else we do not
+know. In neither case is learning possible; on the first alternative
+because we know already; on the second, because we do not know what to
+look for, nor if, by chance, we find it can we tell that it is what
+we were after. The dilemma makes no provision for coming to know, for
+learning; it assumes either complete knowledge or complete ignorance.
+Nevertheless the twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists. The
+possibility of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is
+the fact which the Greek dilemma overlooked. The perplexities of the
+situation suggest certain ways out. We try these ways, and either push
+our way out, in which case we know we have found what we were looking
+for, or the situation gets darker and more confused--in which case, we
+know we are still ignorant. Tentative means trying out, feeling one's
+way along provisionally. Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice
+piece of formal logic. But it is also true that as long as men kept a
+sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science made only
+slow and accidental advance. Systematic advance in invention and
+discovery began when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for
+purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to guide action in tentative
+explorations, whose development would confirm, refute, or modify the
+guiding conjecture. While the Greeks made knowledge more than learning,
+modern science makes conserved knowledge only a means to learning, to
+discovery. To recur to our illustration. A commanding general cannot
+base his actions upon either absolute certainty or absolute ignorance.
+He has a certain amount of information at hand which is, we will assume,
+reasonably trustworthy. He then infers certain prospective movements,
+thus assigning meaning to the bare facts of the given situation. His
+inference is more or less dubious and hypothetical. But he acts upon it.
+He develops a plan of procedure, a method of dealing with the situation.
+The consequences which directly follow from his acting this way rather
+than that test and reveal the worth of his reflections. What he already
+knows functions and has value in what he learns. But will this account
+apply in the case of the one in a neutral country who is thoughtfully
+following as best he can the progress of events? In form, yes, though
+not of course in content. It is self-evident that his guesses about
+the future indicated by present facts, guesses by which he attempts to
+supply meaning to a multitude of disconnected data, cannot be the basis
+of a method which shall take effect in the campaign. That is not his
+problem. But in the degree in which he is actively thinking, and
+not merely passively following the course of events, his tentative
+inferences will take effect in a method of procedure appropriate to his
+situation. He will anticipate certain future moves, and will be on the
+alert to see whether they happen or not. In the degree in which he is
+intellectually concerned, or thoughtful, he will be actively on the
+lookout; he will take steps which although they do not affect the
+campaign, modify in some degree his subsequent actions. Otherwise his
+later "I told you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does
+not mark any testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a
+coincidence that yields emotional satisfaction--and includes a
+large factor of self-deception. The case is comparable to that of an
+astronomer who from given data has been led to foresee (infer) a future
+eclipse. No matter how great the mathematical probability, the inference
+is hypothetical--a matter of probability. 1 The hypothesis as to the
+date and position of the anticipated eclipse becomes the material of
+forming a method of future conduct. Apparatus is arranged; possibly
+an expedition is made to some far part of the globe. In any case, some
+active steps are taken which actually change some physical conditions.
+And apart from such steps and the consequent modification of the
+situation, there is no completion of the act of thinking. It remains
+suspended. Knowledge, already attained knowledge, controls thinking and
+makes it fruitful.
+
+So much for the general features of a reflective experience. They are
+(i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated
+in an incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined;
+(ii) a conjectural anticipation--a tentative interpretation of the given
+elements, attributing to them a tendency to effect certain consequences;
+(iii) a careful survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis)
+of all attainable consideration which will define and clarify the
+problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative
+hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent, because squaring
+with a wider range of facts; (v) taking one stand upon the projected
+hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to the existing state of
+affairs: doing something overtly to bring about the anticipated result,
+and thereby testing the hypothesis. It is the extent and accuracy of
+steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience
+from one on the trial and error plane. They make thinking itself into an
+experience. Nevertheless, we never get wholly beyond the trial and error
+situation. Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to
+be tried in the world and thereby tried out. And since it can never
+take into account all the connections, it can never cover with perfect
+accuracy all the consequences. Yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is
+so careful, and the guessing at results so controlled, that we have a
+right to mark off the reflective experience from the grosser trial and
+error forms of action.
+
+Summary. In determining the place of thinking in experience we first
+noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with
+something which is undergone in consequence. A separation of the active
+doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning
+of an experience. Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of
+connections between what is done and its consequences. It notes not only
+that they are connected, but the details of the connection. It makes
+connecting links explicit in the form of relationships. The stimulus
+to thinking is found when we wish to determine the significance of some
+act, performed or to be performed. Then we anticipate consequences. This
+implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us,
+incomplete and hence indeterminate. The projection of consequences means
+a proposed or tentative solution. To perfect this hypothesis, existing
+conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of the
+hypothesis developed--an operation called reasoning. Then the suggested
+solution--the idea or theory--has to be tested by acting upon it. If it
+brings about certain consequences, certain determinate changes, in the
+world, it is accepted as valid. Otherwise it is modified, and another
+trial made. Thinking includes all of these steps,--the sense of a
+problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and rational
+elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experimental
+testing. While all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately the value
+of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking. For we live not in a
+settled and finished world, but in one which is going on, and where our
+main task is prospective, and where retrospect--and all knowledge
+as distinct from thought is retrospect--is of value in the solidity,
+security, and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.
+
+1 It is most important for the practice of science that men in many
+cases can calculate the degree of probability and the amount of probable
+error involved, but that does alter the features of the situation as
+described. It refines them.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
+
+1. The Essentials of Method. No one doubts, theoretically, the
+importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking. But apart
+from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as in
+theory, there is not adequate theoretical recognition that all which the
+school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned
+(that is, leaving out certain specialized muscular abilities), is to
+develop their ability to think. The parceling out of instruction
+among various ends such as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling,
+writing, drawing, reciting); acquiring information (in history and
+geography), and training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way
+in which we accomplish all three. Thinking which is not connected with
+increase of efficiency in action, and with learning more about ourselves
+and the world in which we live, has something the matter with it just
+as thought (See ante, p. 147). And skill obtained apart from thinking is
+not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used.
+It consequently leaves a man at the mercy of his routine habits and of
+the authoritative control of others, who know what they are about and
+who are not especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement.
+And information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing
+load. Since it simulates knowledge and thereby develops the poison of
+conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to further growth in the grace
+of intelligence. The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the
+methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the
+conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking. Thinking is the
+method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards
+mind. We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but
+the important thing to bear in mind about method is that thinking is
+method, the method of intelligent experience in the course which it
+takes.
+
+I. The initial stage of that developing experience which is called
+thinking is experience. This remark may sound like a silly truism. It
+ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not. On the contrary, thinking
+is often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice
+as something cut off from experience, and capable of being cultivated
+in isolation. In fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often
+urged as the sufficient ground for attention to thinking. Experience
+is then thought to be confined to the senses and appetites; to a mere
+material world, while thinking proceeds from a higher faculty (of
+reason), and is occupied with spiritual or at least literary things. So,
+oftentimes, a sharp distinction is made between pure mathematics as a
+peculiarly fit subject matter of thought (since it has nothing to do
+with physical existences) and applied mathematics, which has utilitarian
+but not mental value.
+
+Speaking generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of instruction
+lies in supposing that experience on the part of pupils may be assumed.
+What is here insisted upon is the necessity of an actual empirical
+situation as the initiating phase of thought. Experience is here taken
+as previously defined: trying to do something and having the thing
+perceptibly do something to one in return. The fallacy consists
+in supposing that we can begin with ready-made subject matter of
+arithmetic, or geography, or whatever, irrespective of some direct
+personal experience of a situation. Even the kindergarten and Montessori
+techniques are so anxious to get at intellectual distinctions, without
+"waste of time," that they tend to ignore--or reduce--the immediate
+crude handling of the familiar material of experience, and to introduce
+pupils at once to material which expresses the intellectual distinctions
+which adults have made. But the first stage of contact with any new
+material, at whatever age of maturity, must inevitably be of the trial
+and error sort. An individual must actually try, in play or work, to do
+something with material in carrying out his own impulsive activity,
+and then note the interaction of his energy and that of the material
+employed. This is what happens when a child at first begins to build
+with blocks, and it is equally what happens when a scientific man in his
+laboratory begins to experiment with unfamiliar objects.
+
+Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be
+aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible.
+To realize what an experience, or empirical situation, means, we have
+to call to mind the sort of situation that presents itself outside of
+school; the sort of occupations that interest and engage activity in
+ordinary life. And careful inspection of methods which are permanently
+successful in formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to
+read, or studying geography, or learning physics or a foreign language,
+will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that
+they go back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out
+of school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do, not
+something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand
+thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally
+results.
+
+That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse thinking
+means of course that it should suggest something to do which is not
+either routine or capricious--something, in other words, presenting
+what is new (and hence uncertain or problematic) and yet sufficiently
+connected with existing habits to call out an effective response. An
+effective response means one which accomplishes a perceptible result,
+in distinction from a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences
+cannot be mentally connected with what is done. The most significant
+question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or
+experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem it
+involves.
+
+At first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods measured
+well up to the standard here set. The giving of problems, the putting of
+questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is
+a large part of school work. But it is indispensable to discriminate
+between genuine and simulated or mock problems. The following questions
+may aid in making such discrimination. (a) Is there anything but
+a problem? Does the question naturally suggest itself within some
+situation or personal experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem
+only for the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic?
+Is it the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage
+experimentation outside of school? (b) Is it the pupil's own problem, or
+is it the teacher's or textbook's problem, made a problem for the pupil
+only because he cannot get the required mark or be promoted or win
+the teacher's approval, unless he deals with it? Obviously, these two
+questions overlap. They are two ways of getting at the same point:
+Is the experience a personal thing of such a nature as inherently to
+stimulate and direct observation of the connections involved, and to
+lead to inference and its testing? Or is it imposed from without, and
+is the pupil's problem simply to meet the external requirement? Such
+questions may give us pause in deciding upon the extent to which
+current practices are adapted to develop reflective habits. The physical
+equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom are hostile to the
+existence of real situations of experience. What is there similar to
+the conditions of everyday life which will generate difficulties? Almost
+everything testifies to the great premium put upon listening, reading,
+and the reproduction of what is told and read. It is hardly possible
+to overstate the contrast between such conditions and the situations of
+active contact with things and persons in the home, on the playground,
+in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life. Much of it is not
+even comparable with the questions which may arise in the mind of a boy
+or girl in conversing with others or in reading books outside of the
+school. No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions
+outside of the school (so that they pester grown-up persons if they get
+any encouragement), and the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity
+about the subject matter of school lessons. Reflection on this striking
+contrast will throw light upon the question of how far customary school
+conditions supply a context of experience in which problems naturally
+suggest themselves. No amount of improvement in the personal technique
+of the instructor will wholly remedy this state of things. There must
+be more actual material, more stuff, more appliances, and more
+opportunities for doing things, before the gap can be overcome. And
+where children are engaged in doing things and in discussing what arises
+in the course of their doing, it is found, even with comparatively
+indifferent modes of instruction, that children's inquiries are
+spontaneous and numerous, and the proposals of solution advanced,
+varied, and ingenious.
+
+As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which
+generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his; or, rather,
+they are his only as a pupil, not as a human being. Hence the lamentable
+waste in carrying over such expertness as is achieved in dealing
+with them to the affairs of life beyond the schoolroom. A pupil has a
+problem, but it is the problem of meeting the peculiar requirements set
+by the teacher. His problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher
+wants, what will satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and
+outward deportment. Relationship to subject matter is no longer direct.
+The occasions and material of thought are not found in the arithmetic
+or the history or geography itself, but in skillfully adapting
+that material to the teacher's requirements. The pupil studies, but
+unconsciously to himself the objects of his study are the conventions
+and standards of the school system and school authority, not the nominal
+"studies." The thinking thus evoked is artificially one-sided at the
+best. At its worst, the problem of the pupil is not how to meet the
+requirements of school life, but how to seem to meet them--or, how to
+come near enough to meeting them to slide along without an undue amount
+of friction. The type of judgment formed by these devices is not a
+desirable addition to character. If these statements give too highly
+colored a picture of usual school methods, the exaggeration may at least
+serve to illustrate the point: the need of active pursuits, involving
+the use of material to accomplish purposes, if there are to be
+situations which normally generate problems occasioning thoughtful
+inquiry.
+
+II. There must be data at command to supply the considerations required
+in dealing with the specific difficulty which has presented itself.
+Teachers following a "developing" method sometimes tell children to
+think things out for themselves as if they could spin them out of their
+own heads. The material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions,
+facts, events, and the relations of things. In other words, to think
+effectively one must have had, or now have, experiences which will
+furnish him resources for coping with the difficulty at hand. A
+difficulty is an indispensable stimulus to thinking, but not all
+difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they overwhelm and submerge
+and discourage. The perplexing situation must be sufficiently like
+situations which have already been dealt with so that pupils will have
+some control of the meanings of handling it. A large part of the art of
+instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough
+to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the
+confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be
+luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.
+
+In one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what psychological means
+the subject matter for reflection is provided. Memory, observation,
+reading, communication, are all avenues for supplying data. The relative
+proportion to be obtained from each is a matter of the specific
+features of the particular problem in hand. It is foolish to insist
+upon observation of objects presented to the senses if the student is
+so familiar with the objects that he could just as well recall the facts
+independently. It is possible to induce undue and crippling dependence
+upon sense-presentations. No one can carry around with him a museum of
+all the things whose properties will assist the conduct of thought. A
+well-trained mind is one that has a maximum of resources behind it, so
+to speak, and that is accustomed to go over its past experiences to
+see what they yield. On the other hand, a quality or relation of even
+a familiar object may previously have been passed over, and be just the
+fact that is helpful in dealing with the question. In this case direct
+observation is called for. The same principle applies to the use to
+be made of observation on one hand and of reading and "telling" on the
+other. Direct observation is naturally more vivid and vital. But it has
+its limitations; and in any case it is a necessary part of education
+that one should acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his
+immediately personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of others.
+Excessive reliance upon others for data (whether got from reading
+or listening) is to be depreciated. Most objectionable of all is the
+probability that others, the book or the teacher, will supply solutions
+ready-made, instead of giving material that the student has to adapt and
+apply to the question in hand for himself.
+
+There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is usually
+both too much and too little information supplied by others. The
+accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction
+in recitation and examination is made too much of. "Knowledge," in
+the sense of information, means the working capital, the indispensable
+resources, of further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things.
+Frequently it is treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes
+to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage
+ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only
+lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one
+could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk.
+Pupils who have stored their "minds" with all kinds of material which
+they have never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered
+when they try to think. They have no practice in selecting what is
+appropriate, and no criterion to go by; everything is on the same dead
+static level. On the other hand, it is quite open to question whether,
+if information actually functioned in experience through use in
+application to the student's own purposes, there would not be need of
+more varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually at
+command.
+
+III. The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already
+acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings,
+suppositions, tentative explanations:--ideas, in short. Careful
+observation and recollection determine what is given, what is already
+there, and hence assured. They cannot furnish what is lacking. They
+define, clarify, and locate the question; they cannot supply its answer.
+Projection, invention, ingenuity, devising come in for that purpose. The
+data arouse suggestions, and only by reference to the specific data can
+we pass upon the appropriateness of the suggestions. But the suggestions
+run beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience. They forecast
+possible results, things to do, not facts (things already done).
+Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.
+
+In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is
+presented) is creative,--an incursion into the novel. It involves some
+inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some
+context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light
+in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton
+thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his
+thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of
+them commonplaces--sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of
+numbers. These were not original ideas; they were established facts. His
+originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances were
+put by introduction into an unfamiliar context. The same is true of
+every striking scientific discovery, every great invention, every
+admirable artistic production. Only silly folk identify creative
+originality with the extraordinary and fanciful; others recognize
+that its measure lies in putting everyday things to uses which had not
+occurred to others. The operation is novel, not the materials out of
+which it is constructed.
+
+The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is
+original in a projection of considerations which have not been
+previously apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be
+done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting
+five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though
+everybody else in the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of
+experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a
+new quality. The charm which the spontaneity of little children has
+for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual
+originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the joy of
+intellectual constructiveness--of creativeness, if the word may be used
+without misunderstanding. The educational moral I am chiefly concerned
+to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of
+a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense
+of discovery and not in that of storing away what others pour into
+them; nor that it would be possible to give even children and youth the
+delights of personal intellectual productiveness--true and important
+as are these things. It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be
+conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it
+is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. The
+communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for
+himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual
+interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he
+directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions
+of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does
+he think. When the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which
+stimulate thinking and has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the
+activities of the learner by entering into a common or conjoint
+experience, all has been done which a second party can do to instigate
+learning. The rest lies with the one directly concerned. If he
+cannot devise his own solution (not of course in isolation, but in
+correspondence with the teacher and other pupils) and find his own way
+out he will not learn, not even if he can recite some correct answer
+with one hundred per cent accuracy. We can and do supply ready-made
+"ideas" by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see
+that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own
+activities generate, support, and clinch ideas--that is, perceived
+meanings or connections. This does not mean that the teacher is to stand
+off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject
+matter and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not
+quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared
+activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing
+it, a teacher--and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on
+either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better.
+IV. Ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble guesses or
+dignified theories, are anticipations of possible solutions. They are
+anticipations of some continuity or connection of an activity and a
+consequence which has not as yet shown itself. They are therefore tested
+by the operation of acting upon them. They are to guide and organize
+further observations, recollections, and experiments. They are
+intermediate in learning, not final. All educational reformers, as we
+have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the passivity of
+traditional education. They have opposed pouring in from without, and
+absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked drilling in material as into
+hard and resisting rock. But it is not easy to secure conditions which
+will make the getting of an idea identical with having an experience
+which widens and makes more precise our contact with the environment.
+Activity, even self-activity, is too easily thought of as something
+merely mental, cooped up within the head, or finding expression only
+through the vocal organs.
+
+While the need of application of ideas gained in study is acknowledged
+by all the more successful methods of instruction, the exercises in
+application are sometimes treated as devices for fixing what has
+already been learned and for getting greater practical skill in its
+manipulation. These results are genuine and not to be despised. But
+practice in applying what has been gained in study ought primarily to
+have an intellectual quality. As we have already seen, thoughts just
+as thoughts are incomplete. At best they are tentative; they are
+suggestions, indications. They are standpoints and methods for dealing
+with situations of experience. Till they are applied in these situations
+they lack full point and reality. Only application tests them, and only
+testing confers full meaning and a sense of their reality. Short of use
+made of them, they tend to segregate into a peculiar world of their
+own. It may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies (to which
+reference has been made in section 2 of chapter X) which isolate mind
+and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact
+that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock
+of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and
+test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends
+in themselves.
+
+However this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar artificiality
+attaches to much of what is learned in schools. It can hardly be said
+that many students consciously think of the subject matter as unreal;
+but it assuredly does not possess for them the kind of reality which the
+subject matter of their vital experiences possesses. They learn not to
+expect that sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating
+it as having reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and
+examinations. That it should remain inert for the experiences of daily
+life is more or less a matter of course. The bad effects are twofold.
+Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment which it should;
+it is not fertilized by school learning. And the attitudes which spring
+from getting used to and accepting half-understood and ill-digested
+material weaken vigor and efficiency of thought.
+
+If we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the sake
+of suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual development
+of thought. Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops,
+and gardens, where dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used,
+opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life, and for
+acquiring and applying information and ideas in the carrying forward of
+progressive experiences. Ideas are not segregated, they do not form an
+isolated island. They animate and enrich the ordinary course of life.
+Information is vitalized by its function; by the place it occupies in
+direction of action. The phrase "opportunities exist" is used purposely.
+They may not be taken advantage of; it is possible to employ manual
+and constructive activities in a physical way, as means of getting just
+bodily skill; or they may be used almost exclusively for "utilitarian,"
+i.e., pecuniary, ends. But the disposition on the part of upholders of
+"cultural" education to assume that such activities are merely physical
+or professional in quality, is itself a product of the philosophies
+which isolate mind from direction of the course of experience and hence
+from action upon and with things. When the "mental" is regarded as
+a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart fate befalls bodily
+activity and movements. They are regarded as at the best mere external
+annexes to mind. They may be necessary for the satisfaction of bodily
+needs and the attainment of external decency and comfort, but they do
+not occupy a necessary place in mind nor enact an indispensable role
+in the completion of thought. Hence they have no place in a liberal
+education--i.e., one which is concerned with the interests of
+intelligence. If they come in at all, it is as a concession to the
+material needs of the masses. That they should be allowed to invade
+the education of the elite is unspeakable. This conclusion follows
+irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind, but by the same
+logic it disappears when we perceive what mind really is--namely, the
+purposive and directive factor in the development of experience. While
+it is desirable that all educational institutions should be equipped so
+as to give students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and
+information in active pursuits typifying important social situations, it
+will, doubtless, be a long time before all of them are thus furnished.
+But this state of affairs does not afford instructors an excuse for
+folding their hands and persisting in methods which segregate school
+knowledge. Every recitation in every subject gives an opportunity for
+establishing cross connections between the subject matter of the lesson
+and the wider and more direct experiences of everyday life. Classroom
+instruction falls into three kinds. The least desirable treats each
+lesson as an independent whole. It does not put upon the student the
+responsibility of finding points of contact between it and other lessons
+in the same subject, or other subjects of study. Wiser teachers see to
+it that the student is systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons
+to help understand the present one, and also to use the present to
+throw additional light upon what has already been acquired. Results are
+better, but school subject matter is still isolated. Save by accident,
+out-of-school experience is left in its crude and comparatively
+irreflective state. It is not subject to the refining and expanding
+influences of the more accurate and comprehensive material of direct
+instruction. The latter is not motivated and impregnated with a sense of
+reality by being intermingled with the realities of everyday life. The
+best type of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this
+interconnection. It puts the student in the habitual attitude of finding
+points of contact and mutual bearings.
+
+Summary. Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which
+they center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may
+speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is
+that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials
+of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection.
+They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of
+experience--that there be a continuous activity in which he is
+interested for its own sake; secondly, that a genuine problem develop
+within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess
+the information and make the observations needed to deal with it;
+fourth, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be
+responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have
+opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their
+meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
+
+1. The Unity of Subject Matter and Method.
+
+The trinity of school topics is subject matter, methods, and
+administration or government. We have been concerned with the two former
+in recent chapters. It remains to disentangle them from the context in
+which they have been referred to, and discuss explicitly their nature.
+We shall begin with the topic of method, since that lies closest to the
+considerations of the last chapter. Before taking it up, it may be well,
+however, to call express attention to one implication of our theory; the
+connection of subject matter and method with each other. The idea
+that mind and the world of things and persons are two separate
+and independent realms--a theory which philosophically is known as
+dualism--carries with it the conclusion that method and subject matter
+of instruction are separate affairs. Subject matter then becomes a
+ready-made systematized classification of the facts and principles
+of the world of nature and man. Method then has for its province a
+consideration of the ways in which this antecedent subject matter may
+be best presented to and impressed upon the mind; or, a consideration
+of the ways in which the mind may be externally brought to bear upon the
+matter so as to facilitate its acquisition and possession. In theory, at
+least, one might deduce from a science of the mind as something existing
+by itself a complete theory of methods of learning, with no knowledge of
+the subjects to which the methods are to be applied. Since many who
+are actually most proficient in various branches of subject matter
+are wholly innocent of these methods, this state of affairs gives
+opportunity for the retort that pedagogy, as an alleged science
+of methods of the mind in learning, is futile;--a mere screen for
+concealing the necessity a teacher is under of profound and accurate
+acquaintance with the subject in hand.
+
+But since thinking is a directed movement of subject matter to a
+completing issue, and since mind is the deliberate and intentional phase
+of the process, the notion of any such split is radically false. The
+fact that the material of a science is organized is evidence that it has
+already been subjected to intelligence; it has been methodized, so
+to say. Zoology as a systematic branch of knowledge represents crude,
+scattered facts of our ordinary acquaintance with animals after
+they have been subjected to careful examination, to deliberate
+supplementation, and to arrangement to bring out connections which
+assist observation, memory, and further inquiry. Instead of furnishing a
+starting point for learning, they mark out a consummation. Method means
+that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use.
+Never is method something outside of the material.
+
+How about method from the standpoint of an individual who is dealing
+with subject matter? Again, it is not something external. It is simply
+an effective treatment of material--efficiency meaning such treatment as
+utilizes the material (puts it to a purpose) with a minimum of waste of
+time and energy. We can distinguish a way of acting, and discuss it by
+itself; but the way exists only as way-of-dealing-with-material. Method
+is not antithetical to subject matter; it is the effective direction
+of subject matter to desired results. It is antithetical to random and
+ill-considered action,--ill-considered signifying ill-adapted.
+
+The statement that method means directed movement of subject matter
+towards ends is formal. An illustration may give it content. Every
+artist must have a method, a technique, in doing his work. Piano playing
+is not hitting the keys at random. It is an orderly way of using them,
+and the order is not something which exists ready-made in the musician's
+hands or brain prior to an activity dealing with the piano. Order is
+found in the disposition of acts which use the piano and the hands and
+brain so as to achieve the result intended. It is the action of the
+piano directed to accomplish the purpose of the piano as a musical
+instrument. It is the same with "pedagogical" method. The only
+difference is that the piano is a mechanism constructed in advance for
+a single end; while the material of study is capable of indefinite uses.
+But even in this regard the illustration may apply if we consider the
+infinite variety of kinds of music which a piano may produce, and
+the variations in technique required in the different musical results
+secured. Method in any case is but an effective way of employing some
+material for some end.
+
+These considerations may be generalized by going back to the conception
+of experience. Experience as the perception of the connection between
+something tried and something undergone in consequence is a process.
+Apart from effort to control the course which the process takes, there
+is no distinction of subject matter and method. There is simply an
+activity which includes both what an individual does and what the
+environment does. A piano player who had perfect mastery of his
+instrument would have no occasion to distinguish between his
+contribution and that of the piano. In well-formed, smooth-running
+functions of any sort,--skating, conversing, hearing music, enjoying a
+landscape,--there is no consciousness of separation of the method of the
+person and of the subject matter. In whole-hearted play and work there
+is the same phenomenon.
+
+When we reflect upon an experience instead of just having it, we
+inevitably distinguish between our own attitude and the objects toward
+which we sustain the attitude. When a man is eating, he is eating food.
+He does not divide his act into eating and food. But if he makes a
+scientific investigation of the act, such a discrimination is the first
+thing he would effect. He would examine on the one hand the properties
+of the nutritive material, and on the other hand the acts of the
+organism in appropriating and digesting. Such reflection upon experience
+gives rise to a distinction of what we experience (the experienced) and
+the experiencing--the how. When we give names to this distinction we
+have subject matter and method as our terms. There is the thing seen,
+heard, loved, hated, imagined, and there is the act of seeing, hearing,
+loving, hating, imagining, etc.
+
+This distinction is so natural and so important for certain purposes,
+that we are only too apt to regard it as a separation in existence and
+not as a distinction in thought. Then we make a division between a self
+and the environment or world. This separation is the root of the dualism
+of method and subject matter. That is, we assume that knowing, feeling,
+willing, etc., are things which belong to the self or mind in its
+isolation, and which then may be brought to bear upon an independent
+subject matter. We assume that the things which belong in isolation to
+the self or mind have their own laws of operation irrespective of the
+modes of active energy of the object. These laws are supposed to furnish
+method. It would be no less absurd to suppose that men can eat without
+eating something, or that the structure and movements of the jaws,
+throat muscles, the digestive activities of stomach, etc., are not what
+they are because of the material with which their activity is engaged.
+Just as the organs of the organism are a continuous part of the very
+world in which food materials exist, so the capacities of seeing,
+hearing, loving, imagining are intrinsically connected with the subject
+matter of the world. They are more truly ways in which the environment
+enters into experience and functions there than they are independent
+acts brought to bear upon things. Experience, in short, is not a
+combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject
+matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity
+(literally countless in number) of energies.
+
+For the purpose of controlling the course or direction which the moving
+unity of experience takes we draw a mental distinction between the
+how and the what. While there is no way of walking or of eating or of
+learning over and above the actual walking, eating, and studying, there
+are certain elements in the act which give the key to its more effective
+control. Special attention to these elements makes them more obvious
+to perception (letting other factors recede for the time being from
+conspicuous recognition). Getting an idea of how the experience proceeds
+indicates to us what factors must be secured or modified in order that
+it may go on more successfully. This is only a somewhat elaborate way
+of saying that if a man watches carefully the growth of several plants,
+some of which do well and some of which amount to little or nothing, he
+may be able to detect the special conditions upon which the prosperous
+development of a plant depends. These conditions, stated in an orderly
+sequence, would constitute the method or way or manner of its growth.
+There is no difference between the growth of a plant and the prosperous
+development of an experience. It is not easy, in either case, to seize
+upon just the factors which make for its best movement. But study of
+cases of success and failure and minute and extensive comparison, helps
+to seize upon causes. When we have arranged these causes in order, we
+have a method of procedure or a technique.
+
+A consideration of some evils in education that flow from the isolation
+of method from subject matter will make the point more definite.
+
+(I) In the first place, there is the neglect (of which we have spoken)
+of concrete situations of experience. There can be no discovery of
+a method without cases to be studied. The method is derived from
+observation of what actually happens, with a view to seeing that it
+happen better next time. But in instruction and discipline, there is
+rarely sufficient opportunity for children and youth to have the direct
+normal experiences from which educators might derive an idea of method
+or order of best development. Experiences are had under conditions
+of such constraint that they throw little or no light upon the normal
+course of an experience to its fruition. "Methods" have then to be
+authoritatively recommended to teachers, instead of being an expression
+of their own intelligent observations. Under such circumstances, they
+have a mechanical uniformity, assumed to be alike for all minds. Where
+flexible personal experiences are promoted by providing an environment
+which calls out directed occupations in work and play, the methods
+ascertained will vary with individuals--for it is certain that each
+individual has something characteristic in his way of going at things.
+
+(ii) In the second place, the notion of methods isolated from subject
+matter is responsible for the false conceptions of discipline and
+interest already noted. When the effective way of managing material
+is treated as something ready-made apart from material, there are just
+three possible ways in which to establish a relationship lacking by
+assumption. One is to utilize excitement, shock of pleasure, tickling
+the palate. Another is to make the consequences of not attending
+painful; we may use the menace of harm to motivate concern with the
+alien subject matter. Or a direct appeal may be made to the person to
+put forth effort without any reason. We may rely upon immediate strain
+of "will." In practice, however, the latter method is effectual only
+when instigated by fear of unpleasant results. (iii) In the third place,
+the act of learning is made a direct and conscious end in itself. Under
+normal conditions, learning is a product and reward of occupation with
+subject matter. Children do not set out, consciously, to learn walking
+or talking. One sets out to give his impulses for communication and for
+fuller intercourse with others a show. He learns in consequence of his
+direct activities. The better methods of teaching a child, say, to read,
+follow the same road. They do not fix his attention upon the fact that
+he has to learn something and so make his attitude self-conscious
+and constrained. They engage his activities, and in the process of
+engagement he learns: the same is true of the more successful methods in
+dealing with number or whatever. But when the subject matter is not used
+in carrying forward impulses and habits to significant results, it is
+just something to be learned. The pupil's attitude to it is just that
+of having to learn it. Conditions more unfavorable to an alert and
+concentrated response would be hard to devise. Frontal attacks are even
+more wasteful in learning than in war. This does not mean, however, that
+students are to be seduced unaware into preoccupation with lessons. It
+means that they shall be occupied with them for real reasons or ends,
+and not just as something to be learned. This is accomplished whenever
+the pupil perceives the place occupied by the subject matter in the
+fulfilling of some experience.
+
+(iv) In the fourth place, under the influence of the conception of the
+separation of mind and material, method tends to be reduced to a cut and
+dried routine, to following mechanically prescribed steps. No one can
+tell in how many schoolrooms children reciting in arithmetic or grammar
+are compelled to go through, under the alleged sanction of method,
+certain preordained verbal formulae. Instead of being encouraged to
+attack their topics directly, experimenting with methods that seem
+promising and learning to discriminate by the consequences that accrue,
+it is assumed that there is one fixed method to be followed. It is
+also naively assumed that if the pupils make their statements and
+explanations in a certain form of "analysis," their mental habits will
+in time conform. Nothing has brought pedagogical theory into greater
+disrepute than the belief that it is identified with handing out to
+teachers recipes and models to be followed in teaching. Flexibility and
+initiative in dealing with problems are characteristic of any conception
+to which method is a way of managing material to develop a conclusion.
+Mechanical rigid woodenness is an inevitable corollary of any theory
+which separates mind from activity motivated by a purpose.
+
+2. Method as General and as Individual. In brief, the method of teaching
+is the method of an art, of action intelligently directed by ends. But
+the practice of a fine art is far from being a matter of extemporized
+inspirations. Study of the operations and results of those in the past
+who have greatly succeeded is essential. There is always a tradition, or
+schools of art, definite enough to impress beginners, and often to take
+them captive. Methods of artists in every branch depend upon thorough
+acquaintance with materials and tools; the painter must know canvas,
+pigments, brushes, and the technique of manipulation of all his
+appliances. Attainment of this knowledge requires persistent and
+concentrated attention to objective materials. The artist studies the
+progress of his own attempts to see what succeeds and what fails. The
+assumption that there are no alternatives between following ready-made
+rules and trusting to native gifts, the inspiration of the moment and
+undirected "hard work," is contradicted by the procedures of every art.
+
+Such matters as knowledge of the past, of current technique, of
+materials, of the ways in which one's own best results are assured,
+supply the material for what may be called general method. There exists
+a cumulative body of fairly stable methods for reaching results, a body
+authorized by past experience and by intellectual analysis, which an
+individual ignores at his peril. As was pointed out in the discussion of
+habit-forming (ante, p. 49), there is always a danger that these methods
+will become mechanized and rigid, mastering an agent instead of being
+powers at command for his own ends. But it is also true that the
+innovator who achieves anything enduring, whose work is more than a
+passing sensation, utilizes classic methods more than may appear to
+himself or to his critics. He devotes them to new uses, and in so far
+transforms them.
+
+
+Education also has its general methods. And if the application of this
+remark is more obvious in the case of the teacher than of the pupil, it
+is equally real in the case of the latter. Part of his learning, a very
+important part, consists in becoming master of the methods which the
+experience of others has shown to be more efficient in like cases of
+getting knowledge. 1 These general methods are in no way opposed to
+individual initiative and originality--to personal ways of doing things.
+On the contrary they are reinforcements of them. For there is radical
+difference between even the most general method and a prescribed rule.
+The latter is a direct guide to action; the former operates indirectly
+through the enlightenment it supplies as to ends and means. It operates,
+that is to say, through intelligence, and not through conformity to
+orders externally imposed. Ability to use even in a masterly way an
+established technique gives no warranty of artistic work, for the latter
+also depends upon an animating idea.
+
+If knowledge of methods used by others does not directly tell us what to
+do, or furnish ready-made models, how does it operate? What is meant by
+calling a method intellectual? Take the case of a physician. No mode
+of behavior more imperiously demands knowledge of established modes of
+diagnosis and treatment than does his. But after all, cases are like,
+not identical. To be used intelligently, existing practices, however
+authorized they may be, have to be adapted to the exigencies of
+particular cases. Accordingly, recognized procedures indicate to the
+physician what inquiries to set on foot for himself, what measures to
+try. They are standpoints from which to carry on investigations; they
+economize a survey of the features of the particular case by suggesting
+the things to be especially looked into. The physician's own personal
+attitudes, his own ways (individual methods) of dealing with the
+situation in which he is concerned, are not subordinated to the general
+principles of procedure, but are facilitated and directed by the latter.
+The instance may serve to point out the value to the teacher of a
+knowledge of the psychological methods and the empirical devices found
+useful in the past. When they get in the way of his own common sense,
+when they come between him and the situation in which he has to act,
+they are worse than useless. But if he has acquired them as intellectual
+aids in sizing up the needs, resources, and difficulties of the unique
+experiences in which he engages, they are of constructive value. In the
+last resort, just because everything depends upon his own methods of
+response, much depends upon how far he can utilize, in making his own
+response, the knowledge which has accrued in the experience of others.
+As already intimated, every word of this account is directly applicable
+also to the method of the pupil, the way of learning. To suppose that
+students, whether in the primary school or in the university, can
+be supplied with models of method to be followed in acquiring and
+expounding a subject is to fall into a self-deception that has
+lamentable consequences. (See ante, p. 169.) One must make his own
+reaction in any case. Indications of the standardized or general methods
+used in like cases by others--particularly by those who are already
+experts--are of worth or of harm according as they make his personal
+reaction more intelligent or as they induce a person to dispense with
+exercise of his own judgment. If what was said earlier (See p. 159)
+about originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding more of
+education than the capacities of average human nature permit, the
+difficulty is that we lie under the incubus of a superstition. We have
+set up the notion of mind at large, of intellectual method that is the
+same for all. Then we regard individuals as differing in the quantity of
+mind with which they are charged. Ordinary persons are then expected to
+be ordinary. Only the exceptional are allowed to have originality. The
+measure of difference between the average student and the genius is a
+measure of the absence of originality in the former. But this notion
+of mind in general is a fiction. How one person's abilities compare in
+quantity with those of another is none of the teacher's business. It is
+irrelevant to his work. What is required is that every individual shall
+have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have
+meaning. Mind, individual method, originality (these are convertible
+terms) signify the quality of purposive or directed action. If we act
+upon this conviction, we shall secure more originality even by the
+conventional standard than now develops. Imposing an alleged uniform
+general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very
+exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds
+eccentricity in them. Thus we stifle the distinctive quality of the
+many, and save in rare instances (like, say, that of Darwin) infect the
+rare geniuses with an unwholesome quality.
+
+3. The Traits of Individual Method. The most general features of the
+method of knowing have been given in our chapter on thinking. They
+are the features of the reflective situation: Problem, collection and
+analysis of data, projection and elaboration of suggestions or ideas,
+experimental application and testing; the resulting conclusion or
+judgment. The specific elements of an individual's method or way of
+attack upon a problem are found ultimately in his native tendencies and
+his acquired habits and interests. The method of one will vary from that
+of another (and properly vary) as his original instinctive capacities
+vary, as his past experiences and his preferences vary. Those who have
+already studied these matters are in possession of information which
+will help teachers in understanding the responses different pupils
+make, and help them in guiding these responses to greater efficiency.
+Child-study, psychology, and a knowledge of social environment
+supplement the personal acquaintance gained by the teacher. But methods
+remain the personal concern, approach, and attack of an individual, and
+no catalogue can ever exhaust their diversity of form and tint.
+
+Some attitudes may be named, however,-which are central in effective
+intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter. Among the most
+important are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or
+whole-heartedness), and responsibility.
+
+1. It is easier to indicate what is meant by directness through negative
+terms than in positive ones. Self-consciousness, embarrassment, and
+constraint are its menacing foes. They indicate that a person is not
+immediately concerned with subject matter. Something has come between
+which deflects concern to side issues. A self-conscious person is partly
+thinking about his problem and partly about what others think of his
+performances. Diverted energy means loss of power and confusion of
+ideas. Taking an attitude is by no means identical with being conscious
+of one's attitude. The former is spontaneous, naive, and simple. It is
+a sign of whole-souled relationship between a person and what he is
+dealing with. The latter is not of necessity abnormal. It is sometimes
+the easiest way of correcting a false method of approach, and of
+improving the effectiveness of the means one is employing,--as golf
+players, piano players, public speakers, etc., have occasionally to give
+especial attention to their position and movements. But this need
+is occasional and temporary. When it is effectual a person thinks of
+himself in terms of what is to be done, as one means among others of the
+realization of an end--as in the case of a tennis player practicing to
+get the "feel" of a stroke. In abnormal cases, one thinks of himself not
+as part of the agencies of execution, but as a separate object--as when
+the player strikes an attitude thinking of the impression it will make
+upon spectators, or is worried because of the impression he fears his
+movements give rise to.
+
+Confidence is a good name for what is intended by the term directness.
+It should not be confused, however, with self-confidence which may be a
+form of self-consciousness--or of "cheek." Confidence is not a name for
+what one thinks or feels about his attitude it is not reflex. It denotes
+the straightforwardness with which one goes at what he has to do.
+It denotes not conscious trust in the efficacy of one's powers but
+unconscious faith in the possibilities of the situation. It signifies
+rising to the needs of the situation. We have already pointed out (See
+p. 169) the objections to making students emphatically aware of the fact
+that they are studying or learning. Just in the degree in which they
+are induced by the conditions to be so aware, they are not studying
+and learning. They are in a divided and complicated attitude. Whatever
+methods of a teacher call a pupil's attention off from what he has to
+do and transfer it to his own attitude towards what he is doing impair
+directness of concern and action. Persisted in, the pupil acquires a
+permanent tendency to fumble, to gaze about aimlessly, to look for some
+clew of action beside that which the subject matter supplies. Dependence
+upon extraneous suggestions and directions, a state of foggy confusion,
+take the place of that sureness with which children (and grown-up people
+who have not been sophisticated by "education") confront the situations
+of life.
+
+2. Open-mindedness. Partiality is, as we have seen, an accompaniment of
+the existence of interest, since this means sharing, partaking, taking
+sides in some movement. All the more reason, therefore, for an attitude
+of mind which actively welcomes suggestions and relevant information
+from all sides. In the chapter on Aims it was shown that foreseen ends
+are factors in the development of a changing situation. They are
+the means by which the direction of action is controlled. They are
+subordinate to the situation, therefore, not the situation to them. They
+are not ends in the sense of finalities to which everything must be bent
+and sacrificed. They are, as foreseen, means of guiding the development
+of a situation. A target is not the future goal of shooting; it is
+the centering factor in a present shooting. Openness of mind means
+accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that will throw
+light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and that will help
+determine the consequences of acting this way or that. Efficiency in
+accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as unalterable can
+coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But intellectual growth means
+constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes
+and new responses. These are impossible without an active disposition
+to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire to entertain
+considerations which modify existing purposes. Retention of capacity
+to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. The worst
+thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they arrest
+development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli. Open-mindedness
+means retention of the childlike attitude; closed-mindedness means
+premature intellectual old age.
+
+Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external
+results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in
+school. The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of
+operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders
+upon pupils--restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's mind
+happens to approve. Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity
+of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately
+measurable, correct results. The zeal for "answers" is the explanation
+of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods. Forcing and
+overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert and
+varied intellectual interest.
+
+Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign
+saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent
+of hospitality. But there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let
+experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which is an essential of
+development. Results (external answers or solutions) may be hurried;
+processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were
+all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not
+the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth
+something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
+
+3. Single-mindedness. So far as the word is concerned, much that was
+said under the head of "directness" is applicable. But what the word is
+here intended to convey is completeness of interest, unity of purpose;
+the absence of suppressed but effectual ulterior aims for which the
+professed aim is but a mask. It is equivalent to mental integrity.
+Absorption, engrossment, full concern with subject matter for its own
+sake, nurture it. Divided interest and evasion destroy it.
+
+Intellectual integrity, honesty, and sincerity are at bottom not
+matters of conscious purpose but of quality of active response.
+Their acquisition is fostered of course by conscious intent, but
+self-deception is very easy. Desires are urgent. When the demands and
+wishes of others forbid their direct expression they are easily driven
+into subterranean and deep channels. Entire surrender, and wholehearted
+adoption of the course of action demanded by others are almost
+impossible. Deliberate revolt or deliberate attempts to deceive others
+may result. But the more frequent outcome is a confused and divided
+state of interest in which one is fooled as to one's own real intent.
+One tries to serve two masters at once. Social instincts, the strong
+desire to please others and get their approval, social training, the
+general sense of duty and of authority, apprehension of penalty, all
+lead to a half-hearted effort to conform, to "pay attention to the
+lesson," or whatever the requirement is. Amiable individuals want to do
+what they are expected to do. Consciously the pupil thinks he is
+doing this. But his own desires are not abolished. Only their evident
+exhibition is suppressed. Strain of attention to what is hostile to
+desire is irksome; in spite of one's conscious wish, the underlying
+desires determine the main course of thought, the deeper emotional
+responses. The mind wanders from the nominal subject and devotes
+itself to what is intrinsically more desirable. A systematized divided
+attention expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result.
+One has only to recall his own experiences in school or at the present
+time when outwardly employed in actions which do not engage one's
+desires and purposes, to realize how prevalent is this attitude of
+divided attention--double-mindedness. We are so used to it that we take
+it for granted that a considerable amount of it is necessary. It may be;
+if so, it is the more important to face its bad intellectual effects.
+Obvious is the loss of energy of thought immediately available when
+one is consciously trying (or trying to seem to try) to attend to one
+matter, while unconsciously one's imagination is spontaneously going out
+to more congenial affairs. More subtle and more permanently crippling
+to efficiency of intellectual activity is a fostering of habitual
+self-deception, with the confused sense of reality which accompanies it.
+A double standard of reality, one for our own private and more or less
+concealed interests, and another for public and acknowledged concerns,
+hampers, in most of us, integrity and completeness of mental action.
+Equally serious is the fact that a split is set up between conscious
+thought and attention and impulsive blind affection and desire.
+Reflective dealings with the material of instruction is constrained
+and half-hearted; attention wanders. The topics to which it wanders are
+unavowed and hence intellectually illicit; transactions with them
+are furtive. The discipline that comes from regulating response by
+deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails; worse than that, the deepest
+concern and most congenial enterprises of the imagination (since they
+center about the things dearest to desire) are casual, concealed. They
+enter into action in ways which are unacknowledged. Not subject to
+rectification by consideration of consequences, they are demoralizing.
+
+School conditions favorable to this division of mind between
+avowed, public, and socially responsible undertakings, and private,
+ill-regulated, and suppressed indulgences of thought are not hard
+to find. What is sometimes called "stern discipline," i.e., external
+coercive pressure, has this tendency. Motivation through rewards
+extraneous to the thing to be done has a like effect. Everything that
+makes schooling merely preparatory (See ante, p. 55) works in this
+direction. Ends being beyond the pupil's present grasp, other agencies
+have to be found to procure immediate attention to assigned tasks. Some
+responses are secured, but desires and affections not enlisted must
+find other outlets. Not less serious is exaggerated emphasis upon
+drill exercises designed to produce skill in action, independent of any
+engagement of thought--exercises have no purpose but the production of
+automatic skill. Nature abhors a mental vacuum. What do teachers imagine
+is happening to thought and emotion when the latter get no outlet in
+the things of immediate activity? Were they merely kept in temporary
+abeyance, or even only calloused, it would not be a matter of so much
+moment. But they are not abolished; they are not suspended; they are
+not suppressed--save with reference to the task in question. They follow
+their own chaotic and undisciplined course. What is native, spontaneous,
+and vital in mental reaction goes unused and untested, and the habits
+formed are such that these qualities become less and less available for
+public and avowed ends.
+
+4. Responsibility. By responsibility as an element in intellectual
+attitude is meant the disposition to consider in advance the probable
+consequences of any projected step and deliberately to accept them: to
+accept them in the sense of taking them into account, acknowledging them
+in action, not yielding a mere verbal assent. Ideas, as we have seen,
+are intrinsically standpoints and methods for bringing about a solution
+of a perplexing situation; forecasts calculated to influence responses.
+It is only too easy to think that one accepts a statement or believes a
+suggested truth when one has not considered its implications; when one
+has made but a cursory and superficial survey of what further things one
+is committed to by acceptance. Observation and recognition, belief and
+assent, then become names for lazy acquiescence in what is externally
+presented.
+
+It would be much better to have fewer facts and truths in
+instruction--that is, fewer things supposedly accepted,--if a smaller
+number of situations could be intellectually worked out to the point
+where conviction meant something real--some identification of the self
+with the type of conduct demanded by facts and foresight of results. The
+most permanent bad results of undue complication of school subjects
+and congestion of school studies and lessons are not the worry, nervous
+strain, and superficial acquaintance that follow (serious as these are),
+but the failure to make clear what is involved in really knowing and
+believing a thing. Intellectual responsibility means severe standards
+in this regard. These standards can be built up only through practice in
+following up and acting upon the meaning of what is acquired.
+
+Intellectual thoroughness is thus another name for the attitude we are
+considering. There is a kind of thoroughness which is almost purely
+physical: the kind that signifies mechanical and exhausting drill upon
+all the details of a subject. Intellectual thoroughness is seeing a
+thing through. It depends upon a unity of purpose to which details are
+subordinated, not upon presenting a multitude of disconnected details.
+It is manifested in the firmness with which the full meaning of the
+purpose is developed, not in attention, however "conscientious" it may
+be, to the steps of action externally imposed and directed.
+
+Summary. Method is a statement of the way the subject matter of an
+experience develops most effectively and fruitfully. It is derived,
+accordingly, from observation of the course of experiences where
+there is no conscious distinction of personal attitude and manner from
+material dealt with. The assumption that method is something separate
+is connected with the notion of the isolation of mind and self from the
+world of things. It makes instruction and learning formal, mechanical,
+constrained. While methods are individualized, certain features of the
+normal course of an experience to its fruition may be discriminated,
+because of the fund of wisdom derived from prior experiences and because
+of general similarities in the materials dealt with from time to time.
+Expressed in terms of the attitude of the individual the traits of
+good method are straightforwardness, flexible intellectual interest
+or open-minded will to learn, integrity of purpose, and acceptance of
+responsibility for the consequences of one's activity including thought.
+
+
+1 This point is developed below in a discussion of what are termed
+psychological and logical methods respectively. See p. 219.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
+
+1. Subject Matter of Educator and of Learner. So far as the nature of
+subject matter in principle is concerned, there is nothing to add
+to what has been said (See ante, p. 134). It consists of the facts
+observed, recalled, read, and talked about, and the ideas suggested, in
+course of a development of a situation having a purpose. This statement
+needs to be rendered more specific by connecting it with the materials
+of school instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. What is
+the significance of our definition in application to reading, writing,
+mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing, physics,
+chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on? Let us recur to two
+of the points made earlier in our discussion. The educator's part in the
+enterprise of education is to furnish the environment which stimulates
+responses and directs the learner's course. In last analysis, all that
+the educator can do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely
+as is possible result in the formation of desirable intellectual and
+emotional dispositions. Obviously studies or the subject matter of the
+curriculum have intimately to do with this business of supplying an
+environment. The other point is the necessity of a social environment
+to give meaning to habits formed. In what we have termed informal
+education, subject matter is carried directly in the matrix of social
+intercourse. It is what the persons with whom an individual associates
+do and say. This fact gives a clew to the understanding of the subject
+matter of formal or deliberate instruction. A connecting link is found
+in the stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which accompany the
+doings and rites of a primitive social group. They represent the stock
+of meanings which have been precipitated out of previous experience,
+which are so prized by the group as to be identified with their
+conception of their own collective life. Not being obviously a part of
+the skill exhibited in the daily occupations of eating, hunting, making
+war and peace, constructing rugs, pottery, and baskets, etc., they
+are consciously impressed upon the young; often, as in the initiation
+ceremonies, with intense emotional fervor. Even more pains are
+consciously taken to perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal
+formulae of the group than to transmit the directly useful customs of
+the group just because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in
+the ordinary processes of association.
+
+As the social group grows more complex, involving a greater number of
+acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or in the belief
+of the group, upon standard ideas deposited from past experience, the
+content of social life gets more definitely formulated for purposes of
+instruction. As we have previously noted, probably the chief motive for
+consciously dwelling upon the group life, extracting the meanings which
+are regarded as most important and systematizing them in a coherent
+arrangement, is just the need of instructing the young so as to
+perpetuate group life. Once started on this road of selection,
+formulation, and organization, no definite limit exists. The invention
+of writing and of printing gives the operation an immense impetus.
+Finally, the bonds which connect the subject matter of school study with
+the habits and ideals of the social group are disguised and covered up.
+The ties are so loosened that it often appears as if there were none;
+as if subject matter existed simply as knowledge on its own independent
+behoof, and as if study were the mere act of mastering it for its own
+sake, irrespective of any social values. Since it is highly important
+for practical reasons to counter-act this tendency (See ante, p. 8)
+the chief purposes of our theoretical discussion are to make clear the
+connection which is so readily lost from sight, and to show in some
+detail the social content and function of the chief constituents of the
+course of study.
+
+The points need to be considered from the standpoint of instructor and
+of student. To the former, the significance of a knowledge of subject
+matter, going far beyond the present knowledge of pupils, is to supply
+definite standards and to reveal to him the possibilities of the
+crude activities of the immature. (i) The material of school studies
+translates into concrete and detailed terms the meanings of current
+social life which it is desirable to transmit. It puts clearly
+before the instructor the essential ingredients of the culture to
+be perpetuated, in such an organized form as to protect him from the
+haphazard efforts he would be likely to indulge in if the meanings had
+not been standardized. (ii) A knowledge of the ideas which have been
+achieved in the past as the outcome of activity places the educator in
+a position to perceive the meaning of the seeming impulsive and aimless
+reactions of the young, and to provide the stimuli needed to direct them
+so that they will amount to something. The more the educator knows of
+music the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate musical
+impulses of a child. Organized subject matter represents the ripe
+fruitage of experiences like theirs, experiences involving the same
+world, and powers and needs similar to theirs. It does not represent
+perfection or infallible wisdom; but it is the best at command to
+further new experiences which may, in some respects at least, surpass
+the achievements embodied in existing knowledge and works of art.
+
+From the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various studies
+represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness from
+the experience of the young is not, however, seeming; it is real. The
+subject matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical
+with the formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter
+of the adult; the material as found in books and in works of art, etc.
+The latter represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing
+state. It enters directly into the activities of the expert and the
+educator, not into that of the beginner, the learner. Failure to bear in
+mind the difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of
+teacher and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the
+use of texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge.
+
+The need for a knowledge of the constitution and functions, in the
+concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's attitude
+to subject matter is so different from that of the pupil. The teacher
+presents in actuality what the pupil represents only in posse. That is,
+the teacher already knows the things which the student is only learning.
+Hence the problem of the two is radically unlike. When engaged in the
+direct act of teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter
+at his fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and
+response of the pupil. To understand the latter in its interplay with
+subject matter is his task, while the pupil's mind, naturally, should be
+not on itself but on the topic in hand. Or to state the same point in
+a somewhat different manner: the teacher should be occupied not with
+subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils' present
+needs and capacities. Hence simple scholarship is not enough. In
+fact, there are certain features of scholarship or mastered subject
+matter--taken by itself--which get in the way of effective teaching
+unless the instructor's habitual attitude is one of concern with
+its interplay in the pupil's own experience. In the first place,
+his knowledge extends indefinitely beyond the range of the pupil's
+acquaintance. It involves principles which are beyond the immature
+pupil's understanding and interest. In and of itself, it may no
+more represent the living world of the pupil's experience than the
+astronomer's knowledge of Mars represents a baby's acquaintance with the
+room in which he stays. In the second place, the method of organization
+of the material of achieved scholarship differs from that of
+the beginner. It is not true that the experience of the young is
+unorganized--that it consists of isolated scraps. But it is organized in
+connection with direct practical centers of interest. The child's home
+is, for example, the organizing center of his geographical knowledge.
+His own movements about the locality, his journeys abroad, the tales of
+his friends, give the ties which hold his items of information together.
+But the geography of the geographer, of the one who has already
+developed the implications of these smaller experiences, is organized
+on the basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to
+one another--not the relations which they bear to his house, bodily
+movements, and friends. To the one who is learned, subject matter is
+extensive, accurately defined, and logically interrelated. To the
+one who is learning, it is fluid, partial, and connected through
+his personal occupations. 1 The problem of teaching is to keep the
+experience of the student moving in the direction of what the expert
+already knows. Hence the need that the teacher know both subject matter
+and the characteristic needs and capacities of the student.
+
+
+2. The Development of Subject Matter in the Learner. It is possible,
+without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three fairly typical
+stages in the growth of subject matter in the experience of the learner.
+In its first estate, knowledge exists as the content of intelligent
+ability--power to do. This kind of subject matter, or known material, is
+expressed in familiarity or acquaintance with things. Then this material
+gradually is surcharged and deepened through communicated knowledge or
+information. Finally, it is enlarged and worked over into rationally or
+logically organized material--that of the one who, relatively speaking,
+is expert in the subject.
+
+I. The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains most
+deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read,
+write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine, calculate, drive a
+horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely. The popular
+tendency to regard instinctive acts which are adapted to an end as a
+sort of miraculous knowledge, while unjustifiable, is evidence of the
+strong tendency to identify intelligent control of the means of action
+with knowledge. When education, under the influence of a scholastic
+conception of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically
+formulated facts and truths, fails to recognize that primary or initial
+subject matter always exists as matter of an active doing, involving
+the use of the body and the handling of material, the subject matter of
+instruction is isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and
+so becomes just a something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand.
+Recognition of the natural course of development, on the contrary,
+always sets out with situations which involve learning by doing. Arts
+and occupations form the initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding
+as they do to knowing how to go about the accomplishment of ends.
+Popular terms denoting knowledge have always retained the connection
+with ability in action lost by academic philosophies. Ken and can are
+allied words. Attention means caring for a thing, in the sense of both
+affection and of looking out for its welfare. Mind means carrying out
+instructions in action--as a child minds his mother--and taking care
+of something--as a nurse minds the baby. To be thoughtful, considerate,
+means to heed the claims of others. Apprehension means dread of
+undesirable consequences, as well as intellectual grasp. To have
+good sense or judgment is to know the conduct a situation calls for;
+discernment is not making distinctions for the sake of making them, an
+exercise reprobated as hair splitting, but is insight into an affair
+with reference to acting. Wisdom has never lost its association with
+the proper direction of life. Only in education, never in the life of
+farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does
+knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
+Having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in acquaintance
+or familiarity. The things we are best acquainted with are the things we
+put to frequent use--such things as chairs, tables, pen, paper, clothes,
+food, knives and forks on the commonplace level, differentiating into
+more special objects according to a person's occupations in life.
+Knowledge of things in that intimate and emotional sense suggested by
+the word acquaintance is a precipitate from our employing them with a
+purpose. We have acted with or upon the thing so frequently that we can
+anticipate how it will act and react--such is the meaning of familiar
+acquaintance. We are ready for a familiar thing; it does not catch us
+napping, or play unexpected tricks with us. This attitude carries with
+it a sense of congeniality or friendliness, of ease and illumination;
+while the things with which we are not accustomed to deal are strange,
+foreign, cold, remote, "abstract."
+
+II. But it is likely that elaborate statements regarding this primary
+stage of knowledge will darken understanding. It includes practically
+all of our knowledge which is not the result of deliberate technical
+study. Modes of purposeful doing include dealings with persons as well
+as things. Impulses of communication and habits of intercourse have to
+be adapted to maintaining successful connections with others; a large
+fund of social knowledge accrues. As a part of this intercommunication
+one learns much from others. They tell of their experiences and of the
+experiences which, in turn, have been told them. In so far as one is
+interested or concerned in these communications, their matter becomes a
+part of one's own experience. Active connections with others are such
+an intimate and vital part of our own concerns that it is impossible to
+draw sharp lines, such as would enable us to say, "Here my experience
+ends; there yours begins." In so far as we are partners in common
+undertakings, the things which others communicate to us as the
+consequences of their particular share in the enterprise blend at once
+into the experience resulting from our own special doings. The ear is as
+much an organ of experience as the eye or hand; the eye is available
+for reading reports of what happens beyond its horizon. Things remote in
+space and time affect the issue of our actions quite as much as
+things which we can smell and handle. They really concern us, and,
+consequently, any account of them which assists us in dealing with
+things at hand falls within personal experience.
+
+Information is the name usually given to this kind of subject matter.
+The place of communication in personal doing supplies us with a
+criterion for estimating the value of informational material in school.
+Does it grow naturally out of some question with which the student
+is concerned? Does it fit into his more direct acquaintance so as to
+increase its efficacy and deepen its meaning? If it meets these two
+requirements, it is educative. The amount heard or read is of no
+importance--the more the better, provided the student has a need for it
+and can apply it in some situation of his own.
+
+But it is not so easy to fulfill these requirements in actual practice
+as it is to lay them down in theory. The extension in modern times of
+the area of intercommunication; the invention of appliances for securing
+acquaintance with remote parts of the heavens and bygone events of
+history; the cheapening of devices, like printing, for recording and
+distributing information--genuine and alleged--have created an immense
+bulk of communicated subject matter. It is much easier to swamp a
+pupil with this than to work it into his direct experiences. All too
+frequently it forms another strange world which just overlies the world
+of personal acquaintance. The sole problem of the student is to learn,
+for school purposes, for purposes of recitations and promotions, the
+constituent parts of this strange world. Probably the most conspicuous
+connotation of the word knowledge for most persons to-day is just the
+body of facts and truths ascertained by others; the material found in
+the rows and rows of atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books
+of travel, scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries.
+
+The imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously
+influenced men's notions of the nature of knowledge itself. The
+statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active
+concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves
+knowledge. The record of knowledge, independent of its place as an
+outcome of inquiry and a resource in further inquiry, is taken to be
+knowledge. The mind of man is taken captive by the spoils of its prior
+victories; the spoils, not the weapons and the acts of waging the battle
+against the unknown, are used to fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact,
+and truth.
+
+If this identification of knowledge with propositions stating
+information has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers, it is
+not surprising that the same ideal has almost dominated instruction.
+The "course of study" consists largely of information distributed into
+various branches of study, each study being subdivided into lessons
+presenting in serial cutoff portions of the total store. In the
+seventeenth century, the store was still small enough so that men set up
+the ideal of a complete encyclopedic mastery of it. It is now so bulky
+that the impossibility of any one man's coming into possession of it
+all is obvious. But the educational ideal has not been much affected.
+Acquisition of a modicum of information in each branch of learning,
+or at least in a selected group, remains the principle by which the
+curriculum, from elementary school through college, is formed; the
+easier portions being assigned to the earlier years, the more difficult
+to the later. The complaints of educators that learning does not enter
+into character and affect conduct; the protests against memoriter work,
+against cramming, against gradgrind preoccupation with "facts," against
+devotion to wire-drawn distinctions and ill-understood rules and
+principles, all follow from this state of affairs. Knowledge which
+is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge, tends to become merely
+verbal. It is no objection to information that it is clothed in words;
+communication necessarily takes place through words. But in the degree
+in which what is communicated cannot be organized into the existing
+experience of the learner, it becomes mere words: that is, pure
+sense-stimuli, lacking in meaning. Then it operates to call out
+mechanical reactions, ability to use the vocal organs to repeat
+statements, or the hand to write or to do "sums."
+
+To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the subject
+matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem, and for giving
+added significance to the search for solution and to the solution
+itself. Informational knowledge is the material which can be fallen back
+upon as given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation. It
+is a kind of bridge for mind in its passage from doubt to discovery. It
+has the office of an intellectual middleman. It condenses and records in
+available form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as
+an agency of enhancing the meaning of new experiences. When one is told
+that Brutus assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the year is
+three hundred sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the ratio of the
+diameter of the circle to its circumference is 3.1415. . . one receives
+what is indeed knowledge for others, but for him it is a stimulus to
+knowing. His acquisition of knowledge depends upon his response to what
+is communicated.
+
+3. Science or Rationalized Knowledge. Science is a name for knowledge in
+its most characteristic form. It represents in its degree, the perfected
+outcome of learning,--its consummation. What is known, in a given case,
+is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think with
+rather than that which we think about. In its honorable sense, knowledge
+is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere
+tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and
+not dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is
+difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our
+certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is
+natural. The undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual
+hesitation; it is prone to assertion. It likes things undisturbed,
+settled, and treats them as such without due warrant. Familiarity,
+common repute, and congeniality to desire are readily made measuring
+rods of truth. Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error,--a
+greater foe to learning than ignorance itself. A Socrates is thus led
+to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective
+love of wisdom, and a Descartes to say that science is born of doubting.
+
+We have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data, and
+ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in themselves
+they are tentative and provisional. Our predilection for premature
+acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs
+that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are
+satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. If
+these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose
+that our assumptions have been confirmed. Even in the case of failure,
+we are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness
+of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of
+circumstance. We charge the evil consequence not to the error of our
+schemes and our incomplete inquiry into conditions (thereby getting
+material for revising the former and stimulus for extending the latter)
+but to untoward fate. We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in
+clinging to our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out.
+
+Science represents the safeguard of the race against these natural
+propensities and the evils which flow from them. It consists of the
+special appliances and methods which the race has slowly worked out in
+order to conduct reflection under conditions whereby its procedures and
+results are tested. It is artificial (an acquired art), not spontaneous;
+learned, not native. To this fact is due the unique, the invaluable
+place of science in education, and also the dangers which threaten its
+right use. Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not
+in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for
+effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts
+inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails
+to understand the full meaning of knowledge. For he does not become
+acquainted with the traits that mark off opinion and assent from
+authorized conviction. On the other hand, the fact that science marks
+the perfecting of knowing in highly specialized conditions of technique
+renders its results, taken by themselves, remote from ordinary
+experience--a quality of aloofness that is popularly designated by the
+term abstract. When this isolation appears in instruction, scientific
+information is even more exposed to the dangers attendant upon
+presenting ready-made subject matter than are other forms of
+information.
+
+Science has been defined in terms of method of inquiry and testing. At
+first sight, this definition may seem opposed to the current conception
+that science is organized or systematized knowledge. The opposition,
+however, is only seeming, and disappears when the ordinary definition
+is completed. Not organization but the kind of organization effected by
+adequate methods of tested discovery marks off science. The knowledge of
+a farmer is systematized in the degree in which he is competent. It
+is organized on the basis of relation of means to ends--practically
+organized. Its organization as knowledge (that is, in the eulogistic
+sense of adequately tested and confirmed) is incidental to its
+organization with reference to securing crops, live-stock, etc. But
+scientific subject matter is organized with specific reference to the
+successful conduct of the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a
+specialized undertaking. Reference to the kind of assurance
+attending science will shed light upon this statement. It is rational
+assurance,--logical warranty. The ideal of scientific organization is,
+therefore, that every conception and statement shall be of such a
+kind as to follow from others and to lead to others. Conceptions
+and propositions mutually imply and support one another. This double
+relation of "leading to and confirming" is what is meant by the terms
+logical and rational. The everyday conception of water is more available
+for ordinary uses of drinking, washing, irrigation, etc., than the
+chemist's notion of it. The latter's description of it as H20 is
+superior from the standpoint of place and use in inquiry. It states
+the nature of water in a way which connects it with knowledge of other
+things, indicating to one who understands it how the knowledge is
+arrived at and its bearings upon other portions of knowledge of the
+structure of things. Strictly speaking, it does not indicate the
+objective relations of water any more than does a statement that water
+is transparent, fluid, without taste or odor, satisfying to thirst,
+etc. It is just as true that water has these relations as that it is
+constituted by two molecules of hydrogen in combination with one of
+oxygen. But for the particular purpose of conducting discovery with a
+view to ascertainment of fact, the latter relations are fundamental. The
+more one emphasizes organization as a mark of science, then, the more he
+is committed to a recognition of the primacy of method in the definition
+of science. For method defines the kind of organization in virtue of
+which science is science.
+
+4. Subject Matter as Social. Our next chapters will take up various
+school activities and studies and discuss them as successive stages
+in that evolution of knowledge which we have just been discussing. It
+remains to say a few words upon subject matter as social, since our
+prior remarks have been mainly concerned with its intellectual aspect. A
+difference in breadth and depth exists even in vital knowledge; even
+in the data and ideas which are relevant to real problems and which are
+motivated by purposes. For there is a difference in the social scope of
+purposes and the social importance of problems. With the wide range
+of possible material to select from, it is important that education
+(especially in all its phases short of the most specialized) should use
+a criterion of social worth. All information and systematized scientific
+subject matter have been worked out under the conditions of social life
+and have been transmitted by social means. But this does not prove that
+all is of equal value for the purposes of forming the disposition and
+supplying the equipment of members of present society. The scheme of a
+curriculum must take account of the adaptation of studies to the needs
+of the existing community life; it must select with the intention of
+improving the life we live in common so that the future shall be better
+than the past. Moreover, the curriculum must be planned with reference
+to placing essentials first, and refinements second. The things which
+are socially most fundamental, that is, which have to do with the
+experiences in which the widest groups share, are the essentials. The
+things which represent the needs of specialized groups and technical
+pursuits are secondary. There is truth in the saying that education must
+first be human and only after that professional. But those who utter
+the saying frequently have in mind in the term human only a highly
+specialized class: the class of learned men who preserve the classic
+traditions of the past. They forget that material is humanized in the
+degree in which it connects with the common interests of men as men.
+Democratic society is peculiarly dependent for its maintenance upon the
+use in forming a course of study of criteria which are broadly human.
+Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting
+subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived
+for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions
+of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the "essentials" of
+elementary education are the three R's mechanically treated, is based
+upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic
+ideals. Unconsciously it assumes that these ideals are unrealizable;
+it assumes that in the future, as in the past, getting a livelihood,
+"making a living," must signify for most men and women doing things
+which are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those who
+do them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged in
+them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of pecuniary
+reward. For preparation of large numbers for a life of this sort, and
+only for this purpose, are mechanical efficiency in reading, writing,
+spelling and figuring, together with attainment of a certain amount
+of muscular dexterity, "essentials." Such conditions also infect the
+education called liberal, with illiberality. They imply a somewhat
+parasitic cultivation bought at the expense of not having the
+enlightenment and discipline which come from concern with the deepest
+problems of common humanity. A curriculum which acknowledges the social
+responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are
+relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and
+information are calculated to develop social insight and interest.
+
+Summary. The subject matter of education consists primarily of the
+meanings which supply content to existing social life. The continuity of
+social life means that many of these meanings are contributed to present
+activity by past collective experience. As social life grows more
+complex, these factors increase in number and import. There is need of
+special selection, formulation, and organization in order that they may
+be adequately transmitted to the new generation. But this very process
+tends to set up subject matter as something of value just by itself,
+apart from its function in promoting the realization of the meanings
+implied in the present experience of the immature. Especially is the
+educator exposed to the temptation to conceive his task in terms of the
+pupil's ability to appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set
+statements, irrespective of its organization into his activities as a
+developing social member. The positive principle is maintained when the
+young begin with active occupations having a social origin and use,
+and proceed to a scientific insight in the materials and laws involved,
+through assimilating into their more direct experience the ideas and
+facts communicated by others who have had a larger experience. 1 Since
+the learned man should also still be a learner, it will be understood
+that these contrasts are relative, not absolute. But in the earlier
+stages of learning at least they are practically all-important.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
+
+1. The Place of Active Occupations in Education. In consequence partly
+of the efforts of educational reformers, partly of increased interest in
+child-psychology, and partly of the direct experience of the schoolroom,
+the course of study has in the past generation undergone considerable
+modification. The desirability of starting from and with the experience
+and capacities of learners, a lesson enforced from all three quarters,
+has led to the introduction of forms of activity, in play and work,
+similar to those in which children and youth engage outside of school.
+Modern psychology has substituted for the general, ready-made faculties
+of older theory a complex group of instinctive and impulsive tendencies.
+Experience has shown that when children have a chance at physical
+activities which bring their natural impulses into play, going to
+school is a joy, management is less of a burden, and learning is easier.
+Sometimes, perhaps, plays, games, and constructive occupations are
+resorted to only for these reasons, with emphasis upon relief from the
+tedium and strain of "regular" school work. There is no reason, however,
+for using them merely as agreeable diversions. Study of mental life has
+made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore,
+to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, to give expression
+to joyous emotion, etc. When exercises which are prompted by these
+instincts are a part of the regular school program, the whole pupil is
+engaged, the artificial gap between life in school and out is reduced,
+motives are afforded for attention to a large variety of materials and
+processes distinctly educative in effect, and cooperative associations
+which give information in a social setting are provided. In short, the
+grounds for assigning to play and active work a definite place in
+the curriculum are intellectual and social, not matters of temporary
+expediency and momentary agreeableness. Without something of the kind,
+it is not possible to secure the normal estate of effective learning;
+namely, that knowledge-getting be an outgrowth of activities having
+their own end, instead of a school task. More specifically, play and
+work correspond, point for point, with the traits of the initial stage
+of knowing, which consists, as we saw in the last chapter, in learning
+how to do things and in acquaintance with things and processes gained
+in the doing. It is suggestive that among the Greeks, till the rise
+of conscious philosophy, the same word, techne, was used for art and
+science. Plato gave his account of knowledge on the basis of an
+analysis of the knowledge of cobblers, carpenters, players of musical
+instruments, etc., pointing out that their art (so far as it was not
+mere routine) involved an end, mastery of material or stuff worked upon,
+control of appliances, and a definite order of procedure--all of which
+had to be known in order that there be intelligent skill or art.
+
+Doubtless the fact that children normally engage in play and work out
+of school has seemed to many educators a reason why they should concern
+themselves in school with things radically different. School time seemed
+too precious to spend in doing over again what children were sure to do
+any way. In some social conditions, this reason has weight. In pioneer
+times, for example, outside occupations gave a definite and valuable
+intellectual and moral training. Books and everything concerned with
+them were, on the other hand, rare and difficult of access; they were
+the only means of outlet from a narrow and crude environment. Wherever
+such conditions obtain, much may be said in favor of concentrating
+school activity upon books. The situation is very different, however,
+in most communities to-day. The kinds of work in which the young
+can engage, especially in cities, are largely anti-educational. That
+prevention of child labor is a social duty is evidence on this point.
+On the other hand, printed matter has been so cheapened and is in such
+universal circulation, and all the opportunities of intellectual culture
+have been so multiplied, that the older type of book work is far from
+having the force it used to possess.
+
+But it must not be forgotten that an educational result is a by-product
+of play and work in most out-of-school conditions. It is incidental,
+not primary. Consequently the educative growth secured is more or less
+accidental. Much work shares in the defects of existing industrial
+society--defects next to fatal to right development. Play tends to
+reproduce and affirm the crudities, as well as the excellencies, of
+surrounding adult life. It is the business of the school to set up an
+environment in which play and work shall be conducted with reference to
+facilitating desirable mental and moral growth. It is not enough just
+to introduce plays and games, hand work and manual exercises. Everything
+depends upon the way in which they are employed.
+
+2. Available Occupations. A bare catalogue of the list of activities
+which have already found their way into schools indicates what a rich
+field is at hand. There is work with paper, cardboard, wood, leather,
+cloth, yarns, clay and sand, and the metals, with and without tools.
+Processes employed are folding, cutting, pricking, measuring, molding,
+modeling, pattern-making, heating and cooling, and the operations
+characteristic of such tools as the hammer, saw, file, etc. Outdoor
+excursions, gardening, cooking, sewing, printing, book-binding, weaving,
+painting, drawing, singing, dramatization, story-telling, reading and
+writing as active pursuits with social aims (not as mere exercises for
+acquiring skill for future use), in addition to a countless variety of
+plays and games, designate some of the modes of occupation.
+
+The problem of the educator is to engage pupils in these activities in
+such ways that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained
+and immediate satisfaction found in the work, together with
+preparation for later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated
+to education--that is, to intellectual results and the forming of a
+socialized disposition. What does this principle signify? In the first
+place, the principle rules out certain practices. Activities which
+follow definite prescription and dictation or which reproduce without
+modification ready-made models, may give muscular dexterity, but they
+do not require the perception and elaboration of ends, nor (what is
+the same thing in other words) do they permit the use of judgment in
+selecting and adapting means. Not merely manual training specifically
+so called but many traditional kindergarten exercises have erred here.
+Moreover, opportunity for making mistakes is an incidental requirement.
+Not because mistakes are ever desirable, but because overzeal to select
+material and appliances which forbid a chance for mistakes to occur,
+restricts initiative, reduces judgment to a minimum, and compels the use
+of methods which are so remote from the complex situations of life
+that the power gained is of little availability. It is quite true that
+children tend to exaggerate their powers of execution and to select
+projects that are beyond them. But limitation of capacity is one of the
+things which has to be learned; like other things, it is learned through
+the experience of consequences. The danger that children undertaking
+too complex projects will simply muddle and mess, and produce not merely
+crude results (which is a minor matter) but acquire crude standards
+(which is an important matter) is great. But it is the fault of the
+teacher if the pupil does not perceive in due season the inadequacy of
+his performances, and thereby receive a stimulus to attempt exercises
+which will perfect his powers. Meantime it is more important to keep
+alive a creative and constructive attitude than to secure an external
+perfection by engaging the pupil's action in too minute and too closely
+regulated pieces of work. Accuracy and finish of detail can be insisted
+upon in such portions of a complex work as are within the pupil's
+capacity.
+
+Unconscious suspicion of native experience and consequent overdoing of
+external control are shown quite as much in the material supplied as in
+the matter of the teacher's orders. The fear of raw material is shown
+in laboratory, manual training shop, Froebelian kindergarten, and
+Montessori house of childhood. The demand is for materials which have
+already been subjected to the perfecting work of mind: a demand which
+shows itself in the subject matter of active occupations quite as
+well as in academic book learning. That such material will control the
+pupil's operations so as to prevent errors is true. The notion that a
+pupil operating with such material will somehow absorb the intelligence
+that went originally to its shaping is fallacious. Only by starting with
+crude material and subjecting it to purposeful handling will he gain the
+intelligence embodied in finished material. In practice, overemphasis
+upon formed material leads to an exaggeration of mathematical qualities,
+since intellect finds its profit in physical things from matters of
+size, form, and proportion and the relations that flow from them. But
+these are known only when their perception is a fruit of acting upon
+purposes which require attention to them. The more human the purpose, or
+the more it approximates the ends which appeal in daily experience, the
+more real the knowledge. When the purpose of the activity is restricted
+to ascertaining these qualities, the resulting knowledge is only
+technical.
+
+To say that active occupations should be concerned primarily with wholes
+is another statement of the same principle. Wholes for purposes of
+education are not, however, physical affairs. Intellectually the
+existence of a whole depends upon a concern or interest; it is
+qualitative, the completeness of appeal made by a situation. Exaggerated
+devotion to formation of efficient skill irrespective of present purpose
+always shows itself in devising exercises isolated from a purpose.
+Laboratory work is made to consist of tasks of accurate measurement
+with a view to acquiring knowledge of the fundamental units of physics,
+irrespective of contact with the problems which make these units
+important; or of operations designed to afford facility in the
+manipulation of experimental apparatus. The technique is acquired
+independently of the purposes of discovery and testing which alone give
+it meaning. Kindergarten employments are calculated to give information
+regarding cubes, spheres, etc., and to form certain habits of
+manipulation of material (for everything must always be done "just so"),
+the absence of more vital purposes being supposedly compensated for by
+the alleged symbolism of the material used. Manual training is reduced
+to a series of ordered assignments calculated to secure the mastery of
+one tool after another and technical ability in the various elements of
+construction--like the different joints. It is argued that pupils must
+know how to use tools before they attack actual making,--assuming that
+pupils cannot learn how in the process of making. Pestalozzi's just
+insistence upon the active use of the senses, as a substitute for
+memorizing words, left behind it in practice schemes for "object
+lessons" intended to acquaint pupils with all the qualities of selected
+objects. The error is the same: in all these cases it is assumed that
+before objects can be intelligently used, their properties must
+be known. In fact, the senses are normally used in the course of
+intelligent (that is, purposeful) use of things, since the qualities
+perceived are factors to be reckoned with in accomplishment. Witness the
+different attitude of a boy in making, say, a kite, with respect to
+the grain and other properties of wood, the matter of size, angles, and
+proportion of parts, to the attitude of a pupil who has an object-lesson
+on a piece of wood, where the sole function of wood and its properties
+is to serve as subject matter for the lesson.
+
+The failure to realize that the functional development of a situation
+alone constitutes a "whole" for the purpose of mind is the cause of the
+false notions which have prevailed in instruction concerning the simple
+and the complex. For the person approaching a subject, the simple
+thing is his purpose--the use he desires to make of material, tool, or
+technical process, no matter how complicated the process of execution
+may be. The unity of the purpose, with the concentration upon details
+which it entails, confers simplicity upon the elements which have to be
+reckoned with in the course of action. It furnishes each with a single
+meaning according to its service in carrying on the whole enterprise.
+After one has gone through the process, the constituent qualities and
+relations are elements, each possessed with a definite meaning of its
+own. The false notion referred to takes the standpoint of the expert,
+the one for whom elements exist; isolates them from purposeful action,
+and presents them to beginners as the "simple" things. But it is time
+for a positive statement. Aside from the fact that active occupations
+represent things to do, not studies, their educational significance
+consists in the fact that they may typify social situations. Men's
+fundamental common concerns center about food, shelter, clothing,
+household furnishings, and the appliances connected with production,
+exchange, and consumption.
+
+Representing both the necessities of life and the adornments with which
+the necessities have been clothed, they tap instincts at a deep level;
+they are saturated with facts and principles having a social quality.
+
+To charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving,
+construction in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc., which carry
+over these fundamental human concerns into school resources, have a
+merely bread and butter value is to miss their point. If the mass of
+mankind has usually found in its industrial occupations nothing but
+evils which had to be endured for the sake of maintaining existence, the
+fault is not in the occupations, but in the conditions under which
+they are carried on. The continually increasing importance of economic
+factors in contemporary life makes it the more needed that education
+should reveal their scientific content and their social value. For in
+schools, occupations are not carried on for pecuniary gain but for their
+own content. Freed from extraneous associations and from the pressure
+of wage-earning, they supply modes of experience which are intrinsically
+valuable; they are truly liberalizing in quality.
+
+Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of
+preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing time.
+It affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place farming and
+horticulture have had in the history of the race and which they
+occupy in present social organization. Carried on in an environment
+educationally controlled, they are means for making a study of the facts
+of growth, the chemistry of soil, the role of light, air, and moisture,
+injurious and helpful animal life, etc. There is nothing in the
+elementary study of botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in
+connection with caring for the growth of seeds. Instead of the subject
+matter belonging to a peculiar study called botany, it will then belong
+to life, and will find, moreover, its natural correlations with the
+facts of soil, animal life, and human relations. As students grow
+mature, they will perceive problems of interest which may be pursued for
+the sake of discovery, independent of the original direct interest in
+gardening--problems connected with the germination and nutrition of
+plants, the reproduction of fruits, etc., thus making a transition to
+deliberate intellectual investigations.
+
+The illustration is intended to apply, of course, to other school
+occupations,--wood-working, cooking, and on through the list. It is
+pertinent to note that in the history of the race the sciences grew
+gradually out from useful social occupations. Physics developed slowly
+out of the use of tools and machines; the important branch of physics
+known as mechanics testifies in its name to its original associations.
+The lever, wheel, inclined plane, etc., were among the first great
+intellectual discoveries of mankind, and they are none the less
+intellectual because they occurred in the course of seeking for means of
+accomplishing practical ends. The great advance of electrical science in
+the last generation was closely associated, as effect and as cause,
+with application of electric agencies to means of communication,
+transportation, lighting of cities and houses, and more economical
+production of goods. These are social ends, moreover, and if they are
+too closely associated with notions of private profit, it is not because
+of anything in them, but because they have been deflected to private
+uses:--a fact which puts upon the school the responsibility of restoring
+their connection, in the mind of the coming generation, with public
+scientific and social interests. In like ways, chemistry grew out of
+processes of dying, bleaching, metal working, etc., and in recent times
+has found innumerable new uses in industry.
+
+Mathematics is now a highly abstract science; geometry, however, means
+literally earth-measuring: the practical use of number in counting to
+keep track of things and in measuring is even more important to-day
+than in the times when it was invented for these purposes. Such
+considerations (which could be duplicated in the history of any science)
+are not arguments for a recapitulation of the history of the race or for
+dwelling long in the early rule of thumb stage. But they indicate
+the possibilities--greater to-day than ever before--of using active
+occupations as opportunities for scientific study. The opportunities
+are just as great on the social side, whether we look at the life of
+collective humanity in its past or in its future. The most direct
+road for elementary students into civics and economics is found in
+consideration of the place and office of industrial occupations in
+social life. Even for older students, the social sciences would be less
+abstract and formal if they were dealt with less as sciences (less as
+formulated bodies of knowledge) and more in their direct subject-matter
+as that is found in the daily life of the social groups in which the
+student shares.
+
+Connection of occupations with the method of science is at least as
+close as with its subject matter. The ages when scientific progress was
+slow were the ages when learned men had contempt for the material and
+processes of everyday life, especially for those concerned with manual
+pursuits. Consequently they strove to develop knowledge out of general
+principles--almost out of their heads--by logical reasons. It seems
+as absurd that learning should come from action on and with physical
+things, like dropping acid on a stone to see what would happen, as that
+it should come from sticking an awl with waxed thread through a piece of
+leather. But the rise of experimental methods proved that, given control
+of conditions, the latter operation is more typical of the right way of
+knowledge than isolated logical reasonings. Experiment developed in the
+seventeenth and succeeding centuries and became the authorized way of
+knowing when men's interests were centered in the question of control
+of nature for human uses. The active occupations in which appliances
+are brought to bear upon physical things with the intention of effecting
+useful changes is the most vital introduction to the experimental
+method.
+
+3. Work and Play. What has been termed active occupation includes both
+play and work. In their intrinsic meaning, play and industry are by
+no means so antithetical to one another as is often assumed, any sharp
+contrast being due to undesirable social conditions. Both involve ends
+consciously entertained and the selection and adaptations of materials
+and processes designed to effect the desired ends. The difference
+between them is largely one of time-span, influencing the directness
+of the connection of means and ends. In play, the interest is more
+direct--a fact frequently indicated by saying that in play the activity
+is its own end, instead of its having an ulterior result. The statement
+is correct, but it is falsely taken, if supposed to mean that play
+activity is momentary, having no element of looking ahead and none of
+pursuit. Hunting, for example, is one of the commonest forms of adult
+play, but the existence of foresight and the direction of present
+activity by what one is watching for are obvious. When an activity is
+its own end in the sense that the action of the moment is complete in
+itself, it is purely physical; it has no meaning (See p. 77). The
+person is either going through motions quite blindly, perhaps purely
+imitatively, or else is in a state of excitement which is exhausting to
+mind and nerves. Both results may be seen in some types of kindergarten
+games where the idea of play is so highly symbolic that only the adult
+is conscious of it. Unless the children succeed in reading in some quite
+different idea of their own, they move about either as if in a hypnotic
+daze, or they respond to a direct excitation.
+
+The point of these remarks is that play has an end in the sense of a
+directing idea which gives point to the successive acts. Persons who
+play are not just doing something (pure physical movement); they are
+trying to do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory
+forecasts which stimulate their present responses. The anticipated
+result, however, is rather a subsequent action than the production of
+a specific change in things. Consequently play is free, plastic. Where
+some definite external outcome is wanted, the end has to be held to with
+some persistence, which increases as the contemplated result is complex
+and requires a fairly long series of intermediate adaptations. When the
+intended act is another activity, it is not necessary to look far ahead
+and it is possible to alter it easily and frequently. If a child
+is making a toy boat, he must hold on to a single end and direct a
+considerable number of acts by that one idea. If he is just "playing
+boat" he may change the material that serves as a boat almost at will,
+and introduce new factors as fancy suggests. The imagination makes what
+it will of chairs, blocks, leaves, chips, if they serve the purpose of
+carrying activity forward.
+
+From a very early age, however, there is no distinction of exclusive
+periods of play activity and work activity, but only one of emphasis.
+There are definite results which even young children desire, and try
+to bring to pass. Their eager interest in sharing the occupations of
+others, if nothing else, accomplishes this. Children want to "help";
+they are anxious to engage in the pursuits of adults which effect
+external changes: setting the table, washing dishes, helping care for
+animals, etc. In their plays, they like to construct their own toys and
+appliances. With increasing maturity, activity which does not give back
+results of tangible and visible achievement loses its interest. Play
+then changes to fooling and if habitually indulged in is demoralizing.
+Observable results are necessary to enable persons to get a sense and
+a measure of their own powers. When make-believe is recognized to be
+make-believe, the device of making objects in fancy alone is too easy
+to stimulate intense action. One has only to observe the countenance of
+children really playing to note that their attitude is one of serious
+absorption; this attitude cannot be maintained when things cease to
+afford adequate stimulation.
+
+When fairly remote results of a definite character are foreseen and
+enlist persistent effort for their accomplishment, play passes into
+work. Like play, it signifies purposeful activity and differs not in
+that activity is subordinated to an external result, but in the fact
+that a longer course of activity is occasioned by the idea of a result.
+The demand for continuous attention is greater, and more intelligence
+must be shown in selecting and shaping means. To extend this account
+would be to repeat what has been said under the caption of aim,
+interest, and thinking. It is pertinent, however, to inquire why the
+idea is so current that work involves subordination of an activity to an
+ulterior material result. The extreme form of this subordination,
+namely drudgery, offers a clew. Activity carried on under conditions
+of external pressure or coercion is not carried on for any significance
+attached to the doing. The course of action is not intrinsically
+satisfying; it is a mere means for avoiding some penalty, or for gaining
+some reward at its conclusion. What is inherently repulsive is endured
+for the sake of averting something still more repulsive or of securing a
+gain hitched on by others. Under unfree economic conditions, this state
+of affairs is bound to exist. Work or industry offers little to engage
+the emotions and the imagination; it is a more or less mechanical series
+of strains. Only the hold which the completion of the work has upon
+a person will keep him going. But the end should be intrinsic to the
+action; it should be its end--a part of its own course. Then it affords
+a stimulus to effort very different from that arising from the thought
+of results which have nothing to do with the intervening action. As
+already mentioned, the absence of economic pressure in schools supplies
+an opportunity for reproducing industrial situations of mature life
+under conditions where the occupation can be carried on for its own
+sake. If in some cases, pecuniary recognition is also a result of an
+action, though not the chief motive for it, that fact may well increase
+the significance of the occupation. Where something approaching drudgery
+or the need of fulfilling externally imposed tasks exists, the demand
+for play persists, but tends to be perverted. The ordinary course of
+action fails to give adequate stimulus to emotion and imagination. So in
+leisure time, there is an imperious demand for their stimulation by any
+kind of means; gambling, drink, etc., may be resorted to. Or, in less
+extreme cases, there is recourse to idle amusement; to anything which
+passes time with immediate agreeableness. Recreation, as the word
+indicates, is recuperation of energy. No demand of human nature is more
+urgent or less to be escaped. The idea that the need can be suppressed
+is absolutely fallacious, and the Puritanic tradition which disallows
+the need has entailed an enormous crop of evils. If education does
+not afford opportunity for wholesome recreation and train capacity
+for seeking and finding it, the suppressed instincts find all sorts of
+illicit outlets, sometimes overt, sometimes confined to indulgence
+of the imagination. Education has no more serious responsibility than
+making adequate provision for enjoyment of recreative leisure; not only
+for the sake of immediate health, but still more if possible for the
+sake of its lasting effect upon habits of mind. Art is again the answer
+to this demand.
+
+Summary. In the previous chapter we found that the primary subject
+matter of knowing is that contained in learning how to do things of a
+fairly direct sort. The educational equivalent of this principle is the
+consistent use of simple occupations which appeal to the powers of youth
+and which typify general modes of social activity. Skill and information
+about materials, tools, and laws of energy are acquired while activities
+are carried on for their own sake. The fact that they are socially
+representative gives a quality to the skill and knowledge gained which
+makes them transferable to out-of-school situations. It is important not
+to confuse the psychological distinction between play and work with the
+economic distinction. Psychologically, the defining characteristic of
+play is not amusement nor aimlessness. It is the fact that the aim
+is thought of as more activity in the same line, without defining
+continuity of action in reference to results produced. Activities as
+they grow more complicated gain added meaning by greater attention to
+specific results achieved. Thus they pass gradually into work. Both
+are equally free and intrinsically motivated, apart from false economic
+conditions which tend to make play into idle excitement for the well
+to do, and work into uncongenial labor for the poor. Work is
+psychologically simply an activity which consciously includes regard for
+consequences as a part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the
+consequences are outside of the activity as an end to which activity is
+merely a means. Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is
+art--in quality if not in conventional designation.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
+
+1. Extension of Meaning of Primary Activities. Nothing is more striking
+than the difference between an activity as merely physical and the
+wealth of meanings which the same activity may assume. From the outside,
+an astronomer gazing through a telescope is like a small boy looking
+through the same tube. In each case, there is an arrangement of glass
+and metal, an eye, and a little speck of light in the distance. Yet at
+a critical moment, the activity of an astronomer might be concerned
+with the birth of a world, and have whatever is known about the starry
+heavens as its significant content. Physically speaking, what man has
+effected on this globe in his progress from savagery is a mere scratch
+on its surface, not perceptible at a distance which is slight in
+comparison with the reaches even of the solar system. Yet in meaning
+what has been accomplished measures just the difference of civilization
+from savagery. Although the activities, physically viewed, have changed
+somewhat, this change is slight in comparison with the development
+of the meanings attaching to the activities. There is no limit to the
+meaning which an action may come to possess. It all depends upon the
+context of perceived connections in which it is placed; the reach of
+imagination in realizing connections is inexhaustible. The advantage
+which the activity of man has in appropriating and finding meanings
+makes his education something else than the manufacture of a tool or
+the training of an animal. The latter increase efficiency; they do
+not develop significance. The final educational importance of such
+occupations in play and work as were considered in the last chapter is
+that they afford the most direct instrumentalities for such extension
+of meaning. Set going under adequate conditions they are magnets for
+gathering and retaining an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual
+considerations. They provide vital centers for the reception and
+assimilation of information. When information is purveyed in chunks
+simply as information to be retained for its own sake, it tends to
+stratify over vital experience. Entering as a factor into an activity
+pursued for its own sake--whether as a means or as a widening of the
+content of the aim--it is informing. The insight directly gained fuses
+with what is told. Individual experience is then capable of taking up
+and holding in solution the net results of the experience of the group
+to which he belongs--including the results of sufferings and trials over
+long stretches of time. And such media have no fixed saturation point
+where further absorption is impossible. The more that is taken in, the
+greater capacity there is for further assimilation. New receptiveness
+follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon information gained.
+
+The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature
+and man. This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning when
+translated into educational equivalents. So translated, it signifies
+that geography and history supply subject matter which gives background
+and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow
+personal actions or mere forms of technical skill. With every increase
+of ability to place our own doings in their time and space connections,
+our doings gain in significant content. We realize that we are citizens
+of no mean city in discovering the scene in space of which we are
+denizens, and the continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which
+we are heirs and continuers. Thus our ordinary daily experiences cease
+to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance. Of course if
+geography and history are taught as ready-made studies which a person
+studies simply because he is sent to school, it easily happens that a
+large number of statements about things remote and alien to everyday
+experience are learned. Activity is divided, and two separate worlds are
+built up, occupying activity at divided periods. No transmutation takes
+place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in meaning by getting its
+connections; what is studied is not animated and made real by entering
+into immediate activity. Ordinary experience is not even left as it
+was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses something of its mobility and
+sensitiveness to suggestions. It is weighed down and pushed into
+a corner by a load of unassimilated information. It parts with its
+flexible responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning. Mere
+amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life makes
+mind wooden; elasticity disappears.
+
+Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out beyond
+its immediate self. It does not passively wait for information to be
+bestowed which will increase its meaning; it seeks it out. Curiosity is
+not an accidental isolated possession; it is a necessary consequence of
+the fact that an experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all
+kinds of connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency
+to make these conditions perceptible. It is the business of educators to
+supply an environment so that this reaching out of an experience may be
+fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously active. Within a certain kind
+of environment, an activity may be checked so that the only meaning
+which accrues is of its direct and tangible isolated outcome. One may
+cook, or hammer, or walk, and the resulting consequences may not take
+the mind any farther than the consequences of cooking, hammering,
+and walking in the literal--or physical--sense. But nevertheless
+the consequences of the act remain far-reaching. To walk involves a
+displacement and reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is felt
+wherever there is matter. It involves the structure of the limbs and the
+nervous system; the principles of mechanics. To cook is to utilize heat
+and moisture to change the chemical relations of food materials; it has
+a bearing upon the assimilation of food and the growth of the body. The
+utmost that the most learned men of science know in physics, chemistry,
+physiology is not enough to make all these consequences and connections
+perceptible. The task of education, once more, is to see to it that
+such activities are performed in such ways and under such conditions as
+render these conditions as perceptible as possible. To "learn geography"
+is to gain in power to perceive the spatial, the natural, connections of
+an ordinary act; to "learn history" is essentially to gain in power
+to recognize its human connections. For what is called geography as a
+formulated study is simply the body of facts and principles which have
+been discovered in other men's experience about the natural medium in
+which we live, and in connection with which the particular acts of our
+life have an explanation. So history as a formulated study is but the
+body of known facts about the activities and sufferings of the social
+groups with which our own lives are continuous, and through reference to
+which our own customs and institutions are illuminated.
+
+2. The Complementary Nature of History and Geography. History and
+geography--including in the latter, for reasons about to be mentioned,
+nature study--are the information studies par excellence of the schools.
+Examination of the materials and the method of their use will make clear
+that the difference between penetration of this information into living
+experience and its mere piling up in isolated heaps depends upon whether
+these studies are faithful to the interdependence of man and nature
+which affords these studies their justification. Nowhere, however, is
+there greater danger that subject matter will be accepted as appropriate
+educational material simply because it has become customary to teach
+and learn it. The idea of a philosophic reason for it, because of the
+function of the material in a worthy transformation of experience, is
+looked upon as a vain fancy, or as supplying a high-sounding phraseology
+in support of what is already done. The words "history" and "geography"
+suggest simply the matter which has been traditionally sanctioned in the
+schools. The mass and variety of this matter discourage an attempt to
+see what it really stands for, and how it can be so taught as to fulfill
+its mission in the experience of pupils. But unless the idea that there
+is a unifying and social direction in education is a farcical pretense,
+subjects that bulk as large in the curriculum as history and geography,
+must represent a general function in the development of a truly
+socialized and intellectualized experience. The discovery of this
+function must be employed as a criterion for trying and sifting the
+facts taught and the methods used.
+
+The function of historical and geographical subject matter has been
+stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal
+contacts of life by furnishing their context, their background and
+outlook. While geography emphasizes the physical side and history
+the social, these are only emphases in a common topic, namely, the
+associated life of men. For this associated life, with its experiments,
+its ways and means, its achievements and failures, does not go on in the
+sky nor yet in a vacuum. It takes place on the earth. This setting of
+nature does not bear to social activities the relation that the scenery
+of a theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation; it
+enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form history.
+Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It furnishes original
+stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources. Civilization is the
+progressive mastery of its varied energies. When this interdependence of
+the study of history, representing the human emphasis, with the study
+of geography, representing the natural, is ignored, history sinks to
+a listing of dates with an appended inventory of events, labeled
+"important"; or else it becomes a literary phantasy--for in purely
+literary history the natural environment is but stage scenery.
+
+Geography, of course, has its educative influence in a counterpart
+connection of natural facts with social events and their consequences.
+The classic definition of geography as an account of the earth as the
+home of man expresses the educational reality. But it is easier to give
+this definition than it is to present specific geographical subject
+matter in its vital human bearings. The residence, pursuits, successes,
+and failures of men are the things that give the geographic data their
+reason for inclusion in the material of instruction. But to hold the two
+together requires an informed and cultivated imagination. When the ties
+are broken, geography presents itself as that hodge-podge of unrelated
+fragments too often found. It appears as a veritable rag-bag of
+intellectual odds and ends: the height of a mountain here, the course
+of a river there, the quantity of shingles produced in this town, the
+tonnage of the shipping in that, the boundary of a county, the capital
+of a state. The earth as the home of man is humanizing and unified; the
+earth viewed as a miscellany of facts is scattering and imaginatively
+inert. Geography is a topic that originally appeals to imagination--even
+to the romantic imagination. It shares in the wonder and glory that
+attach to adventure, travel, and exploration. The variety of peoples and
+environments, their contrast with familiar scenes, furnishes infinite
+stimulation. The mind is moved from the monotony of the customary.
+And while local or home geography is the natural starting point in
+the reconstructive development of the natural environment, it is an
+intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown, not an end
+in itself. When not treated as a basis for getting at the large world
+beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as deadly as do object
+lessons which simply summarize the properties of familiar objects. The
+reason is the same. The imagination is not fed, but is held down to
+recapitulating, cataloguing, and refining what is already known. But
+when the familiar fences that mark the limits of the village proprietors
+are signs that introduce an understanding of the boundaries of great
+nations, even fences are lighted with meaning. Sunlight, air, running
+water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil officers
+and their duties--all these things are found in the local environment.
+Treated as if their meaning began and ended in those confines, they are
+curious facts to be laboriously learned. As instruments for extending
+the limits of experience, bringing within its scope peoples and things
+otherwise strange and unknown, they are transfigured by the use to which
+they are put. Sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political relations
+come from afar and lead the thoughts afar. To follow their course is to
+enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional information, but by
+remaking the meaning of what was previously a matter of course.
+
+The same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of geographical
+study which tend to become specialized and separate. Mathematical
+or astronomical, physiographic, topographic, political, commercial,
+geography, all make their claims. How are they to be adjusted? By an
+external compromise that crowds in so much of each? No other method is
+to be found unless it be constantly borne in mind that the educational
+center of gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject.
+From this center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is
+needed to help appreciate the significance of human activities and
+relations. The differences of civilization in cold and tropical regions,
+the special inventions, industrial and political, of peoples in the
+temperate regions, cannot be understood without appeal to the earth as a
+member of the solar system. Economic activities deeply influence social
+intercourse and political organization on one side, and reflect physical
+conditions on the other. The specializations of these topics are for the
+specialists; their interaction concerns man as a being whose experience
+is social.
+
+To include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced;
+verbally, it is. But in educational idea there is but one reality, and
+it is pity that in practice we have two names: for the diversity of
+names tends to conceal the identity of meaning. Nature and the earth
+should be equivalent terms, and so should earth study and nature
+study. Everybody knows that nature study has suffered in schools from
+scrappiness of subject matter, due to dealing with a large number of
+isolated points. The parts of a flower have been studied, for example,
+apart from the flower as an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the
+plant apart from the soil, air, and light in which and through which it
+lives. The result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which attention
+is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed imagination.
+The lack of interest is so great that it was seriously proposed to
+revive animism, to clothe natural facts and events with myths in order
+that they might attract and hold the mind. In numberless cases, more or
+less silly personifications were resorted to. The method was silly, but
+it expressed a real need for a human atmosphere. The facts had been torn
+to pieces by being taken out of their context. They no longer belonged
+to the earth; they had no abiding place anywhere. To compensate,
+recourse was had to artificial and sentimental associations. The real
+remedy is to make nature study a study of nature, not of fragments made
+meaningless through complete removal from the situations in which they
+are produced and in which they operate. When nature is treated as a
+whole, like the earth in its relations, its phenomena fall into their
+natural relations of sympathy and association with human life, and
+artificial substitutes are not needed.
+
+3. History and Present Social Life. The segregation which kills the
+vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social
+life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly
+gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward
+it. Let the dead bury their dead. But knowledge of the past is the key
+to understanding the present. History deals with the past, but this past
+is the history of the present. An intelligent study of the discovery,
+explorations, colonization of America, of the pioneer movement westward,
+of immigration, etc., should be a study of the United States as it
+is to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying it in process of
+formation makes much that is too complex to be directly grasped open
+to comprehension. Genetic method was perhaps the chief scientific
+achievement of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its principle
+is that the way to get insight into any complex product is to trace the
+process of its making,--to follow it through the successive stages of
+its growth. To apply this method to history as if it meant only the
+truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its past,
+is one-sided. It means equally that past events cannot be separated
+from the living present and retain meaning. The true starting point of
+history is always some present situation with its problems.
+
+This general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration of its
+bearing upon a number of points. The biographical method is generally
+recommended as the natural mode of approach to historical study. The
+lives of great men, of heroes and leaders, make concrete and vital
+historic episodes otherwise abstract and incomprehensible. They condense
+into vivid pictures complicated and tangled series of events spread over
+so much space and time that only a highly trained mind can follow and
+unravel them. There can be no doubt of the psychological soundness
+of this principle. But it is misused when employed to throw into
+exaggerated relief the doings of a few individuals without reference to
+the social situations which they represent. When a biography is related
+just as an account of the doings of a man isolated from the conditions
+that aroused him and to which his activities were a response, we do not
+have a study of history, for we have no study of social life, which is
+an affair of individuals in association. We get only a sugar coating
+which makes it easier to swallow certain fragments of information. Much
+attention has been given of late to primitive life as an introduction
+to learning history. Here also there is a right and a wrong way of
+conceiving its value. The seemingly ready-made character and the
+complexity of present conditions, their apparently hard and fast
+character, is an almost insuperable obstacle to gaining insight into
+their nature. Recourse to the primitive may furnish the fundamental
+elements of the present situation in immensely simplified form. It is
+like unraveling a cloth so complex and so close to the eyes that its
+scheme cannot be seen, until the larger coarser features of the
+pattern appear. We cannot simplify the present situations by deliberate
+experiment, but resort to primitive life presents us with the sort of
+results we should desire from an experiment. Social relationships and
+modes of organized action are reduced to their lowest terms. When this
+social aim is overlooked, however, the study of primitive life becomes
+simply a rehearsing of sensational and exciting features of savagery.
+Primitive history suggests industrial history. For one of the chief
+reasons for going to more primitive conditions to resolve the present
+into more easily perceived factors is that we may realize how the
+fundamental problems of procuring subsistence, shelter, and protection
+have been met; and by seeing how these were solved in the earlier days
+of the human race, form some conception of the long road which has had
+to be traveled, and of the successive inventions by which the race has
+been brought forward in culture. We do not need to go into disputes
+regarding the economic interpretation of history to realize that the
+industrial history of mankind gives insight into two important phases of
+social life in a way which no other phase of history can possibly do.
+It presents us with knowledge of the successive inventions by which
+theoretical science has been applied to the control of nature in the
+interests of security and prosperity of social life. It thus reveals the
+successive causes of social progress. Its other service is to put
+before us the things that fundamentally concern all men in common--the
+occupations and values connected with getting a living. Economic history
+deals with the activities, the career, and fortunes of the common man as
+does no other branch of history. The one thing every individual must do
+is to live; the one thing that society must do is to secure from each
+individual his fair contribution to the general well being and see to it
+that a just return is made to him.
+
+Economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more
+liberalizing than political history. It deals not with the rise and
+fall of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the effective
+liberties, through command of nature, of the common man for whom powers
+and principalities exist.
+
+Industrial history also offers a more direct avenue of approach to the
+realization of the intimate connection of man's struggles, successes,
+and failures with nature than does political history--to say nothing of
+the military history into which political history so easily runs when
+reduced to the level of youthful comprehension. For industrial history
+is essentially an account of the way in which man has learned to utilize
+natural energy from the time when men mostly exploited the muscular
+energies of other men to the time when, in promise if not in actuality,
+the resources of nature are so under command as to enable men to
+extend a common dominion over her. When the history of work, when
+the conditions of using the soil, forest, mine, of domesticating and
+cultivating grains and animals, of manufacture and distribution,
+are left out of account, history tends to become merely literary--a
+systematized romance of a mythical humanity living upon itself instead
+of upon the earth.
+
+Perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education is
+intellectual history. We are only just beginning to realize that the
+great heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its politicians,
+generals, and diplomatists, but the scientific discoverers and inventors
+who have put into man's hands the instrumentalities of an expanding and
+controlled experience, and the artists and poets who have celebrated his
+struggles, triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic,
+or written, that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to
+others. One of the advantages of industrial history as a history of
+man's progressive adaptation of natural forces to social uses is the
+opportunity which it affords for consideration of advance in the methods
+and results of knowledge. At present men are accustomed to eulogize
+intelligence and reason in general terms; their fundamental importance
+is urged. But pupils often come away from the conventional study of
+history, and think either that the human intellect is a static quantity
+which has not progressed by the invention of better methods, or else
+that intelligence, save as a display of personal shrewdness, is a
+negligible historic factor. Surely no better way could be devised of
+instilling a genuine sense of the part which mind has to play in life
+than a study of history which makes plain how the entire advance
+of humanity from savagery to civilization has been dependent upon
+intellectual discoveries and inventions, and the extent to which the
+things which ordinarily figure most largely in historical writings have
+been side issues, or even obstructions for intelligence to overcome.
+
+Pursued in this fashion, history would most naturally become of ethical
+value in teaching. Intelligent insight into present forms of associated
+life is necessary for a character whose morality is more than colorless
+innocence. Historical knowledge helps provide such insight. It is an
+organ for analysis of the warp and woof of the present social fabric, of
+making known the forces which have woven the pattern. The use of
+history for cultivating a socialized intelligence constitutes its moral
+significance. It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of
+anecdotes to be drawn on to inculcate special moral lessons on this
+virtue or that vice. But such teaching is not so much an ethical use of
+history as it is an effort to create moral impressions by means of more
+or less authentic material. At best, it produces a temporary emotional
+glow; at worst, callous indifference to moralizing. The assistance which
+may be given by history to a more intelligent sympathetic understanding
+of the social situations of the present in which individuals share is a
+permanent and constructive moral asset.
+
+Summary. It is the nature of an experience to have implications which
+go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. Bringing these
+connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the
+experience. Any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is
+capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending
+its range of perceived connections. Normal communication with others is
+the readiest way of effecting this development, for it links up the
+net results of the experience of the group and even the race with the
+immediate experience of an individual. By normal communication is meant
+that in which there is a joint interest, a common interest, so that one
+is eager to give and the other to take. It contrasts with telling or
+stating things simply for the sake of impressing them upon another,
+merely in order to test him to see how much he has retained and can
+literally reproduce.
+
+Geography and history are the two great school resources for bringing
+about the enlargement of the significance of a direct personal
+experience. The active occupations described in the previous chapter
+reach out in space and time with respect to both nature and man. Unless
+they are taught for external reasons or as mere modes of skill their
+chief educational value is that they provide the most direct and
+interesting roads out into the larger world of meanings stated in
+history and geography. While history makes human implications explicit
+and geography natural connections, these subjects are two phases of
+the same living whole, since the life of men in association goes on in
+nature, not as an accidental setting, but as the material and medium of
+development.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
+
+1. The Logical and the Psychological. By science is meant, as already
+stated, that knowledge which is the outcome of methods of observation,
+reflection, and testing which are deliberately adopted to secure
+a settled, assured subject matter. It involves an intelligent and
+persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is
+erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such
+shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may
+be as obvious as possible. It is, like all knowledge, an outcome of
+activity bringing about certain changes in the environment. But in its
+case, the quality of the resulting knowledge is the controlling factor
+and not an incident of the activity. Both logically and educationally,
+science is the perfecting of knowing, its last stage.
+
+Science, in short, signifies a realization of the logical implications
+of any knowledge. Logical order is not a form imposed upon what is
+known; it is the proper form of knowledge as perfected. For it means
+that the statement of subject matter is of a nature to exhibit to
+one who understands it the premises from which it follows and the
+conclusions to which it points (See ante, p. 190). As from a few bones
+the competent zoologist reconstructs an animal; so from the form of a
+statement in mathematics or physics the specialist in the subject can
+form an idea of the system of truths in which it has its place.
+
+To the non-expert, however, this perfected form is a stumbling block.
+Just because the material is stated with reference to the furtherance
+of knowledge as an end in itself, its connections with the material of
+everyday life are hidden. To the layman the bones are a mere curiosity.
+Until he had mastered the principles of zoology, his efforts to make
+anything out of them would be random and blind. From the standpoint of
+the learner scientific form is an ideal to be achieved, not a starting
+point from which to set out. It is, nevertheless, a frequent practice to
+start in instruction with the rudiments of science somewhat simplified.
+The necessary consequence is an isolation of science from significant
+experience. The pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning.
+He acquires a technical body of information without ability to trace
+its connections with the objects and operations with which he is
+familiar--often he acquires simply a peculiar vocabulary. There is
+a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its
+perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural
+than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be
+protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers
+have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education.
+Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject
+is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist.
+Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the
+outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few
+indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn
+a "science" instead of learning the scientific way of treating the
+familiar material of ordinary experience. The method of the advanced
+student dominates college teaching; the approach of the college is
+transferred into the high school, and so down the line, with such
+omissions as may make the subject easier.
+
+The chronological method which begins with the experience of the learner
+and develops from that the proper modes of scientific treatment is often
+called the "psychological" method in distinction from the logical method
+of the expert or specialist. The apparent loss of time involved is
+more than made up for by the superior understanding and vital interest
+secured. What the pupil learns he at least understands. Moreover by
+following, in connection with problems selected from the material of
+ordinary acquaintance, the methods by which scientific men have reached
+their perfected knowledge, he gains independent power to deal with
+material within his range, and avoids the mental confusion and
+intellectual distaste attendant upon studying matter whose meaning
+is only symbolic. Since the mass of pupils are never going to become
+scientific specialists, it is much more important that they should get
+some insight into what scientific method means than that they should
+copy at long range and second hand the results which scientific men have
+reached. Students will not go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered,"
+but they will be sure and intelligent as far as they do go. And it is
+safe to say that the few who go on to be scientific experts will have
+a better preparation than if they had been swamped with a large mass of
+purely technical and symbolically stated information. In fact, those
+who do become successful men of science are those who by their own power
+manage to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional scholastic introduction
+into it.
+
+The contrast between the expectations of the men who a generation or
+two ago strove, against great odds, to secure a place for science
+in education, and the result generally achieved is painful. Herbert
+Spencer, inquiring what knowledge is of most worth, concluded that
+from all points of view scientific knowledge is most valuable. But
+his argument unconsciously assumed that scientific knowledge could be
+communicated in a ready-made form. Passing over the methods by which the
+subject matter of our ordinary activities is transmuted into scientific
+form, it ignored the method by which alone science is science.
+Instruction has too often proceeded upon an analogous plan. But there is
+no magic attached to material stated in technically correct scientific
+form. When learned in this condition it remains a body of inert
+information. Moreover its form of statement removes it further from
+fruitful contact with everyday experiences than does the mode of
+statement proper to literature. Nevertheless that the claims made for
+instruction in science were unjustifiable does not follow. For material
+so taught is not science to the pupil.
+
+Contact with things and laboratory exercises, while a great improvement
+upon textbooks arranged upon the deductive plan, do not of themselves
+suffice to meet the need. While they are an indispensable portion
+of scientific method, they do not as a matter of course constitute
+scientific method. Physical materials may be manipulated with scientific
+apparatus, but the materials may be disassociated in themselves and in
+the ways in which they are handled, from the materials and processes
+used out of school. The problems dealt with may be only problems of
+science: problems, that is, which would occur to one already initiated
+in the science of the subject. Our attention may be devoted to getting
+skill in technical manipulation without reference to the connection of
+laboratory exercises with a problem belonging to subject matter. There
+is sometimes a ritual of laboratory instruction as well as of heathen
+religion. 1 It has been mentioned, incidentally, that scientific
+statements, or logical form, implies the use of signs or symbols.
+The statement applies, of course, to all use of language. But in the
+vernacular, the mind proceeds directly from the symbol to the thing
+signified. Association with familiar material is so close that the mind
+does not pause upon the sign. The signs are intended only to stand for
+things and acts. But scientific terminology has an additional use. It is
+designed, as we have seen, not to stand for the things directly in their
+practical use in experience, but for the things placed in a cognitive
+system. Ultimately, of course, they denote the things of our common
+sense acquaintance. But immediately they do not designate them in their
+common context, but translated into terms of scientific inquiry. Atoms,
+molecules, chemical formulae, the mathematical propositions in the study
+of physics--all these have primarily an intellectual value and only
+indirectly an empirical value. They represent instruments for
+the carrying on of science. As in the case of other tools, their
+significance can be learned only by use. We cannot procure understanding
+of their meaning by pointing to things, but only by pointing to their
+work when they are employed as part of the technique of knowledge. Even
+the circle, square, etc., of geometry exhibit a difference from the
+squares and circles of familiar acquaintance, and the further one
+proceeds in mathematical science the greater the remoteness from the
+everyday empirical thing. Qualities which do not count for the pursuit
+of knowledge about spatial relations are left out; those which are
+important for this purpose are accentuated. If one carries his study
+far enough, he will find even the properties which are significant for
+spatial knowledge giving way to those which facilitate knowledge of
+other things--perhaps a knowledge of the general relations of number.
+There will be nothing in the conceptual definitions even to suggest
+spatial form, size, or direction. This does not mean that they are
+unreal mental inventions, but it indicates that direct physical
+qualities have been transmuted into tools for a special end--the end
+of intellectual organization. In every machine the primary state of
+material has been modified by subordinating it to use for a purpose.
+Not the stuff in its original form but in its adaptation to an end
+is important. No one would have a knowledge of a machine who could
+enumerate all the materials entering into its structure, but only he
+who knew their uses and could tell why they are employed as they are. In
+like fashion one has a knowledge of mathematical conceptions only when
+he sees the problems in which they function and their specific utility
+in dealing with these problems. "Knowing" the definitions, rules,
+formulae, etc., is like knowing the names of parts of a machine without
+knowing what they do. In one case, as in the other, the meaning, or
+intellectual content, is what the element accomplishes in the system of
+which it is a member.
+
+2. Science and Social Progress. Assuming that the development of the
+direct knowledge gained in occupations of social interest is carried
+to a perfected logical form, the question arises as to its place in
+experience. In general, the reply is that science marks the emancipation
+of mind from devotion to customary purposes and makes possible the
+systematic pursuit of new ends. It is the agency of progress in action.
+Progress is sometimes thought of as consisting in getting nearer to ends
+already sought. But this is a minor form of progress, for it requires
+only improvement of the means of action or technical advance. More
+important modes of progress consist in enriching prior purposes and in
+forming new ones. Desires are not a fixed quantity, nor does progress
+mean only an increased amount of satisfaction. With increased culture
+and new mastery of nature, new desires, demands for new qualities
+of satisfaction, show themselves, for intelligence perceives new
+possibilities of action. This projection of new possibilities leads to
+search for new means of execution, and progress takes place; while the
+discovery of objects not already used leads to suggestion of new ends.
+
+That science is the chief means of perfecting control of means of action
+is witnessed by the great crop of inventions which followed intellectual
+command of the secrets of nature. The wonderful transformation of
+production and distribution known as the industrial revolution is the
+fruit of experimental science. Railways, steamboats, electric motors,
+telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles are
+conspicuous evidences of the application of science in life. But none
+of them would be of much importance without the thousands of less
+sensational inventions by means of which natural science has been
+rendered tributary to our daily life.
+
+It must be admitted that to a considerable extent the progress thus
+procured has been only technical: it has provided more efficient means
+for satisfying preexistent desires, rather than modified the quality of
+human purposes. There is, for example, no modern civilization which is
+the equal of Greek culture in all respects. Science is still too recent
+to have been absorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition. Men
+move more swiftly and surely to the realization of their ends, but
+their ends too largely remain what they were prior to scientific
+enlightenment. This fact places upon education the responsibility of
+using science in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination
+and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical arms and
+legs.
+
+The advance of science has already modified men's thoughts of the
+purposes and goods of life to a sufficient extent to give some idea of
+the nature of this responsibility and the ways of meeting it. Science
+taking effect in human activity has broken down physical barriers
+which formerly separated men; it has immensely widened the area of
+intercourse. It has brought about interdependence of interests on an
+enormous scale. It has brought with it an established conviction of the
+possibility of control of nature in the interests of mankind and thus
+has led men to look to the future, instead of the past. The coincidence
+of the ideal of progress with the advance of science is not a mere
+coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote
+antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence
+properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To
+subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of
+abolishing poverty is not utopian. Science has familiarized men with
+the idea of development, taking effect practically in persistent gradual
+amelioration of the estate of our common humanity.
+
+
+The problem of an educational use of science is then to create an
+intelligence pregnant with belief in the possibility of the direction
+of human affairs by itself. The method of science engrained through
+education in habit means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the
+routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. The word empirical in its
+ordinary use does not mean "connected with experiment," but rather
+crude and unrational. Under the influence of conditions created by the
+non-existence of experimental science, experience was opposed in all
+the ruling philosophies of the past to reason and the truly rational.
+Empirical knowledge meant the knowledge accumulated by a multitude of
+past instances without intelligent insight into the principles of any
+of them. To say that medicine was empirical meant that it was not
+scientific, but a mode of practice based upon accumulated observations
+of diseases and of remedies used more or less at random. Such a mode of
+practice is of necessity happy-go-lucky; success depends upon chance. It
+lends itself to deception and quackery. Industry that is "empirically"
+controlled forbids constructive applications of intelligence; it depends
+upon following in an imitative slavish manner the models set in
+the past. Experimental science means the possibility of using past
+experiences as the servant, not the master, of mind. It means that
+reason operates within experience, not beyond it, to give it an
+intelligent or reasonable quality. Science is experience becoming
+rational. The effect of science is thus to change men's idea of the
+nature and inherent possibilities of experience. By the same token, it
+changes the idea and the operation of reason. Instead of being something
+beyond experience, remote, aloof, concerned with a sublime region
+that has nothing to do with the experienced facts of life, it is found
+indigenous in experience:--the factor by which past experiences are
+purified and rendered into tools for discovery and advance.
+
+The term "abstract" has a rather bad name in popular speech, being used
+to signify not only that which is abstruse and hard to understand,
+but also that which is far away from life. But abstraction is an
+indispensable trait in reflective direction of activity. Situations do
+not literally repeat themselves. Habit treats new occurrences as if
+they were identical with old ones; it suffices, accordingly, when the
+different or novel element is negligible for present purposes. But when
+the new element requires especial attention, random reaction is the
+sole recourse unless abstraction is brought into play. For abstraction
+deliberately selects from the subject matter of former experiences that
+which is thought helpful in dealing with the new. It signifies conscious
+transfer of a meaning embedded in past experience for use in a new one.
+It is the very artery of intelligence, of the intentional rendering of
+one experience available for guidance of another.
+
+Science carries on this working over of prior subject matter on a large
+scale. It aims to free an experience from all which is purely personal
+and strictly immediate; it aims to detach whatever it has in common with
+the subject matter of other experiences, and which, being common, may
+be saved for further use. It is, thus, an indispensable factor in social
+progress. In any experience just as it occurs there is much which,
+while it may be of precious import to the individual implicated in
+the experience, is peculiar and unreduplicable. From the standpoint
+of science, this material is accidental, while the features which are
+widely shared are essential. Whatever is unique in the situation, since
+dependent upon the peculiarities of the individual and the coincidence
+of circumstance, is not available for others; so that unless what is
+shared is abstracted and fixed by a suitable symbol, practically all the
+value of the experience may perish in its passing. But abstraction
+and the use of terms to record what is abstracted put the net value of
+individual experience at the permanent disposal of mankind. No one
+can foresee in detail when or how it may be of further use. The man of
+science in developing his abstractions is like a manufacturer of tools
+who does not know who will use them nor when. But intellectual tools
+are indefinitely more flexible in their range of adaptation than other
+mechanical tools.
+
+Generalization is the counterpart of abstraction. It is the functioning
+of an abstraction in its application to a new concrete experience,--its
+extension to clarify and direct new situations. Reference to these
+possible applications is necessary in order that the abstraction may be
+fruitful, instead of a barren formalism ending in itself. Generalization
+is essentially a social device. When men identified their interests
+exclusively with the concerns of a narrow group, their generalizations
+were correspondingly restricted. The viewpoint did not permit a wide and
+free survey. Men's thoughts were tied down to a contracted space and a
+short time,--limited to their own established customs as a measure
+of all possible values. Scientific abstraction and generalization are
+equivalent to taking the point of view of any man, whatever his location
+in time and space. While this emancipation from the conditions and
+episodes of concrete experiences accounts for the remoteness, the
+"abstractness," of science, it also accounts for its wide and free
+range of fruitful novel applications in practice. Terms and propositions
+record, fix, and convey what is abstracted. A meaning detached from a
+given experience cannot remain hanging in the air. It must acquire a
+local habitation. Names give abstract meanings a physical locus and
+body. Formulation is thus not an after-thought or by-product; it is
+essential to the completion of the work of thought. Persons know many
+things which they cannot express, but such knowledge remains practical,
+direct, and personal. An individual can use it for himself; he may be
+able to act upon it with efficiency. Artists and executives often have
+their knowledge in this state. But it is personal, untransferable, and,
+as it were, instinctive. To formulate the significance of an experience
+a man must take into conscious account the experiences of others. He
+must try to find a standpoint which includes the experience of others
+as well as his own. Otherwise his communication cannot be understood. He
+talks a language which no one else knows. While literary art furnishes
+the supreme successes in stating of experiences so that they are vitally
+significant to others, the vocabulary of science is designed, in another
+fashion, to express the meaning of experienced things in symbols which
+any one will know who studies the science. Aesthetic formulation reveals
+and enhances the meaning of experiences one already has; scientific
+formulation supplies one with tools for constructing new experiences
+with transformed meanings.
+
+To sum up: Science represents the office of intelligence, in projection
+and control of new experiences, pursued systematically, intentionally,
+and on a scale due to freedom from limitations of habit. It is the sole
+instrumentality of conscious, as distinct from accidental, progress.
+And if its generality, its remoteness from individual conditions, confer
+upon it a certain technicality and aloofness, these qualities are very
+different from those of merely speculative theorizing. The latter are in
+permanent dislocation from practice; the former are temporarily detached
+for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action.
+There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but
+genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its
+expansion and its direction to new possibilities.
+
+3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational
+tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the
+curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests
+is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a
+literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of
+learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had
+naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily
+surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from
+whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively
+humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import,
+is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both
+studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere
+stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's
+life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or
+defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of
+deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct
+natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon
+insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the
+specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions
+of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse
+goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development
+is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in
+quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of
+the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from
+superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically,
+to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of
+formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever
+information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of
+such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the
+antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a
+wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it
+functions in men's occupations is itself a survival of an aristocratic
+culture. The notion that "applied" knowledge is somehow less worthy than
+"pure" knowledge, was natural to a society in which all useful work was
+performed by slaves and serfs, and in which industry was controlled by
+the models set by custom rather than by intelligence. Science, or the
+highest knowing, was then identified with pure theorizing, apart from
+all application in the uses of life; and knowledge relating to useful
+arts suffered the stigma attaching to the classes who engaged in them
+(See below, Ch. XIX). The idea of science thus generated persisted after
+science had itself adopted the appliances of the arts, using them for
+the production of knowledge, and after the rise of democracy. Taking
+theory just as theory, however, that which concerns humanity is of more
+significance for man than that which concerns a merely physical world.
+In adopting the criterion of knowledge laid down by a literary culture,
+aloof from the practical needs of the mass of men, the educational
+advocates of scientific education put themselves at a strategic
+disadvantage. So far as they adopt the idea of science appropriate
+to its experimental method and to the movements of a democratic and
+industrial society, they have no difficulty in showing that natural
+science is more humanistic than an alleged humanism which bases its
+educational schemes upon the specialized interests of a leisure
+class. For, as we have already stated, humanistic studies when set
+in opposition to study of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce
+themselves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies, which in turn
+tend to shrink to "the classics," to languages no longer spoken. For
+modern languages may evidently be put to use, and hence fall under the
+ban. It would be hard to find anything in history more ironical than the
+educational practices which have identified the "humanities"
+exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin. Greek and Roman art and
+institutions made such important contributions to our civilization
+that there should always be the amplest opportunities for making their
+acquaintance. But to regard them as par excellence the humane studies
+involves a deliberate neglect of the possibilities of the subject matter
+which is accessible in education to the masses, and tends to cultivate
+a narrow snobbery: that of a learned class whose insignia are the
+accidents of exclusive opportunity. Knowledge is humanistic in quality
+not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what
+it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy. Any subject
+matter which accomplishes this result is humane, and any subject matter
+which does not accomplish it is not even educational.
+
+Summary. Science represents the fruition of the cognitive factors in
+experience. Instead of contenting itself with a mere statement of
+what commends itself to personal or customary experience, it aims at a
+statement which will reveal the sources, grounds, and consequences of
+a belief. The achievement of this aim gives logical character to
+the statements. Educationally, it has to be noted that logical
+characteristics of method, since they belong to subject matter which has
+reached a high degree of intellectual elaboration, are different from
+the method of the learner--the chronological order of passing from a
+cruder to a more refined intellectual quality of experience. When this
+fact is ignored, science is treated as so much bare information, which
+however is less interesting and more remote than ordinary information,
+being stated in an unusual and technical vocabulary. The function which
+science has to perform in the curriculum is that which it has performed
+for the race: emancipation from local and temporary incidents of
+experience, and the opening of intellectual vistas unobscured by the
+accidents of personal habit and predilection. The logical traits of
+abstraction, generalization, and definite formulation are all associated
+with this function. In emancipating an idea from the particular context
+in which it originated and giving it a wider reference the results of
+the experience of any individual are put at the disposal of all men.
+Thus ultimately and philosophically science is the organ of general
+social progress. 1 Upon the positive side, the value of problems arising
+in work in the garden, the shop, etc., may be referred to (See p.
+200). The laboratory may be treated as an additional resource to supply
+conditions and appliances for the better pursuit of these problems.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
+
+The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have
+already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests.
+
+The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide
+with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility,
+culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental
+discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of
+which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature
+of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an
+interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens,
+however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a
+consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the
+curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects
+by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from
+their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords
+an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests
+on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into
+connection with one another.
+
+1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation. Much of our experience is
+indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things
+and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is
+one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and
+hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language,
+all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical
+language the experience which is procured by their means is "mediated."
+It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something
+in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through
+the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of
+personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not
+for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant
+affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the
+brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon
+the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate
+experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting
+it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is
+doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify
+an uncultivated person with an illiterate person--so dependent are we on
+letters for effective representative or indirect experience.
+
+At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there
+is always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger
+that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make
+it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation
+will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly exposed
+to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes, mere
+bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes
+with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used
+to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience
+in contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of
+a representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and
+"appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for
+the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these ideas
+except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it
+in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct
+experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between
+reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between
+just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical
+equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious
+illumination of a misty landscape. We are thus met by the danger of the
+tendency of technique and other purely representative forms to encroach
+upon the sphere of direct appreciations; in other words, the tendency to
+assume that pupils have a foundation of direct realization of situations
+sufficient for the superstructure of representative experience erected
+by formulated school studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or
+bulk. Sufficient direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it
+must be of a sort to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic
+material of instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying
+facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide
+genuine situations in which personal participation brings home the
+import of the material and the problems which it conveys. From the
+standpoint of the pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on
+their own account; from the standpoint of the teacher they are also
+means of supplying subject matter required for understanding instruction
+involving signs, and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern
+as to the material symbolically conveyed.
+
+In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the
+demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by
+the provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical
+situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except
+to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the
+subject matter of primary education, where the demand for the available
+background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies
+to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and basic
+function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or college in
+a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with a certain
+range of facts and problems--to give him a "feeling" for them.
+Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and testing
+generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation. As
+regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that
+the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a
+minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,--though these results
+may accrue as by-products,--but to enlarge and enrich the scope of
+experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual
+progress.
+
+The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out
+three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct
+from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in
+appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course
+of study.
+
+1. The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in
+the course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of
+the worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon
+qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral
+goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as
+aesthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain
+rules for these values--the golden rule in morals; harmony, balance,
+etc., proportionate distribution in aesthetic goods; definition,
+clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These principles are
+so important as standards of judging the worth of new experiences that
+parents and instructors are always tending to teach them directly to the
+young. They overlook the danger that standards so taught will be merely
+symbolic; that is, largely conventional and verbal. In reality, working
+as distinct from professed standards depend upon what an individual has
+himself specifically appreciated to be deeply significant in concrete
+situations. An individual may have learned that certain characteristics
+are conventionally esteemed in music; he may be able to converse with
+some correctness about classic music; he may even honestly believe that
+these traits constitute his own musical standards. But if in his own
+past experience, what he has been most accustomed to and has most
+enjoyed is ragtime, his active or working measures of valuation are
+fixed on the ragtime level. The appeal actually made to him in his own
+personal realization fixes his attitude much more deeply than what he
+has been taught as the proper thing to say; his habitual disposition
+thus fixed forms his real "norm" of valuation in subsequent musical
+experiences.
+
+Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it
+applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A
+youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value
+of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure
+of the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital
+appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by
+others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot
+adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed;
+it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence,
+and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows
+up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones.
+A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his
+inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict
+between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will
+win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware;
+the result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of
+disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some
+confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up
+obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity
+and definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may
+be trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and
+division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value
+of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow
+comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the
+significance of the logical norms--so-called--remains as much an
+external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China. He
+may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal.
+
+It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were
+confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope
+is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation
+of habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also
+tastes--habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective sense of
+excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the premium
+so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon marks and
+rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of the lack of
+attention given to life situations in which the meaning of facts, ideas,
+principles, and problems is vitally brought home.
+
+2. Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or
+representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from
+the work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response
+involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure
+"facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field.
+The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any
+activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to
+identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and
+intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an
+exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and
+something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and
+appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters,
+leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative
+acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information.
+Theory, and--to some extent--practice, have advanced far enough to
+recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise. But it is
+still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off stage of
+childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference between
+play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a
+difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a
+difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The
+result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal"
+phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to
+a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results.
+Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned
+machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of
+education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the
+wayside. Meantime mind-wandering and wayward fancy are nothing but the
+unsuppressible imagination cut loose from concern with what is done.
+
+An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of
+realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct
+physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in
+teaching. The emphasis put in this book, in accord with many tendencies
+in contemporary education, upon activity, will be misleading if it is
+not recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral
+part of human activity as is muscular movement. The educative value
+of manual activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play,
+depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing
+of the meaning of what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are
+dramatizations. Their utilitarian value in forming habits of skill to be
+used for tangible results is important, but not when isolated from the
+appreciative side. Were it not for the accompanying play of imagination,
+there would be no road from a direct activity to representative
+knowledge; for it is by imagination that symbols are translated over
+into a direct meaning and integrated with a narrower activity so as to
+expand and enrich it. When the representative creative imagination is
+made merely literary and mythological, symbols are rendered mere means
+of directing physical reactions of the organs of speech.
+
+3. In the account previously given nothing was explicitly said about
+the place of literature and the fine arts in the course of study. The
+omission at that point was intentional. At the outset, there is no sharp
+demarcation of useful, or industrial, arts and fine arts. The activities
+mentioned in Chapter XV contain within themselves the factors later
+discriminated into fine and useful arts. As engaging the emotions and
+the imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts
+their quality. As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of tools
+to materials with constantly increasing perfection, they involve the
+element of technique indispensable to artistic production. From the
+standpoint of product, or the work of art, they are naturally defective,
+though even in this respect when they comprise genuine appreciation
+they often have a rudimentary charm. As experiences they have both an
+artistic and an esthetic quality. When they emerge into activities which
+are tested by their product and when the socially serviceable value of
+the product is emphasized, they pass into useful or industrial arts.
+When they develop in the direction of an enhanced appreciation of the
+immediate qualities which appeal to taste, they grow into fine arts.
+
+In one of its meanings, appreciation is opposed to depreciation. It
+denotes an enlarged, an intensified prizing, not merely a prizing,
+much less--like depreciation--a lowered and degraded prizing. This
+enhancement of the qualities which make any ordinary experience
+appealing, appropriable--capable of full assimilation--and enjoyable,
+constitutes the prime function of literature, music, drawing, painting,
+etc., in education. They are not the exclusive agencies of appreciation
+in the most general sense of that word; but they are the chief agencies
+of an intensified, enhanced appreciation. As such, they are not only
+intrinsically and directly enjoyable, but they serve a purpose
+beyond themselves. They have the office, in increased degree, of all
+appreciation in fixing taste, in forming standards for the worth of
+later experiences. They arouse discontent with conditions which fall
+below their measure; they create a demand for surroundings coming up to
+their own level. They reveal a depth and range of meaning in experiences
+which otherwise might be mediocre and trivial. They supply, that
+is, organs of vision. Moreover, in their fullness they represent the
+concentration and consummation of elements of good which are otherwise
+scattered and incomplete. They select and focus the elements of
+enjoyable worth which make any experience directly enjoyable. They are
+not luxuries of education, but emphatic expressions of that which makes
+any education worth while.
+
+2. The Valuation of Studies. The theory of educational values involves
+not only an account of the nature of appreciation as fixing the measure
+of subsequent valuations, but an account of the specific directions
+in which these valuations occur. To value means primarily to prize, to
+esteem; but secondarily it means to apprise, to estimate. It means, that
+is, the act of cherishing something, holding it dear, and also the act
+of passing judgment upon the nature and amount of its value as compared
+with something else. To value in the latter sense is to valuate or
+evaluate. The distinction coincides with that sometimes made between
+intrinsic and instrumental values. Intrinsic values are not objects of
+judgment, they cannot (as intrinsic) be compared, or regarded as greater
+and less, better or worse. They are invaluable; and if a thing is
+invaluable, it is neither more nor less so than any other invaluable.
+But occasions present themselves when it is necessary to choose, when
+we must let one thing go in order to take another. This establishes an
+order of preference, a greater and less, better and worse. Things judged
+or passed upon have to be estimated in relation to some third thing,
+some further end. With respect to that, they are means, or instrumental
+values.
+
+We may imagine a man who at one time thoroughly enjoys converse with his
+friends, at another the hearing of a symphony; at another the eating of
+his meals; at another the reading of a book; at another the earning of
+money, and so on. As an appreciative realization, each of these is an
+intrinsic value. It occupies a particular place in life; it serves its
+own end, which cannot be supplied by a substitute. There is no question
+of comparative value, and hence none of valuation. Each is the specific
+good which it is, and that is all that can be said. In its own place,
+none is a means to anything beyond itself. But there may arise a
+situation in which they compete or conflict, in which a choice has to be
+made. Now comparison comes in. Since a choice has to be made, we want
+to know the respective claims of each competitor. What is to be said
+for it? What does it offer in comparison with, as balanced over against,
+some other possibility? Raising these questions means that a particular
+good is no longer an end in itself, an intrinsic good. For if it were,
+its claims would be incomparable, imperative. The question is now as
+to its status as a means of realizing something else, which is then the
+invaluable of that situation. If a man has just eaten, or if he is well
+fed generally and the opportunity to hear music is a rarity, he will
+probably prefer the music to eating. In the given situation that will
+render the greater contribution. If he is starving, or if he is satiated
+with music for the time being, he will naturally judge food to have the
+greater worth. In the abstract or at large, apart from the needs of a
+particular situation in which choice has to be made, there is no such
+thing as degrees or order of value. Certain conclusions follow with
+respect to educational values. We cannot establish a hierarchy of values
+among studies. It is futile to attempt to arrange them in an order,
+beginning with one having least worth and going on to that of maximum
+value. In so far as any study has a unique or irreplaceable function in
+experience, in so far as it marks a characteristic enrichment of life,
+its worth is intrinsic or incomparable. Since education is not a means
+to living, but is identical with the operation of living a life which is
+fruitful and inherently significant, the only ultimate value which can
+be set up is just the process of living itself. And this is not an end
+to which studies and activities are subordinate means; it is the whole
+of which they are ingredients. And what has been said about appreciation
+means that every study in one of its aspects ought to have just such
+ultimate significance. It is true of arithmetic as it is of poetry that
+in some place and at some time it ought to be a good to be appreciated
+on its own account--just as an enjoyable experience, in short. If it is
+not, then when the time and place come for it to be used as a means or
+instrumentality, it will be in just that much handicapped. Never having
+been realized or appreciated for itself, one will miss something of its
+capacity as a resource for other ends.
+
+It equally follows that when we compare studies as to their values,
+that is, treat them as means to something beyond themselves, that which
+controls their proper valuation is found in the specific situation in
+which they are to be used. The way to enable a student to apprehend the
+instrumental value of arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit
+it will be to him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him
+discover that success in something he is interested in doing depends
+upon ability to use number.
+
+It also follows that the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of value
+among different studies is a misguided one, in spite of the amount of
+time recently devoted to the undertaking. Science for example may have
+any kind of value, depending upon the situation into which it enters
+as a means. To some the value of science may be military; it may be
+an instrument in strengthening means of offense or defense; it may be
+technological, a tool for engineering; or it may be commercial--an aid
+in the successful conduct of business; under other conditions, its
+worth may be philanthropic--the service it renders in relieving
+human suffering; or again it may be quite conventional--of value in
+establishing one's social status as an "educated" person. As matter of
+fact, science serves all these purposes, and it would be an arbitrary
+task to try to fix upon one of them as its "real" end. All that we can
+be sure of educationally is that science should be taught so as to be an
+end in itself in the lives of students--something worth while on account
+of its own unique intrinsic contribution to the experience of life.
+Primarily it must have "appreciation value." If we take something
+which seems to be at the opposite pole, like poetry, the same sort of
+statement applies. It may be that, at the present time, its chief value
+is the contribution it makes to the enjoyment of leisure. But that may
+represent a degenerate condition rather than anything necessary. Poetry
+has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the
+purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things. It has had an
+enormous patriotic value. Homer to the Greeks was a Bible, a textbook
+of morals, a history, and a national inspiration. In any case, it may
+be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry
+a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has
+something the matter with it--or else the poetry is artificial poetry.
+
+The same considerations apply to the value of a study or a topic of
+a study with reference to its motivating force. Those responsible
+for planning and teaching the course of study should have grounds
+for thinking that the studies and topics included furnish both direct
+increments to the enriching of lives of the pupils and also materials
+which they can put to use in other concerns of direct interest. Since
+the curriculum is always getting loaded down with purely inherited
+traditional matter and with subjects which represent mainly the energy
+of some influential person or group of persons in behalf of something
+dear to them, it requires constant inspection, criticism, and revision
+to make sure it is accomplishing its purpose. Then there is always the
+probability that it represents the values of adults rather than those
+of children and youth, or those of pupils a generation ago rather than
+those of the present day. Hence a further need for a critical outlook
+and survey. But these considerations do not mean that for a subject to
+have motivating value to a pupil (whether intrinsic or instrumental)
+is the same thing as for him to be aware of the value, or to be able to
+tell what the study is good for.
+
+In the first place, as long as any topic makes an immediate appeal, it
+is not necessary to ask what it is good for. This is a question which
+can be asked only about instrumental values. Some goods are not good for
+anything; they are just goods. Any other notion leads to an absurdity.
+For we cannot stop asking the question about an instrumental good, one
+whose value lies in its being good for something, unless there is at
+some point something intrinsically good, good for itself. To a hungry,
+healthy child, food is a good of the situation; we do not have to bring
+him to consciousness of the ends subserved by food in order to supply a
+motive to eat. The food in connection with his appetite is a motive. The
+same thing holds of mentally eager pupils with respect to many topics.
+Neither they nor the teacher could possibly foretell with any exactness
+the purposes learning is to accomplish in the future; nor as long as the
+eagerness continues is it advisable to try to specify particular goods
+which are to come of it. The proof of a good is found in the fact that
+the pupil responds; his response is use. His response to the material
+shows that the subject functions in his life. It is unsound to urge
+that, say, Latin has a value per se in the abstract, just as a study, as
+a sufficient justification for teaching it. But it is equally absurd
+to argue that unless teacher or pupil can point out some definite
+assignable future use to which it is to be put, it lacks justifying
+value. When pupils are genuinely concerned in learning Latin, that is of
+itself proof that it possesses value. The most which one is entitled to
+ask in such cases is whether in view of the shortness of time, there
+are not other things of intrinsic value which in addition have greater
+instrumental value.
+
+This brings us to the matter of instrumental values--topics studied
+because of some end beyond themselves. If a child is ill and his
+appetite does not lead him to eat when food is presented, or if his
+appetite is perverted so that he prefers candy to meat and vegetables,
+conscious reference to results is indicated. He needs to be made
+conscious of consequences as a justification of the positive or negative
+value of certain objects. Or the state of things may be normal enough,
+and yet an individual not be moved by some matter because he does not
+grasp how his attainment of some intrinsic good depends upon active
+concern with what is presented. In such cases, it is obviously the part
+of wisdom to establish consciousness of connection. In general what is
+desirable is that a topic be presented in such a way that it either have
+an immediate value, and require no justification, or else be perceived
+to be a means of achieving something of intrinsic value. An instrumental
+value then has the intrinsic value of being a means to an end. It may
+be questioned whether some of the present pedagogical interest in the
+matter of values of studies is not either excessive or else too narrow.
+Sometimes it appears to be a labored effort to furnish an apologetic for
+topics which no longer operate to any purpose, direct or indirect, in
+the lives of pupils. At other times, the reaction against useless lumber
+seems to have gone to the extent of supposing that no subject or topic
+should be taught unless some quite definite future utility can be
+pointed out by those making the course of study or by the pupil himself,
+unmindful of the fact that life is its own excuse for being; and that
+definite utilities which can be pointed out are themselves justified
+only because they increase the experienced content of life itself. 3.
+The Segregation and Organization of Values. It is of course possible to
+classify in a general way the various valuable phases of life. In order
+to get a survey of aims sufficiently wide (See ante, p. 110) to give
+breadth and flexibility to the enterprise of education, there is some
+advantage in such a classification. But it is a great mistake to regard
+these values as ultimate ends to which the concrete satisfactions of
+experience are subordinate. They are nothing but generalizations,
+more or less adequate, of concrete goods. Health, wealth, efficiency,
+sociability, utility, culture, happiness itself are only abstract
+terms which sum up a multitude of particulars. To regard such things as
+standards for the valuation of concrete topics and process of education
+is to subordinate to an abstraction the concrete facts from which the
+abstraction is derived. They are not in any true sense standards of
+valuation; these are found, as we have previously seen, in the specific
+realizations which form tastes and habits of preference. They are,
+however, of significance as points of view elevated above the details of
+life whence to survey the field and see how its constituent details are
+distributed, and whether they are well proportioned. No classification
+can have other than a provisional validity. The following may prove of
+some help. We may say that the kind of experience to which the work of
+the schools should contribute is one marked by executive competency in
+the management of resources and obstacles encountered (efficiency);
+by sociability, or interest in the direct companionship of others; by
+aesthetic taste or capacity to appreciate artistic excellence in at
+least some of its classic forms; by trained intellectual method, or
+interest in some mode of scientific achievement; and by sensitiveness
+to the rights and claims of others--conscientiousness. And while these
+considerations are not standards of value, they are useful criteria
+for survey, criticism, and better organization of existing methods and
+subject matter of instruction.
+
+The need of such general points of view is the greater because of a
+tendency to segregate educational values due to the isolation from one
+another of the various pursuits of life. The idea is prevalent that
+different studies represent separate kinds of values, and that the
+curriculum should, therefore, be constituted by gathering together
+various studies till a sufficient variety of independent values have
+been cared for. The following quotation does not use the word value,
+but it contains the notion of a curriculum constructed on the idea that
+there are a number of separate ends to be reached, and that various
+studies may be evaluated by referring each study to its respective end.
+"Memory is trained by most studies, but best by languages and history;
+taste is trained by the more advanced study of languages, and still
+better by English literature; imagination by all higher language
+teaching, but chiefly by Greek and Latin poetry; observation by science
+work in the laboratory, though some training is to be got from the
+earlier stages of Latin and Greek; for expression, Greek and Latin
+composition comes first and English composition next; for abstract
+reasoning, mathematics stands almost alone; for concrete reasoning,
+science comes first, then geometry; for social reasoning, the Greek and
+Roman historians and orators come first, and general history next. Hence
+the narrowest education which can claim to be at all complete includes
+Latin, one modern language, some history, some English literature, and
+one science." There is much in the wording of this passage which is
+irrelevant to our point and which must be discounted to make it clear.
+The phraseology betrays the particular provincial tradition within
+which the author is writing. There is the unquestioned assumption
+of "faculties" to be trained, and a dominant interest in the ancient
+languages; there is comparative disregard of the earth on which men
+happen to live and the bodies they happen to carry around with them.
+But with allowances made for these matters (even with their complete
+abandonment) we find much in contemporary educational philosophy which
+parallels the fundamental notion of parceling out special values to
+segregated studies. Even when some one end is set up as a standard of
+value, like social efficiency or culture, it will often be found to be
+but a verbal heading under which a variety of disconnected factors
+are comprised. And although the general tendency is to allow a greater
+variety of values to a given study than does the passage quoted, yet the
+attempt to inventory a number of values attaching to each study and
+to state the amount of each value which the given study possesses
+emphasizes an implied educational disintegration.
+
+As matter of fact, such schemes of values of studies are largely but
+unconscious justifications of the curriculum with which one is familiar.
+One accepts, for the most part, the studies of the existing course
+and then assigns values to them as a sufficient reason for their being
+taught. Mathematics is said to have, for example, disciplinary value
+in habituating the pupil to accuracy of statement and closeness of
+reasoning; it has utilitarian value in giving command of the arts
+of calculation involved in trade and the arts; culture value in
+its enlargement of the imagination in dealing with the most general
+relations of things; even religious value in its concept of the infinite
+and allied ideas. But clearly mathematics does not accomplish such
+results, because it is endowed with miraculous potencies called values;
+it has these values if and when it accomplishes these results, and not
+otherwise. The statements may help a teacher to a larger vision of the
+possible results to be effected by instruction in mathematical topics.
+But unfortunately, the tendency is to treat the statement as indicating
+powers inherently residing in the subject, whether they operate or not,
+and thus to give it a rigid justification. If they do not operate, the
+blame is put not on the subject as taught, but on the indifference and
+recalcitrancy of pupils.
+
+This attitude toward subjects is the obverse side of the conception of
+experience or life as a patchwork of independent interests which exist
+side by side and limit one another. Students of politics are familiar
+with a check and balance theory of the powers of government. There are
+supposed to be independent separate functions, like the legislative,
+executive, judicial, administrative, and all goes well if each of these
+checks all the others and thus creates an ideal balance. There is a
+philosophy which might well be called the check and balance theory of
+experience. Life presents a diversity of interests. Left to themselves,
+they tend to encroach on one another. The ideal is to prescribe a
+special territory for each till the whole ground of experience is
+covered, and then see to it each remains within its own boundaries.
+Politics, business, recreation, art, science, the learned professions,
+polite intercourse, leisure, represent such interests. Each of these
+ramifies into many branches: business into manual occupations, executive
+positions, bookkeeping, railroading, banking, agriculture, trade and
+commerce, etc., and so with each of the others. An ideal education
+would then supply the means of meeting these separate and pigeon-holed
+interests. And when we look at the schools, it is easy to get the
+impression that they accept this view of the nature of adult life, and
+set for themselves the task of meeting its demands. Each interest is
+acknowledged as a kind of fixed institution to which something in the
+course of study must correspond. The course of study must then have
+some civics and history politically and patriotically viewed: some
+utilitarian studies; some science; some art (mainly literature of
+course); some provision for recreation; some moral education; and so
+on. And it will be found that a large part of current agitation about
+schools is concerned with clamor and controversy about the due meed of
+recognition to be given to each of these interests, and with struggles
+to secure for each its due share in the course of study; or, if this
+does not seem feasible in the existing school system, then to secure a
+new and separate kind of schooling to meet the need. In the multitude of
+educations education is forgotten.
+
+The obvious outcome is congestion of the course of study, overpressure
+and distraction of pupils, and a narrow specialization fatal to the very
+idea of education. But these bad results usually lead to more of the
+same sort of thing as a remedy. When it is perceived that after all the
+requirements of a full life experience are not met, the deficiency is
+not laid to the isolation and narrowness of the teaching of the existing
+subjects, and this recognition made the basis of reorganization of the
+system. No, the lack is something to be made up for by the introduction
+of still another study, or, if necessary, another kind of school. And
+as a rule those who object to the resulting overcrowding and consequent
+superficiality and distraction usually also have recourse to a merely
+quantitative criterion: the remedy is to cut off a great many studies as
+fads and frills, and return to the good old curriculum of the three R's
+in elementary education and the equally good and equally old-fashioned
+curriculum of the classics and mathematics in higher education.
+
+The situation has, of course, its historic explanation. Various epochs
+of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests.
+Each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural
+deposit, like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way
+into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses
+of study, distinct types of schools. With the rapid change of political,
+scientific, and economic interests in the last century, provision had to
+be made for new values. Though the older courses resisted, they have had
+at least in this country to retire their pretensions to a monopoly. They
+have not, however, been reorganized in content and aim; they have only
+been reduced in amount. The new studies, representing the new interests,
+have not been used to transform the method and aim of all instruction;
+they have been injected and added on. The result is a conglomerate, the
+cement of which consists in the mechanics of the school program or time
+table. Thence arises the scheme of values and standards of value which
+we have mentioned.
+
+This situation in education represents the divisions and separations
+which obtain in social life. The variety of interests which should mark
+any rich and balanced experience have been torn asunder and deposited in
+separate institutions with diverse and independent purposes and methods.
+Business is business, science is science, art is art, politics is
+politics, social intercourse is social intercourse, morals is morals,
+recreation is recreation, and so on. Each possesses a separate and
+independent province with its own peculiar aims and ways of proceeding.
+Each contributes to the others only externally and accidentally. All of
+them together make up the whole of life by just apposition and addition.
+What does one expect from business save that it should furnish money,
+to be used in turn for making more money and for support of self and
+family, for buying books and pictures, tickets to concerts which may
+afford culture, and for paying taxes, charitable gifts and other things
+of social and ethical value? How unreasonable to expect that the pursuit
+of business should be itself a culture of the imagination, in breadth
+and refinement; that it should directly, and not through the money which
+it supplies, have social service for its animating principle and be
+conducted as an enterprise in behalf of social organization! The same
+thing is to be said, mutatis mutandis, of the pursuit of art or science
+or politics or religion. Each has become specialized not merely in
+its appliances and its demands upon time, but in its aim and animating
+spirit. Unconsciously, our course of studies and our theories of the
+educational values of studies reflect this division of interests. The
+point at issue in a theory of educational value is then the unity or
+integrity of experience. How shall it be full and varied without losing
+unity of spirit? How shall it be one and yet not narrow and monotonous
+in its unity? Ultimately, the question of values and a standard of
+values is the moral question of the organization of the interests of
+life. Educationally, the question concerns that organization of schools,
+materials, and methods which will operate to achieve breadth and
+richness of experience. How shall we secure breadth of outlook without
+sacrificing efficiency of execution? How shall we secure the diversity
+of interests, without paying the price of isolation? How shall the
+individual be rendered executive in his intelligence instead of at the
+cost of his intelligence? How shall art, science, and politics reinforce
+one another in an enriched temper of mind instead of constituting ends
+pursued at one another's expense? How can the interests of life and the
+studies which enforce them enrich the common experience of men instead
+of dividing men from one another? With the questions of reorganization
+thus suggested, we shall be concerned in the concluding chapters.
+
+Summary. Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value
+have been covered in the prior discussion of aims and interests. But
+since educational values are generally discussed in connection with the
+claims of the various studies of the curriculum, the consideration
+of aim and interest is here resumed from the point of view of special
+studies. The term "value" has two quite different meanings. On the one
+hand, it denotes the attitude of prizing a thing finding it worth
+while, for its own sake, or intrinsically. This is a name for a full
+or complete experience. To value in this sense is to appreciate. But
+to value also means a distinctively intellectual act--an operation
+of comparing and judging--to valuate. This occurs when direct full
+experience is lacking, and the question arises which of the various
+possibilities of a situation is to be preferred in order to reach a full
+realization, or vital experience.
+
+We must not, however, divide the studies of the curriculum into
+the appreciative, those concerned with intrinsic value, and the
+instrumental, concerned with those which are of value or ends beyond
+themselves. The formation of proper standards in any subject depends
+upon a realization of the contribution which it makes to the immediate
+significance of experience, upon a direct appreciation. Literature and
+the fine arts are of peculiar value because they represent appreciation
+at its best--a heightened realization of meaning through selection and
+concentration. But every subject at some phase of its development should
+possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic
+quality.
+
+Contribution to immediate intrinsic values in all their variety
+in experience is the only criterion for determining the worth of
+instrumental and derived values in studies. The tendency to assign
+separate values to each study and to regard the curriculum in its
+entirety as a kind of composite made by the aggregation of segregated
+values is a result of the isolation of social groups and classes. Hence
+it is the business of education in a democratic social group to struggle
+against this isolation in order that the various interests may reinforce
+and play into one another.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
+
+1. The Origin of the Opposition.
+
+The isolation of aims and values which we have been considering leads to
+opposition between them. Probably the most deep-seated antithesis which
+has shown itself in educational history is that between education in
+preparation for useful labor and education for a life of leisure. The
+bare terms "useful labor" and "leisure" confirm the statement already
+made that the segregation and conflict of values are not self-inclosed,
+but reflect a division within social life. Were the two functions
+of gaining a livelihood by work and enjoying in a cultivated way the
+opportunities of leisure, distributed equally among the different
+members of a community, it would not occur to any one that there was
+any conflict of educational agencies and aims involved. It would be
+self-evident that the question was how education could contribute most
+effectively to both. And while it might be found that some materials of
+instruction chiefly accomplished one result and other subject matter
+the other, it would be evident that care must be taken to secure as
+much overlapping as conditions permit; that is, the education which had
+leisure more directly in view should indirectly reinforce as much as
+possible the efficiency and the enjoyment of work, while that aiming at
+the latter should produce habits of emotion and intellect which would
+procure a worthy cultivation of leisure. These general considerations
+are amply borne out by the historical development of educational
+philosophy. The separation of liberal education from professional
+and industrial education goes back to the time of the Greeks, and was
+formulated expressly on the basis of a division of classes into those
+who had to labor for a living and those who were relieved from this
+necessity. The conception that liberal education, adapted to men in the
+latter class, is intrinsically higher than the servile training given
+to the latter class reflected the fact that one class was free and the
+other servile in its social status. The latter class labored not only
+for its own subsistence, but also for the means which enabled the
+superior class to live without personally engaging in occupations
+taking almost all the time and not of a nature to engage or reward
+intelligence.
+
+That a certain amount of labor must be engaged in goes without saying.
+Human beings have to live and it requires work to supply the resources
+of life. Even if we insist that the interests connected with getting
+a living are only material and hence intrinsically lower than those
+connected with enjoyment of time released from labor, and even if it
+were admitted that there is something engrossing and insubordinate
+in material interests which leads them to strive to usurp the place
+belonging to the higher ideal interests, this would not--barring
+the fact of socially divided classes--lead to neglect of the kind of
+education which trains men for the useful pursuits. It would rather lead
+to scrupulous care for them, so that men were trained to be efficient in
+them and yet to keep them in their place; education would see to it
+that we avoided the evil results which flow from their being allowed to
+flourish in obscure purlieus of neglect. Only when a division of these
+interests coincides with a division of an inferior and a superior social
+class will preparation for useful work be looked down upon with contempt
+as an unworthy thing: a fact which prepares one for the conclusion that
+the rigid identification of work with material interests, and leisure
+with ideal interests is itself a social product. The educational
+formulations of the social situation made over two thousand years ago
+have been so influential and give such a clear and logical recognition
+of the implications of the division into laboring and leisure classes,
+that they deserve especial note. According to them, man occupies the
+highest place in the scheme of animate existence. In part, he shares
+the constitution and functions of plants and animals--nutritive,
+reproductive, motor or practical. The distinctively human function is
+reason existing for the sake of beholding the spectacle of the universe.
+Hence the truly human end is the fullest possible of this distinctive
+human prerogative. The life of observation, meditation, cogitation, and
+speculation pursued as an end in itself is the proper life of man. From
+reason moreover proceeds the proper control of the lower elements
+of human nature--the appetites and the active, motor, impulses. In
+themselves greedy, insubordinate, lovers of excess, aiming only at their
+own satiety, they observe moderation--the law of the mean--and serve
+desirable ends as they are subjected to the rule of reason.
+
+Such is the situation as an affair of theoretical psychology and as most
+adequately stated by Aristotle. But this state of things is reflected
+in the constitution of classes of men and hence in the organization of
+society. Only in a comparatively small number is the function of reason
+capable of operating as a law of life. In the mass of people, vegetative
+and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble
+and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and
+passion. Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason
+constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they
+are means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves,
+although unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain
+discretion in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by
+nature, and not merely by social convention, there are those who are
+slaves--that is, means for the ends of others. 1 The great body of
+artisans are in one important respect worse off than even slaves.
+Like the latter they are given up to the service of ends external to
+themselves; but since they do not enjoy the intimate association with
+the free superior class experienced by domestic slaves they remain on a
+lower plane of excellence. Moreover, women are classed with slaves and
+craftsmen as factors among the animate instrumentalities of production
+and reproduction of the means for a free or rational life.
+
+Individually and collectively there is a gulf between merely living and
+living worthily. In order that one may live worthily he must first live,
+and so with collective society. The time and energy spent upon mere
+life, upon the gaining of subsistence, detracts from that available for
+activities that have an inherent rational meaning; they also unfit for
+the latter. Means are menial, the serviceable is servile. The true life
+is possible only in the degree in which the physical necessities are had
+without effort and without attention. Hence slaves, artisans, and
+women are employed in furnishing the means of subsistence in order that
+others, those adequately equipped with intelligence, may live the life
+of leisurely concern with things intrinsically worth while.
+
+To these two modes of occupation, with their distinction of servile and
+free activities (or "arts") correspond two types of education: the base
+or mechanical and the liberal or intellectual. Some persons are trained
+by suitable practical exercises for capacity in doing things, for
+ability to use the mechanical tools involved in turning out physical
+commodities and rendering personal service. This training is a
+mere matter of habituation and technical skill; it operates through
+repetition and assiduity in application, not through awakening and
+nurturing thought. Liberal education aims to train intelligence for its
+proper office: to know. The less this knowledge has to do with practical
+affairs, with making or producing, the more adequately it engages
+intelligence. So consistently does Aristotle draw the line between
+menial and liberal education that he puts what are now called the "fine"
+arts, music, painting, sculpture, in the same class with menial arts
+so far as their practice is concerned. They involve physical agencies,
+assiduity of practice, and external results. In discussing, for example,
+education in music he raises the question how far the young should
+be practiced in the playing of instruments. His answer is that such
+practice and proficiency may be tolerated as conduce to appreciation;
+that is, to understanding and enjoyment of music when played by slaves
+or professionals. When professional power is aimed at, music sinks from
+the liberal to the professional level. One might then as well teach
+cooking, says Aristotle. Even a liberal concern with the works of fine
+art depends upon the existence of a hireling class of practitioners who
+have subordinated the development of their own personality to attaining
+skill in mechanical execution. The higher the activity the more purely
+mental is it; the less does it have to do with physical things or
+with the body. The more purely mental it is, the more independent or
+self-sufficing is it.
+
+These last words remind us that Aristotle again makes a distinction of
+superior and inferior even within those living the life of reason. For
+there is a distinction in ends and in free action, according as one's
+life is merely accompanied by reason or as it makes reason its own
+medium. That is to say, the free citizen who devotes himself to the
+public life of his community, sharing in the management of its affairs
+and winning personal honor and distinction, lives a life accompanied
+by reason. But the thinker, the man who devotes himself to scientific
+inquiry and philosophic speculation, works, so to speak, in reason, not
+simply by *. Even the activity of the citizen in his civic relations,
+in other words, retains some of the taint of practice, of external or
+merely instrumental doing. This infection is shown by the fact that
+civic activity and civic excellence need the help of others; one cannot
+engage in public life all by himself. But all needs, all desires imply,
+in the philosophy of Aristotle, a material factor; they involve lack,
+privation; they are dependent upon something beyond themselves for
+completion. A purely intellectual life, however, one carries on by
+himself, in himself; such assistance as he may derive from others is
+accidental, rather than intrinsic. In knowing, in the life of theory,
+reason finds its own full manifestation; knowing for the sake of knowing
+irrespective of any application is alone independent, or self-sufficing.
+Hence only the education that makes for power to know as an end in
+itself, without reference to the practice of even civic duties, is
+truly liberal or free. 2. The Present Situation. If the Aristotelian
+conception represented just Aristotle's personal view, it would be a
+more or less interesting historical curiosity. It could be dismissed
+as an illustration of the lack of sympathy or the amount of academic
+pedantry which may coexist with extraordinary intellectual gifts.
+But Aristotle simply described without confusion and without that
+insincerity always attendant upon mental confusion, the life that was
+before him. That the actual social situation has greatly changed since
+his day there is no need to say. But in spite of these changes, in spite
+of the abolition of legal serfdom, and the spread of democracy, with
+the extension of science and of general education (in books, newspapers,
+travel, and general intercourse as well as in schools), there remains
+enough of a cleavage of society into a learned and an unlearned class,
+a leisure and a laboring class, to make his point of view a most
+enlightening one from which to criticize the separation between culture
+and utility in present education. Behind the intellectual and abstract
+distinction as it figures in pedagogical discussion, there looms a
+social distinction between those whose pursuits involve a minimum of
+self-directive thought and aesthetic appreciation, and those who are
+concerned more directly with things of the intelligence and with the
+control of the activities of others.
+
+Aristotle was certainly permanently right when he said that "any
+occupation or art or study deserves to be called mechanical if it
+renders the body or soul or intellect of free persons unfit for the
+exercise and practice of excellence." The force of the statement is
+almost infinitely increased when we hold, as we nominally do at present,
+that all persons, instead of a comparatively few, are free. For when the
+mass of men and all women were regarded as unfree by the very nature
+of their bodies and minds, there was neither intellectual confusion nor
+moral hypocrisy in giving them only the training which fitted them
+for mechanical skill, irrespective of its ulterior effect upon their
+capacity to share in a worthy life. He was permanently right also when
+he went on to say that "all mercenary employments as well as those which
+degrade the condition of the body are mechanical, since they deprive
+the intellect of leisure and dignity,"--permanently right, that is,
+if gainful pursuits as matter of fact deprive the intellect of the
+conditions of its exercise and so of its dignity. If his statements
+are false, it is because they identify a phase of social custom with
+a natural necessity. But a different view of the relations of mind and
+matter, mind and body, intelligence and social service, is better than
+Aristotle's conception only if it helps render the old idea obsolete
+in fact--in the actual conduct of life and education. Aristotle was
+permanently right in assuming the inferiority and subordination of
+mere skill in performance and mere accumulation of external products to
+understanding, sympathy of appreciation, and the free play of ideas. If
+there was an error, it lay in assuming the necessary separation of the
+two: in supposing that there is a natural divorce between efficiency in
+producing commodities and rendering service, and self-directive thought;
+between significant knowledge and practical achievement. We hardly
+better matters if we just correct his theoretical misapprehension, and
+tolerate the social state of affairs which generated and sanctioned
+his conception. We lose rather than gain in change from serfdom to
+free citizenship if the most prized result of the change is simply an
+increase in the mechanical efficiency of the human tools of production.
+So we lose rather than gain in coming to think of intelligence as an
+organ of control of nature through action, if we are content that an
+unintelligent, unfree state persists in those who engage directly in
+turning nature to use, and leave the intelligence which controls to be
+the exclusive possession of remote scientists and captains of industry.
+We are in a position honestly to criticize the division of life into
+separate functions and of society into separate classes only so far
+as we are free from responsibility for perpetuating the educational
+practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in
+production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a
+cultural embellishment. In short, ability to transcend the Greek
+philosophy of life and education is not secured by a mere shifting about
+of the theoretical symbols meaning free, rational, and worthy. It is not
+secured by a change of sentiment regarding the dignity of labor, and
+the superiority of a life of service to that of an aloof self-sufficing
+independence. Important as these theoretical and emotional changes
+are, their importance consists in their being turned to account in the
+development of a truly democratic society, a society in which all share
+in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure. It is not a mere
+change in the concepts of culture--or a liberal mind--and social service
+which requires an educational reorganization; but the educational
+transformation is needed to give full and explicit effect to the
+changes implied in social life. The increased political and economic
+emancipation of the "masses" has shown itself in education; it has
+effected the development of a common school system of education, public
+and free. It has destroyed the idea that learning is properly a monopoly
+of the few who are predestined by nature to govern social affairs. But
+the revolution is still incomplete. The idea still prevails that a truly
+cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly
+at least, with industrial affairs, and that the education which is fit
+for the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense which
+opposes useful and practical to nurture of appreciation and liberation
+of thought. As a consequence, our actual system is an inconsistent
+mixture. Certain studies and methods are retained on the supposition
+that they have the sanction of peculiar liberality, the chief content
+of the term liberal being uselessness for practical ends. This aspect
+is chiefly visible in what is termed the higher education--that of the
+college and of preparation for it. But is has filtered through into
+elementary education and largely controls its processes and aims. But,
+on the other hand, certain concessions have been made to the masses
+who must engage in getting a livelihood and to the increased role of
+economic activities in modern life. These concessions are exhibited in
+special schools and courses for the professions, for engineering, for
+manual training and commerce, in vocational and prevocational courses;
+and in the spirit in which certain elementary subjects, like the three
+R's, are taught. The result is a system in which both "cultural" and
+"utilitarian" subjects exist in an inorganic composite where the former
+are not by dominant purpose socially serviceable and the latter not
+liberative of imagination or thinking power.
+
+In the inherited situation, there is a curious intermingling, in even
+the same study, of concession to usefulness and a survival of traits
+once exclusively attributed to preparation for leisure. The "utility"
+element is found in the motives assigned for the study, the "liberal"
+element in methods of teaching. The outcome of the mixture is perhaps
+less satisfactory than if either principle were adhered to in its
+purity. The motive popularly assigned for making the studies of the
+first four or five years consist almost entirely of reading, spelling,
+writing, and arithmetic, is, for example, that ability to read, write,
+and figure accurately is indispensable to getting ahead. These studies
+are treated as mere instruments for entering upon a gainful employment
+or of later progress in the pursuit of learning, according as pupils do
+not or do remain in school. This attitude is reflected in the emphasis
+put upon drill and practice for the sake of gaining automatic skill.
+If we turn to Greek schooling, we find that from the earliest years the
+acquisition of skill was subordinated as much as possible to acquisition
+of literary content possessed of aesthetic and moral significance. Not
+getting a tool for subsequent use but present subject matter was the
+emphasized thing. Nevertheless the isolation of these studies from
+practical application, their reduction to purely symbolic devices,
+represents a survival of the idea of a liberal training divorced from
+utility. A thorough adoption of the idea of utility would have led to
+instruction which tied up the studies to situations in which they
+were directly needed and where they were rendered immediately and not
+remotely helpful. It would be hard to find a subject in the curriculum
+within which there are not found evil results of a compromise between
+the two opposed ideals. Natural science is recommended on the ground
+of its practical utility, but is taught as a special accomplishment in
+removal from application. On the other hand, music and literature are
+theoretically justified on the ground of their culture value and are
+then taught with chief emphasis upon forming technical modes of skill.
+
+If we had less compromise and resulting confusion, if we analyzed more
+carefully the respective meanings of culture and utility, we might find
+it easier to construct a course of study which should be useful and
+liberal at the same time. Only superstition makes us believe that the
+two are necessarily hostile so that a subject is illiberal because it
+is useful and cultural because it is useless. It will generally be found
+that instruction which, in aiming at utilitarian results, sacrifices the
+development of imagination, the refining of taste and the deepening of
+intellectual insight--surely cultural values--also in the same degree
+renders what is learned limited in its use. Not that it makes it
+wholly unavailable but that its applicability is restricted to routine
+activities carried on under the supervision of others. Narrow modes of
+skill cannot be made useful beyond themselves; any mode of skill which
+is achieved with deepening of knowledge and perfecting of judgment is
+readily put to use in new situations and is under personal control. It
+was not the bare fact of social and economic utility which made certain
+activities seem servile to the Greeks but the fact that the activities
+directly connected with getting a livelihood were not, in their days,
+the expression of a trained intelligence nor carried on because of a
+personal appreciation of their meaning. So far as farming and the trades
+were rule-of-thumb occupations and so far as they were engaged in for
+results external to the minds of agricultural laborers and mechanics,
+they were illiberal--but only so far. The intellectual and social
+context has now changed. The elements in industry due to mere custom and
+routine have become subordinate in most economic callings to elements
+derived from scientific inquiry. The most important occupations of today
+represent and depend upon applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
+The area of the human world influenced by economic production
+and influencing consumption has been so indefinitely widened that
+geographical and political considerations of an almost infinitely wide
+scope enter in. It was natural for Plato to deprecate the learning of
+geometry and arithmetic for practical ends, because as matter of fact
+the practical uses to which they were put were few, lacking in content
+and mostly mercenary in quality. But as their social uses have increased
+and enlarged, their liberalizing or "intellectual" value and their
+practical value approach the same limit.
+
+Doubtless the factor which chiefly prevents our full recognition and
+employment of this identification is the conditions under which so much
+work is still carried on. The invention of machines has extended the
+amount of leisure which is possible even while one is at work. It is a
+commonplace that the mastery of skill in the form of established habits
+frees the mind for a higher order of thinking. Something of the same
+kind is true of the introduction of mechanically automatic operations in
+industry. They may release the mind for thought upon other topics. But
+when we confine the education of those who work with their hands to a
+few years of schooling devoted for the most part to acquiring the use of
+rudimentary symbols at the expense of training in science, literature,
+and history, we fail to prepare the minds of workers to take advantage
+of this opportunity. More fundamental is the fact that the great
+majority of workers have no insight into the social aims of their
+pursuits and no direct personal interest in them. The results actually
+achieved are not the ends of their actions, but only of their employers.
+They do what they do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of
+the wage earned. It is this fact which makes the action illiberal, and
+which will make any education designed simply to give skill in such
+undertakings illiberal and immoral. The activity is not free because not
+freely participated in.
+
+Nevertheless, there is already an opportunity for an education which,
+keeping in mind the larger features of work, will reconcile liberal
+nurture with training in social serviceableness, with ability to share
+efficiently and happily in occupations which are productive. And such an
+education will of itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing
+economic situation. In the degree in which men have an active concern
+in the ends that control their activity, their activity becomes free or
+voluntary and loses its externally enforced and servile quality, even
+though the physical aspect of behavior remain the same. In what is
+termed politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this
+direct participation in control: in the economic region, control remains
+external and autocratic. Hence the split between inner mental action and
+outer physical action of which the traditional distinction between the
+liberal and the utilitarian is the reflex. An education which should
+unify the disposition of the members of society would do much to unify
+society itself.
+
+Summary. Of the segregations of educational values discussed in the
+last chapter, that between culture and utility is probably the most
+fundamental. While the distinction is often thought to be intrinsic and
+absolute, it is really historical and social. It originated, so far as
+conscious formulation is concerned, in Greece, and was based upon the
+fact that the truly human life was lived only by a few who subsisted
+upon the results of the labor of others. This fact affected the
+psychological doctrine of the relation of intelligence and desire,
+theory and practice. It was embodied in a political theory of a
+permanent division of human beings into those capable of a life of
+reason and hence having their own ends, and those capable only of desire
+and work, and needing to have their ends provided by others. The two
+distinctions, psychological and political, translated into educational
+terms, effected a division between a liberal education, having to do
+with the self-sufficing life of leisure devoted to knowing for its
+own sake, and a useful, practical training for mechanical occupations,
+devoid of intellectual and aesthetic content. While the present
+situation is radically diverse in theory and much changed in fact, the
+factors of the older historic situation still persist sufficiently to
+maintain the educational distinction, along with compromises which
+often reduce the efficacy of the educational measures. The problem of
+education in a democratic society is to do away with the dualism and
+to construct a course of studies which makes thought a guide of
+free practice for all and which makes leisure a reward of accepting
+responsibility for service, rather than a state of exemption from it.
+
+1 Aristotle does not hold that the class of actual slaves and of natural
+slaves necessarily coincide.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
+
+1. The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge. As livelihood
+and leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice, intelligence
+and execution, knowledge and activity. The latter set of oppositions
+doubtless springs from the same social conditions which produce the
+former conflict; but certain definite problems of education connected
+with them make it desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the
+relationship and alleged separation of knowing and doing.
+
+The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
+practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has
+a long history. The history so far as conscious statement is concerned
+takes us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated
+by Plato and Aristotle. Much as these thinkers differed in many
+respects, they agreed in identifying experience with purely practical
+concerns; and hence with material interests as to its purpose and with
+the body as to its organ. Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its
+own sake free from practical reference, and found its source and organ
+in a purely immaterial mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal
+interests. Again, experience always involved lack, need, desire; it was
+never self-sufficing. Rational knowing on the other hand, was complete
+and comprehensive within itself. Hence the practical life was in a
+condition of perpetual flux, while intellectual knowledge concerned
+eternal truth.
+
+This sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that Athenian
+philosophy began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of
+knowledge and conduct. In a search for something to replace them, it
+hit upon reason as the only adequate guide of belief and activity. Since
+custom and tradition were identified with experience, it followed at
+once that reason was superior to experience. Moreover, experience, not
+content with its proper position of subordination, was the great foe
+to the acknowledgment of the authority of reason. Since custom and
+traditionary beliefs held men in bondage, the struggle of reason for
+its legitimate supremacy could be won only by showing the inherently
+unstable and inadequate nature of experience. The statement of Plato
+that philosophers should be kings may best be understood as a statement
+that rational intelligence and not habit, appetite, impulse, and emotion
+should regulate human affairs. The former secures unity, order, and law;
+the latter signify multiplicity and discord, irrational fluctuations
+from one estate to another.
+
+The grounds for the identification of experience with the unsatisfactory
+condition of things, the state of affairs represented by rule of mere
+custom, are not far to seek. Increasing trade and travel, colonizations,
+migrations and wars, had broadened the intellectual horizon. The customs
+and beliefs of different communities were found to diverge sharply
+from one another. Civil disturbance had become a custom in Athens;
+the fortunes of the city seemed given over to strife of factions. The
+increase of leisure coinciding with the broadening of the horizon had
+brought into ken many new facts of nature and had stimulated curiosity
+and speculation. The situation tended to raise the question as to the
+existence of anything constant and universal in the realm of nature and
+society. Reason was the faculty by which the universal principle and
+essence is apprehended; while the senses were the organs of perceiving
+change,--the unstable and the diverse as against the permanent and
+uniform. The results of the work of the senses, preserved in memory
+and imagination, and applied in the skill given by habit, constituted
+experience.
+
+Experience at its best is thus represented in the various
+handicrafts--the arts of peace and war. The cobbler, the flute player,
+the soldier, have undergone the discipline of experience to acquire the
+skill they have. This means that the bodily organs, particularly the
+senses, have had repeated contact with things and that the result of
+these contacts has been preserved and consolidated till ability in
+foresight and in practice had been secured. Such was the essential
+meaning of the term "empirical." It suggested a knowledge and an ability
+not based upon insight into principles, but expressing the result of a
+large number of separate trials. It expressed the idea now conveyed by
+"method of trial and error," with especial emphasis upon the more or
+less accidental character of the trials. So far as ability of control,
+of management, was concerned, it amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure,
+to routine. If new circumstances resembled the past, it might work well
+enough; in the degree in which they deviated, failure was likely. Even
+to-day to speak of a physician as an empiricist is to imply that he
+lacks scientific training, and that he is proceeding simply on the basis
+of what he happens to have got out of the chance medley of his past
+practice. Just because of the lack of science or reason in "experience"
+it is hard to keep it at its poor best. The empiric easily degenerates
+into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves
+off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to
+pretend--to make claims for which there is no justification, and
+to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others--to "bluff."
+Moreover, he assumes that because he has learned one thing, he knows
+others--as the history of Athens showed that the common craftsmen
+thought they could manage household affairs, education, and politics,
+because they had learned to do the specific things of their trades.
+Experience is always hovering, then, on the edge of pretense, of sham,
+of seeming, and appearance, in distinction from the reality upon which
+reason lays hold.
+
+The philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this state
+of affairs. The senses are connected with the appetites, with wants and
+desires. They lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation
+which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of
+wants and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the
+life of the body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life.
+Experience thus has a definitely material character; it has to do
+with physical things in relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or
+science, lays hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is
+something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as sensual,
+carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure reason and
+spirit connote something morally praiseworthy. Moreover, ineradicable
+connection with the changing, the inexplicably shifting, and with the
+manifold, the diverse, clings to experience. Its material is inherently
+variable and untrustworthy. It is anarchic, because unstable. The man
+who trusts to experience does not know what he depends upon, since it
+changes from person to person, from day to day, to say nothing of
+from country to country. Its connection with the "many," with various
+particulars, has the same effect, and also carries conflict in its
+train.
+
+Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. Out of
+experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts within
+the individual and between individuals. From experience no standard
+of belief can issue, because it is the very nature of experience to
+instigate all kinds of contrary beliefs, as varieties of local custom
+proved. Its logical outcome is that anything is good and true to the
+particular individual which his experience leads him to believe true and
+good at a particular time and place. Finally practice falls of necessity
+within experience. Doing proceeds from needs and aims at change. To
+produce or to make is to alter something; to consume is to alter. All
+the obnoxious characters of change and diversity thus attach themselves
+to doing while knowing is as permanent as its object. To know, to grasp
+a thing intellectually or theoretically, is to be out of the region of
+vicissitude, chance, and diversity. Truth has no lack; it is untouched
+by the perturbations of the world of sense. It deals with the eternal
+and the universal. And the world of experience can be brought under
+control, can be steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law
+of reason.
+
+It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions persisted
+in full technical definiteness. But they all of them profoundly
+influenced men's subsequent thinking and their ideas about education.
+The contempt for physical as compared with mathematical and logical
+science, for the senses and sense observation; the feeling that
+knowledge is high and worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal
+symbols instead of with the concrete; the scorn of particulars except
+as they are deductively brought under a universal; the disregard for
+the body; the depreciation of arts and crafts as intellectual
+instrumentalities, all sought shelter and found sanction under this
+estimate of the respective values of experience and reason--or, what
+came to the same thing, of the practical and the intellectual. Medieval
+philosophy continued and reinforced the tradition. To know reality
+meant to be in relation to the supreme reality, or God, and to enjoy the
+eternal bliss of that relation. Contemplation of supreme reality was the
+ultimate end of man to which action is subordinate. Experience had to
+do with mundane, profane, and secular affairs, practically necessary
+indeed, but of little import in comparison with supernatural objects
+of knowledge. When we add to this motive the force derived from the
+literary character of the Roman education and the Greek philosophic
+tradition, and conjoin to them the preference for studies which
+obviously demarcated the aristocratic class from the lower classes, we
+can readily understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent
+preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply in
+educational philosophies but in the higher schools. 2. The Modern Theory
+of Experience and Knowledge. As we shall see later, the development of
+experimentation as a method of knowledge makes possible and necessitates
+a radical transformation of the view just set forth. But before
+coming to that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge
+developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, it
+presents us with an almost complete reversal of the classic doctrine
+of the relations of experience and reason. To Plato experience meant
+habituation, or the conservation of the net product of a lot of past
+chance trials. Reason meant the principle of reform, of progress, of
+increase of control. Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking
+through the limitations of custom and getting at things as they really
+were. To the modern reformers, the situation was the other way around.
+Reason, universal principles, a priori notions, meant either blank forms
+which had to be filled in by experience, by sense observations, in
+order to get significance and validity; or else were mere indurated
+prejudices, dogmas imposed by authority, which masqueraded and found
+protection under august names. The great need was to break way from
+captivity to conceptions which, as Bacon put it, "anticipated nature"
+and imposed merely human opinions upon her, and to resort to experience
+to find out what nature was like. Appeal to experience marked the breach
+with authority. It meant openness to new impressions; eagerness
+in discovery and invention instead of absorption in tabulating and
+systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of the
+relations they sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the
+mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over
+them by preconceived ideas.
+
+The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it
+had borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing
+and being done to, and became a name for something intellectual and
+cognitive. It meant the apprehension of material which should ballast
+and check the exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic
+empiricist and by his opponent, experience has been looked upon just as
+a way of knowing. The only question was how good a way it is. The
+result was an even greater "intellectualism" than is found in ancient
+philosophy, if that word be used to designate an emphatic and almost
+exclusive interest in knowledge in its isolation. Practice was not
+so much subordinated to knowledge as treated as a kind of tag-end or
+aftermath of knowledge. The educational result was only to confirm the
+exclusion of active pursuits from the school, save as they might be
+brought in for purely utilitarian ends--the acquisition by drill of
+certain habits. In the second place, the interest in experience as a
+means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the
+mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the more truly
+objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a hand, so
+to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate
+true knowledge--to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a maximum of
+receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by objects were
+generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a doctrine of
+sensationalism--that is to say, a doctrine which identified knowledge
+with the reception and association of sensory impressions. In
+John Locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we find this
+sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties,
+like discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction, and
+generalization which work up the material of sense into definite and
+organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own account,
+such as the fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics. (See
+ante, p. 61.) But some of his successors, especially in France in the
+latter part of the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the
+limit; they regarded discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations
+made in us by the conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held
+that the mind is a blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing
+engraved on it at birth (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of ideas
+were concerned, but had endowed it with activities to be exercised upon
+the material received. His French successors razed away the powers and
+derived them also from impressions received.
+
+As we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new interest
+in education as method of social reform. (See ante, p. 93.) The emptier
+the mind to begin with, the more it may be made anything we wish by
+bringing the right influences to bear upon it. Thus Helvetius, perhaps
+the most extreme and consistent sensationalist, proclaimed that
+education could do anything--that it was omnipotent. Within the sphere
+of school instruction, empiricism found its directly beneficial office
+in protesting against mere book learning. If knowledge comes from the
+impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure
+knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind. Words,
+all kinds of linguistic symbols, in the lack of prior presentations of
+objects with which they may be associated, convey nothing but sensations
+of their own shape and color--certainly not a very instructive kind of
+knowledge. Sensationalism was an extremely handy weapon with which
+to combat doctrines and opinions resting wholly upon tradition and
+authority. With respect to all of them, it set up a test: Where are the
+real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are received? If such
+objects could not be produced, ideas were explained as the result of
+false associations and combinations. Empiricism also insisted upon a
+first-hand element. The impression must be made upon me, upon my
+mind. The further we get away from this direct, first-hand source of
+knowledge, the more numerous the sources of error, and the vaguer the
+resulting idea.
+
+
+As might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the positive
+side. Of course, the value of natural objects and firsthand acquaintance
+was not dependent upon the truth of the theory. Introduced into the
+schools they would do their work, even if the sensational theory about
+the way in which they did it was quite wrong. So far, there is nothing
+to complain of. But the emphasis upon sensationalism also operated to
+influence the way in which natural objects were employed, and to prevent
+full good being got from them. "Object lessons" tended to isolate the
+mere sense-activity and make it an end in itself. The more isolated the
+object, the more isolated the sensory quality, the more distinct the
+sense-impression as a unit of knowledge. The theory worked not only
+in the direction of this mechanical isolation, which tended to reduce
+instruction to a kind of physical gymnastic of the sense-organs (good
+like any gymnastic of bodily organs, but not more so), but also to
+the neglect of thinking. According to the theory there was no need of
+thinking in connection with sense-observation; in fact, in strict
+theory such thinking would be impossible till afterwards, for thinking
+consisted simply in combining and separating sensory units which had
+been received without any participation of judgment.
+
+As a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education
+upon a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least
+after the early years of infancy. Its obvious deficiencies have caused
+it to be resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge
+(that is to say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and
+modes of application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for
+lending greater "interest" to barren symbols. There are at least
+three serious defects of sensationalistic empiricism as an educational
+philosophy of knowledge. (a) the historical value of the theory was
+critical; it was a dissolvent of current beliefs about the world and
+political institutions. It was a destructive organ of criticism of
+hard and fast dogmas. But the work of education is constructive, not
+critical. It assumes not old beliefs to be eliminated and revised, but
+the need of building up new experience into intellectual habitudes as
+correct as possible from the start. Sensationalism is highly unfitted
+for this constructive task. Mind, understanding, denotes responsiveness
+to meanings (ante, p. 29), not response to direct physical stimuli. And
+meaning exists only with reference to a context, which is excluded
+by any scheme which identifies knowledge with a combination of
+sense-impressions. The theory, so far as educationally applied, led
+either to a magnification of mere physical excitations or else to a mere
+heaping up of isolated objects and qualities.
+
+(b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it
+also has the disadvantage of being limited in range. Direct acquaintance
+with the natural surroundings of the home environment so as to give
+reality to ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of the
+senses, and as a means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one
+thing. As an end-all and be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally
+restricted. In precisely analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and
+counters may be helpful aids to a realization of numerical relations,
+but when employed except as aids to thought--the apprehension of
+meaning--they become an obstacle to the growth of arithmetical
+understanding. They arrest growth on a low plane, the plane of specific
+physical symbols. Just as the race developed especial symbols as tools
+of calculation and mathematical reasonings, because the use of the
+fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the individual must
+progress from concrete to abstract symbols--that is, symbols whose
+meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. And undue
+absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers this
+growth. (c) A thoroughly false psychology of mental development
+underlay sensationalistic empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter
+of activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with
+things. What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received
+quality impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of
+handling, throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the
+consequent effect of the object upon the direction of activities. (See
+ante, p. 140.) Fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the
+ancient notion of experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that
+the modern notion of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The
+neglect of the deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a
+fatal defect of the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more
+uninteresting and mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which
+ignores and as far as may be excludes the natural tendency to learn
+about the qualities of objects by the uses to which they are put through
+trying to do something with them.
+
+It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience
+represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical
+assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished
+a satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. Its educational
+influence was confined to injecting a new factor into the older
+curriculum, with incidental modifications of the older studies and
+methods. It introduced greater regard for observation of things directly
+and through pictures and graphic descriptions, and it reduced the
+importance attached to verbal symbolization. But its own scope was
+so meager that it required supplementation by information concerning
+matters outside of sense-perception and by matters which appealed
+more directly to thought. Consequently it left unimpaired the scope of
+informational and abstract, or "rationalistic" studies.
+
+3. Experience as Experimentation. It has already been intimated that
+sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience
+justified by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by
+modern scientific procedure. With respect to the former, it omits the
+primary position of active response which puts things to use and which
+learns about them through discovering the consequences that result from
+use. It would seem as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of
+the way an infant gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the
+notion that he is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated
+ready-made qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it would
+be seen that the infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling,
+reaching, etc., in order to see what results follow upon motor response
+to a sensory stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not
+isolated qualities, but the behavior which may be expected from a thing,
+and the changes in things and persons which an activity may be expected
+to produce. In other words, what he learns are connections. Even such
+qualities as red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated
+and identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
+consequences these activities effect. We learn what things are hard and
+what are soft by finding out through active experimentation what they
+respectively will do and what can be done and what cannot be done with
+them. In like fashion, children learn about persons by finding out what
+responsive activities these persons exact and what these persons will
+do in reply to the children's activities. And the combination of what
+things do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind) in
+modifying our actions, furthering some of them and resisting and
+checking others, and what we can do to them in producing new changes
+constitutes experience. The methods of science by which the revolution
+in our knowledge of the world dating from the seventeenth century, was
+brought about, teach the same lesson. For these methods are nothing but
+experimentation carried out under conditions of deliberate control. To
+the Greek, it seemed absurd that such an activity as, say, the cobbler
+punching holes in leather, or using wax and needle and thread, could
+give an adequate knowledge of the world. It seemed almost axiomatic
+that for true knowledge we must have recourse to concepts coming from a
+reason above experience. But the introduction of the experimental method
+signified precisely that such operations, carried on under conditions
+of control, are just the ways in which fruitful ideas about nature are
+obtained and tested. In other words, it is only needed to conduct such
+an operation as the pouring of an acid on a metal for the purpose of
+getting knowledge instead of for the purpose of getting a trade result,
+in order to lay hold of the principle upon which the science of nature
+was henceforth to depend. Sense perceptions were indeed indispensable,
+but there was less reliance upon sense perceptions in their natural or
+customary form than in the older science. They were no longer regarded
+as containing within themselves some "form" or "species" of universal
+kind in a disguised mask of sense which could be stripped off by
+rational thought. On the contrary, the first thing was to alter and
+extend the data of sense perception: to act upon the given objects of
+sense by the lens of the telescope and microscope, and by all sorts of
+experimental devices. To accomplish this in a way which would arouse
+new ideas (hypotheses, theories) required even more general ideas (like
+those of mathematics) than were at the command of ancient science. But
+these general conceptions were no longer taken to give knowledge
+in themselves. They were implements for instituting, conducting,
+interpreting experimental inquiries and formulating their results.
+
+The logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and knowledge,
+a philosophy which no longer puts experience in opposition to rational
+knowledge and explanation. Experience is no longer a mere summarizing
+of what has been done in a more or less chance way in the past; it is a
+deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens
+to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions
+(of suggested meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the
+suggestions. When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by
+impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure
+and method, it becomes reasonable--rational. When what we suffer from
+things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance
+circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior
+purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant--enlightening
+and instructive. The antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses the
+support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and relative
+justification.
+
+The bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely practical and
+purely intellectual studies is self-evident. The distinction is not
+intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions, and upon conditions which
+can be regulated. Practical activities may be intellectually narrow and
+trivial; they will be so in so far as they are routine, carried on
+under the dictates of authority, and having in view merely some external
+result. But childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just the
+time when it is possible to carry them on in a different spirit. It
+is inexpedient to repeat the discussions of our previous chapters on
+thinking and on the evolution of educative subject matter from childlike
+work and play to logically organized subject matter. The discussions of
+this chapter and the prior one should, however, give an added meaning to
+those results.
+
+(i) Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations
+subsisting between a human being and his natural and social
+surroundings. In some cases, the initiative in activity is on the
+side of the environment; the human being undergoes or suffers certain
+checkings and deflections of endeavors. In other cases, the behavior of
+surrounding things and persons carries to a successful issue the active
+tendencies of the individual, so that in the end what the individual
+undergoes are consequences which he has himself tried to produce.
+In just the degree in which connections are established between what
+happens to a person and what he does in response, and between what he
+does to his environment and what it does in response to him, his acts
+and the things about him acquire meaning. He learns to understand
+both himself and the world of men and things. Purposive education or
+schooling should present such an environment that this interaction will
+effect acquisition of those meanings which are so important that they
+become, in turn, instruments of further learnings. (ante, Ch. XI.) As
+has been repeatedly pointed out, activity out of school is carried on
+under conditions which have not been deliberately adapted to promoting
+the function of understanding and formation of effective intellectual
+dispositions. The results are vital and genuine as far as they go, but
+they are limited by all kinds of circumstances. Some powers are left
+quite undeveloped and undirected; others get only occasional and
+whimsical stimulations; others are formed into habits of a routine skill
+at the expense of aims and resourceful initiative and inventiveness. It
+is not the business of the school to transport youth from an environment
+of activity into one of cramped study of the records of other men's
+learning; but to transport them from an environment of relatively chance
+activities (accidental in the relation they bear to insight and thought)
+into one of activities selected with reference to guidance of learning.
+A slight inspection of the improved methods which have already shown
+themselves effective in education will reveal that they have laid hold,
+more or less consciously, upon the fact that "intellectual"
+studies instead of being opposed to active pursuits represent an
+intellectualizing of practical pursuits. It remains to grasp the
+principle with greater firmness.
+
+(ii) The changes which are taking place in the content of social life
+tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which will
+intellectualize the play and work of the school. When one bears in mind
+the social environment of the Greeks and the people of the Middle Ages,
+where such practical activities as could be successfully carried on were
+mostly of a routine and external sort and even servile in nature, one is
+not surprised that educators turned their backs upon them as unfitted
+to cultivate intelligence. But now that even the occupations of the
+household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as transportation
+and intercourse are instinct with applied science, the case stands
+otherwise. It is true that many of those who now engage in them are
+not aware of the intellectual content upon which their personal actions
+depend. But this fact only gives an added reason why schooling should
+use these pursuits so as to enable the coming generation to acquire
+a comprehension now too generally lacking, and thus enable persons to
+carry on their pursuits intelligently instead of blindly. (iii) The most
+direct blow at the traditional separation of doing and knowing and at
+the traditional prestige of purely "intellectual" studies, however, has
+been given by the progress of experimental science. If this progress
+has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no such thing as genuine
+knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing.
+The analysis and rearrangement of facts which is indispensable to the
+growth of knowledge and power of explanation and right classification
+cannot be attained purely mentally--just inside the head. Men have to do
+something to the things when they wish to find out something; they have
+to alter conditions. This is the lesson of the laboratory method,
+and the lesson which all education has to learn. The laboratory is a
+discovery of the condition under which labor may become intellectually
+fruitful and not merely externally productive. If, in too many cases
+at present, it results only in the acquisition of an additional mode
+of technical skill, that is because it still remains too largely but an
+isolated resource, not resorted to until pupils are mostly too old
+to get the full advantage of it, and even then is surrounded by other
+studies where traditional methods isolate intellect from activity.
+
+Summary. The Greeks were induced to philosophize by the increasing
+failure of their traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. Thus
+they were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other
+source of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational
+standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs
+which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat
+opposition of reason and experience. The more the former was exalted,
+the more the latter was depreciated. Since experience was identified
+with what men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of
+life, doing shared in the philosophic depreciation. This influence fell
+in with many others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods
+and topics which involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily
+activity. The modern age began with a revolt against this point of
+view, with an appeal to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely
+rational concepts on the ground that they either needed to be ballasted
+by the results of concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions
+of prejudice and institutionalized class interest, calling themselves
+rational for protection. But various circumstances led to considering
+experience as pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic
+active and emotional phases, and to identifying it with a passive
+reception of isolated "sensations." Hence the education reform effected
+by the new theory was confined mainly to doing away with some of
+the bookishness of prior methods; it did not accomplish a consistent
+reorganization.
+
+Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the
+experimental method in science makes another conception of experience
+explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of
+the ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive--a
+matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. But the
+ancient theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so
+as to take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as
+to result in securely tested knowledge. "Experience" then ceases to be
+empirical and becomes experimental. Reason ceases to be a remote and
+ideal faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made
+fruitful in meaning. Educationally, this change denotes such a plan
+for the studies and method of instruction as has been developed in the
+previous chapters.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and Humanism
+
+ALLUSION has already been made to the conflict of natural science with
+literary studies for a place in the curriculum. The solution thus far
+reached consists essentially in a somewhat mechanical compromise whereby
+the field is divided between studies having nature and studies having
+man as their theme. The situation thus presents us with another instance
+of the external adjustment of educational values, and focuses attention
+upon the philosophy of the connection of nature with human affairs. In
+general, it may be said that the educational division finds a reflection
+in the dualistic philosophies. Mind and the world are regarded as two
+independent realms of existence having certain points of contact with
+each other. From this point of view it is natural that each sphere of
+existence should have its own separate group of studies connected with
+it; it is even natural that the growth of scientific studies should be
+viewed with suspicion as marking a tendency of materialistic philosophy
+to encroach upon the domain of spirit. Any theory of education which
+contemplates a more unified scheme of education than now exists is under
+the necessity of facing the question of the relation of man to nature.
+
+1. The Historic Background of Humanistic Study. It is noteworthy that
+classic Greek philosophy does not present the problem in its modern
+form. Socrates indeed appears to have thought that science of nature was
+not attainable and not very important. The chief thing to know is the
+nature and end of man. Upon that knowledge hangs all that is of deep
+significance--all moral and social achievement. Plato, however,
+makes right knowledge of man and society depend upon knowledge of the
+essential features of nature. His chief treatise, entitled the Republic,
+is at once a treatise on morals, on social organization, and on the
+metaphysics and science of nature. Since he accepts the Socratic
+doctrine that right achievement in the former depends upon rational
+knowledge, he is compelled to discuss the nature of knowledge. Since he
+accepts the idea that the ultimate object of knowledge is the discovery
+of the good or end of man, and is discontented with the Socratic
+conviction that all we know is our own ignorance, he connects the
+discussion of the good of man with consideration of the essential good
+or end of nature itself. To attempt to determine the end of man apart
+from a knowledge of the ruling end which gives law and unity to nature
+is impossible. It is thus quite consistent with his philosophy that he
+subordinates literary studies (under the name of music) to mathematics
+and to physics as well as to logic and metaphysics. But on the other
+hand, knowledge of nature is not an end in itself; it is a necessary
+stage in bringing the mind to a realization of the supreme purpose of
+existence as the law of human action, corporate and individual. To use
+the modern phraseology, naturalistic studies are indispensable, but they
+are in the interests of humanistic and ideal ends.
+
+Aristotle goes even farther, if anything, in the direction of
+naturalistic studies. He subordinates (ante, p. 254) civic relations
+to the purely cognitive life. The highest end of man is not human but
+divine--participation in pure knowing which constitutes the divine life.
+Such knowing deals with what is universal and necessary, and finds,
+therefore, a more adequate subject matter in nature at its best than in
+the transient things of man. If we take what the philosophers stood
+for in Greek life, rather than the details of what they say, we might
+summarize by saying that the Greeks were too much interested in free
+inquiry into natural fact and in the aesthetic enjoyment of nature, and
+were too deeply conscious of the extent in which society is rooted in
+nature and subject to its laws, to think of bringing man and nature
+into conflict. Two factors conspire in the later period of ancient
+life, however, to exalt literary and humanistic studies. One is the
+increasingly reminiscent and borrowed character of culture; the other is
+the political and rhetorical bent of Roman life.
+
+Greek achievement in civilization was native; the civilization of the
+Alexandrians and Romans was inherited from alien sources. Consequently
+it looked back to the records upon which it drew, instead of looking
+out directly upon nature and society, for material and inspiration.
+We cannot do better than quote the words of Hatch to indicate the
+consequences for educational theory and practice. "Greece on one hand
+had lost political power, and on the other possessed in her splendid
+literature an inalienable heritage. It was natural that she should turn
+to letters. It was natural also that the study of letters should be
+reflected upon speech. The mass of men in the Greek world tended to lay
+stress on that acquaintance with the literature of bygone generations,
+and that habit of cultivated speech, which has ever since been commonly
+spoken of as education. Our own comes by direct tradition from it. It
+set a fashion which until recently has uniformly prevailed over the
+entire civilized world. We study literature rather than nature because
+the Greeks did so, and because when the Romans and the Roman provincials
+resolved to educate their sons, they employed Greek teachers and
+followed in Greek paths." 1
+
+The so-called practical bent of the Romans worked in the same direction.
+In falling back upon the recorded ideas of the Greeks, they not only
+took the short path to attaining a cultural development, but they
+procured just the kind of material and method suited to their
+administrative talents. For their practical genius was not directed to
+the conquest and control of nature but to the conquest and control of
+men.
+
+Mr. Hatch, in the passage quoted, takes a good deal of history for
+granted in saying that we have studied literature rather than nature
+because the Greeks, and the Romans whom they taught, did so. What is the
+link that spans the intervening centuries? The question suggests that
+barbarian Europe but repeated on a larger scale and with increased
+intensity the Roman situation. It had to go to school to Greco-Roman
+civilization; it also borrowed rather than evolved its culture. Not
+merely for its general ideas and their artistic presentation but for
+its models of law it went to the records of alien peoples. And its
+dependence upon tradition was increased by the dominant theological
+interests of the period. For the authorities to which the Church
+appealed were literatures composed in foreign tongues. Everything
+converged to identify learning with linguistic training and to make
+the language of the learned a literary language instead of the mother
+speech.
+
+The full scope of this fact escapes us, moreover, until we recognize
+that this subject matter compelled recourse to a dialectical method.
+Scholasticism frequently has been used since the time of the revival of
+learning as a term of reproach. But all that it means is the method of
+The Schools, or of the School Men. In its essence, it is nothing but a
+highly effective systematization of the methods of teaching and learning
+which are appropriate to transmit an authoritative body of truths.
+Where literature rather than contemporary nature and society furnishes
+material of study, methods must be adapted to defining, expounding, and
+interpreting the received material, rather than to inquiry, discovery,
+and invention. And at bottom what is called Scholasticism is the
+whole-hearted and consistent formulation and application of the methods
+which are suited to instruction when the material of instruction is
+taken ready-made, rather than as something which students are to find
+out for themselves. So far as schools still teach from textbooks and
+rely upon the principle of authority and acquisition rather than upon
+that of discovery and inquiry, their methods are Scholastic--minus the
+logical accuracy and system of Scholasticism at its best. Aside from
+laxity of method and statement, the only difference is that geographies
+and histories and botanies and astronomies are now part of the
+authoritative literature which is to be mastered.
+
+As a consequence, the Greek tradition was lost in which a humanistic
+interest was used as a basis of interest in nature, and a knowledge of
+nature used to support the distinctively human aims of man. Life found
+its support in authority, not in nature. The latter was moreover an
+object of considerable suspicion. Contemplation of it was dangerous, for
+it tended to draw man away from reliance upon the documents in which the
+rules of living were already contained. Moreover nature could be known
+only through observation; it appealed to the senses--which were merely
+material as opposed to a purely immaterial mind. Furthermore, the
+utilities of a knowledge of nature were purely physical and secular;
+they connected with the bodily and temporal welfare of man, while the
+literary tradition concerned his spiritual and eternal well-being.
+
+2. The Modern Scientific Interest in Nature. The movement of the
+fifteenth century which is variously termed the revival of learning
+and the renascence was characterized by a new interest in man's present
+life, and accordingly by a new interest in his relationships with
+nature. It was naturalistic, in the sense that it turned against the
+dominant supernaturalistic interest. It is possible that the influence
+of a return to classic Greek pagan literature in bringing about this
+changed mind has been overestimated. Undoubtedly the change was mainly
+a product of contemporary conditions. But there can be no doubt that
+educated men, filled with the new point of view, turned eagerly to
+Greek literature for congenial sustenance and reinforcement. And to
+a considerable extent, this interest in Greek thought was not in
+literature for its own sake, but in the spirit it expressed. The mental
+freedom, the sense of the order and beauty of nature, which animated
+Greek expression, aroused men to think and observe in a similar
+untrammeled fashion. The history of science in the sixteenth century
+shows that the dawning sciences of physical nature largely borrowed
+their points of departure from the new interest in Greek literature.
+As Windelband has said, the new science of nature was the daughter of
+humanism. The favorite notion of the time was that man was in microcosm
+that which the universe was in macrocosm.
+
+This fact raises anew the question of how it was that nature and man
+were later separated and a sharp division made between language and
+literature and the physical sciences. Four reasons may be suggested. (a)
+The old tradition was firmly entrenched in institutions. Politics,
+law, and diplomacy remained of necessity branches of authoritative
+literature, for the social sciences did not develop until the methods of
+the sciences of physics and chemistry, to say nothing of biology, were
+much further advanced. The same is largely true of history. Moreover,
+the methods used for effective teaching of the languages were well
+developed; the inertia of academic custom was on their side. Just as the
+new interest in literature, especially Greek, had not been allowed at
+first to find lodgment in the scholastically organized universities, so
+when it found its way into them it joined hands with the older learning
+to minimize the influence of experimental science. The men who taught
+were rarely trained in science; the men who were scientifically
+competent worked in private laboratories and through the medium of
+academies which promoted research, but which were not organized as
+teaching bodies. Finally, the aristocratic tradition which looked down
+upon material things and upon the senses and the hands was still mighty.
+
+(b) The Protestant revolt brought with it an immense increase of
+interest in theological discussion and controversies. The appeal on both
+sides was to literary documents. Each side had to train men in ability
+to study and expound the records which were relied upon. The demand for
+training men who could defend the chosen faith against the other side,
+who were able to propagandize and to prevent the encroachments of the
+other side, was such that it is not too much to say that by the middle
+of the seventeenth century the linguistic training of gymnasia and
+universities had been captured by the revived theological interest, and
+used as a tool of religious education and ecclesiastical controversy.
+Thus the educational descent of the languages as they are found in
+education to-day is not direct from the revival of learning, but from
+its adaptation to theological ends.
+
+(c) The natural sciences were themselves conceived in a way which
+sharpened the opposition of man and nature. Francis Bacon presents
+an almost perfect example of the union of naturalistic and
+humanistic interest. Science, adopting the methods of observation and
+experimentation, was to give up the attempt to "anticipate" nature--to
+impose preconceived notions upon her--and was to become her humble
+interpreter. In obeying nature intellectually, man would learn to
+command her practically. "Knowledge is power." This aphorism meant that
+through science man is to control nature and turn her energies to the
+execution of his own ends. Bacon attacked the old learning and logic as
+purely controversial, having to do with victory in argument, not with
+discovery of the unknown. Through the new method of thought which
+was set forth in his new logic an era of expansive discoveries was to
+emerge, and these discoveries were to bear fruit in inventions for the
+service of man. Men were to give up their futile, never-finished effort
+to dominate one another to engage in the cooperative task of dominating
+nature in the interests of humanity.
+
+In the main, Bacon prophesied the direction of subsequent progress. But
+he "anticipated" the advance. He did not see that the new science
+was for a long time to be worked in the interest of old ends of human
+exploitation. He thought that it would rapidly give man new ends.
+Instead, it put at the disposal of a class the means to secure their old
+ends of aggrandizement at the expense of another class. The industrial
+revolution followed, as he foresaw, upon a revolution in scientific
+method. But it is taking the revolution many centuries to produce a new
+mind. Feudalism was doomed by the applications of the new science, for
+they transferred power from the landed nobility to the manufacturing
+centers. But capitalism rather than a social humanism took its place.
+Production and commerce were carried on as if the new science had no
+moral lesson, but only technical lessons as to economies in production
+and utilization of saving in self-interest. Naturally, this application
+of physical science (which was the most conspicuously perceptible
+one) strengthened the claims of professed humanists that science
+was materialistic in its tendencies. It left a void as to man's
+distinctively human interests which go beyond making, saving, and
+expending money; and languages and literature put in their claim to
+represent the moral and ideal interests of humanity.
+
+(d) Moreover, the philosophy which professed itself based upon science,
+which gave itself out as the accredited representative of the net
+significance of science, was either dualistic in character, marked by
+a sharp division between mind (characterizing man) and matter,
+constituting nature; or else it was openly mechanical, reducing the
+signal features of human life to illusion. In the former case, it
+allowed the claims of certain studies to be peculiar consignees of
+mental values, and indirectly strengthened their claim to superiority,
+since human beings would incline to regard human affairs as of chief
+importance at least to themselves. In the latter case, it called out
+a reaction which threw doubt and suspicion upon the value of physical
+science, giving occasion for treating it as an enemy to man's higher
+interests.
+
+Greek and medieval knowledge accepted the world in its qualitative
+variety, and regarded nature's processes as having ends, or in technical
+phrase as teleological. New science was expounded so as to deny the
+reality of all qualities in real, or objective, existence. Sounds,
+colors, ends, as well as goods and bads, were regarded as purely
+subjective--as mere impressions in the mind. Objective existence was
+then treated as having only quantitative aspects--as so much mass in
+motion, its only differences being that at one point in space there was
+a larger aggregate mass than at another, and that in some spots there
+were greater rates of motion than at others. Lacking qualitative
+distinctions, nature lacked significant variety. Uniformities were
+emphasized, not diversities; the ideal was supposed to be the discovery
+of a single mathematical formula applying to the whole universe at once
+from which all the seeming variety of phenomena could be derived. This
+is what a mechanical philosophy means.
+
+Such a philosophy does not represent the genuine purport of science.
+It takes the technique for the thing itself; the apparatus and the
+terminology for reality, the method for its subject matter. Science
+does confine its statements to conditions which enable us to predict and
+control the happening of events, ignoring the qualities of the events.
+Hence its mechanical and quantitative character. But in leaving them out
+of account, it does not exclude them from reality, nor relegate them
+to a purely mental region; it only furnishes means utilizable for ends.
+Thus while in fact the progress of science was increasing man's power
+over nature, enabling him to place his cherished ends on a firmer basis
+than ever before, and also to diversify his activities almost at will,
+the philosophy which professed to formulate its accomplishments reduced
+the world to a barren and monotonous redistribution of matter in space.
+Thus the immediate effect of modern science was to accentuate the
+dualism of matter and mind, and thereby to establish the physical and
+the humanistic studies as two disconnected groups. Since the difference
+between better and worse is bound up with the qualities of experience,
+any philosophy of science which excludes them from the genuine content
+of reality is bound to leave out what is most interesting and most
+important to mankind.
+
+3. The Present Educational Problem. In truth, experience knows no
+division between human concerns and a purely mechanical physical world.
+Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution
+upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become
+empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy. From the standpoint of human
+experience, and hence of educational endeavor, any distinction which
+can be justly made between nature and man is a distinction between the
+conditions which have to be reckoned with in the formation and execution
+of our practical aims, and the aims themselves. This philosophy is
+vouched for by the doctrine of biological development which shows that
+man is continuous with nature, not an alien entering her processes from
+without. It is reinforced by the experimental method of science which
+shows that knowledge accrues in virtue of an attempt to direct physical
+energies in accord with ideas suggested in dealing with natural objects
+in behalf of social uses. Every step forward in the social sciences--the
+studies termed history, economics, politics, sociology--shows that
+social questions are capable of being intelligently coped with only
+in the degree in which we employ the method of collected data, forming
+hypotheses, and testing them in action which is characteristic of
+natural science, and in the degree in which we utilize in behalf of
+the promotion of social welfare the technical knowledge ascertained by
+physics and chemistry. Advanced methods of dealing with such perplexing
+problems as insanity, intemperance, poverty, public sanitation, city
+planning, the conservation of natural resources, the constructive use of
+governmental agencies for furthering the public good without weakening
+personal initiative, all illustrate the direct dependence of our
+important social concerns upon the methods and results of natural
+science.
+
+With respect then to both humanistic and naturalistic studies, education
+should take its departure from this close interdependence. It should aim
+not at keeping science as a study of nature apart from literature as
+a record of human interests, but at cross-fertilizing both the natural
+sciences and the various human disciplines such as history, literature,
+economics, and politics. Pedagogically, the problem is simpler than the
+attempt to teach the sciences as mere technical bodies of information
+and technical forms of physical manipulation, on one side; and to teach
+humanistic studies as isolated subjects, on the other. For the latter
+procedure institutes an artificial separation in the pupils' experience.
+Outside of school pupils meet with natural facts and principles in
+connection with various modes of human action. (See ante, p. 30.) In
+all the social activities in which they have shared they have had to
+understand the material and processes involved. To start them in school
+with a rupture of this intimate association breaks the continuity of
+mental development, makes the student feel an indescribable unreality in
+his studies, and deprives him of the normal motive for interest in them.
+
+There is no doubt, of course, that the opportunities of education
+should be such that all should have a chance who have the disposition to
+advance to specialized ability in science, and thus devote themselves to
+its pursuit as their particular occupation in life. But at present, the
+pupil too often has a choice only between beginning with a study of the
+results of prior specialization where the material is isolated from his
+daily experiences, or with miscellaneous nature study, where material
+is presented at haphazard and does not lead anywhere in particular. The
+habit of introducing college pupils into segregated scientific subject
+matter, such as is appropriate to the man who wishes to become an expert
+in a given field, is carried back into the high schools. Pupils in the
+latter simply get a more elementary treatment of the same thing, with
+difficulties smoothed over and topics reduced to the level of their
+supposed ability. The cause of this procedure lies in following
+tradition, rather than in conscious adherence to a dualistic philosophy.
+But the effect is the same as if the purpose were to inculcate an idea
+that the sciences which deal with nature have nothing to do with man,
+and vice versa. A large part of the comparative ineffectiveness of
+the teaching of the sciences, for those who never become scientific
+specialists, is the result of a separation which is unavoidable when one
+begins with technically organized subject matter. Even if all students
+were embryonic scientific specialists, it is questionable whether this
+is the most effective procedure. Considering that the great majority
+are concerned with the study of sciences only for its effect upon
+their mental habits--in making them more alert, more open-minded, more
+inclined to tentative acceptance and to testing of ideas propounded
+or suggested,--and for achieving a better understanding of their daily
+environment, it is certainly ill-advised. Too often the pupil comes
+out with a smattering which is too superficial to be scientific and too
+technical to be applicable to ordinary affairs.
+
+The utilization of ordinary experience to secure an advance into
+scientific material and method, while keeping the latter connected with
+familiar human interests, is easier to-day than it ever was before.
+The usual experience of all persons in civilized communities to-day is
+intimately associated with industrial processes and results. These in
+turn are so many cases of science in action. The stationary and traction
+steam engine, gasoline engine, automobile, telegraph and telephone, the
+electric motor enter directly into the lives of most individuals. Pupils
+at an early age are practically acquainted with these things. Not only
+does the business occupation of their parents depend upon scientific
+applications, but household pursuits, the maintenance of health,
+the sights seen upon the streets, embody scientific achievements and
+stimulate interest in the connected scientific principles. The obvious
+pedagogical starting point of scientific instruction is not to teach
+things labeled science, but to utilize the familiar occupations and
+appliances to direct observation and experiment, until pupils have
+arrived at a knowledge of some fundamental principles by understanding
+them in their familiar practical workings.
+
+The opinion sometimes advanced that it is a derogation from the
+"purity" of science to study it in its active incarnation, instead of
+in theoretical abstraction, rests upon a misunderstanding. AS matter of
+fact, any subject is cultural in the degree in which it is apprehended
+in its widest possible range of meanings. Perception of meanings depends
+upon perception of connections, of context. To see a scientific fact or
+law in its human as well as in its physical and technical context is
+to enlarge its significance and give it increased cultural value. Its
+direct economic application, if by economic is meant something having
+money worth, is incidental and secondary, but a part of its actual
+connections. The important thing is that the fact be grasped in its
+social connections--its function in life.
+
+On the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with an
+intelligent sense of human interests. The social interest, identical in
+its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is necessarily supreme with
+man. Knowledge about man, information as to his past, familiarity with
+his documented records of literature, may be as technical a possession
+as the accumulation of physical details. Men may keep busy in a variety
+of ways, making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or
+in amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the chronology
+of literary productions. Unless such activity reacts to enlarge the
+imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with the busy work of
+children. It has the letter without the spirit of activity. It readily
+degenerates itself into a miser's accumulation, and a man prides himself
+on what he has, and not on the meaning he finds in the affairs of life.
+Any study so pursued that it increases concern for the values of life,
+any study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and
+greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study. The
+humanistic spirit of the Greeks was native and intense but it was narrow
+in scope. Everybody outside the Hellenic circle was a barbarian,
+and negligible save as a possible enemy. Acute as were the social
+observations and speculations of Greek thinkers, there is not a word in
+their writings to indicate that Greek civilization was not self-inclosed
+and self-sufficient. There was, apparently, no suspicion that its future
+was at the mercy of the despised outsider. Within the Greek community,
+the intense social spirit was limited by the fact that higher culture
+was based on a substratum of slavery and economic serfdom--classes
+necessary to the existence of the state, as Aristotle declared, and
+yet not genuine parts of it. The development of science has produced an
+industrial revolution which has brought different peoples in such close
+contact with one another through colonization and commerce that no
+matter how some nations may still look down upon others, no country can
+harbor the illusion that its career is decided wholly within itself. The
+same revolution has abolished agricultural serfdom, and created a class
+of more or less organized factory laborers with recognized political
+rights, and who make claims for a responsible role in the control of
+industry--claims which receive sympathetic attention from many among the
+well-to-do, since they have been brought into closer connections with
+the less fortunate classes through the breaking down of class barriers.
+
+This state of affairs may be formulated by saying that the older
+humanism omitted economic and industrial conditions from its purview.
+Consequently, it was one sided. Culture, under such circumstances,
+inevitably represented the intellectual and moral outlook of the class
+which was in direct social control. Such a tradition as to culture is,
+as we have seen (ante, p. 260), aristocratic; it emphasizes what marks
+off one class from another, rather than fundamental common interests.
+Its standards are in the past; for the aim is to preserve what has been
+gained rather than widely to extend the range of culture.
+
+The modifications which spring from taking greater account of industry
+and of whatever has to do with making a living are frequently condemned
+as attacks upon the culture derived from the past. But a wider
+educational outlook would conceive industrial activities as agencies for
+making intellectual resources more accessible to the masses, and giving
+greater solidity to the culture of those having superior resources.
+In short, when we consider the close connection between science and
+industrial development on the one hand, and between literary and
+aesthetic cultivation and an aristocratic social organization on the
+other, we get light on the opposition between technical scientific
+studies and refining literary studies. We have before us the need
+of overcoming this separation in education if society is to be truly
+democratic.
+
+Summary. The philosophic dualism between man and nature is reflected in
+the division of studies between the naturalistic and the humanistic with
+a tendency to reduce the latter to the literary records of the past.
+This dualism is not characteristic (as were the others which we have
+noted) of Greek thought. It arose partly because of the fact that the
+culture of Rome and of barbarian Europe was not a native product,
+being borrowed directly or indirectly from Greece, and partly because
+political and ecclesiastic conditions emphasized dependence upon
+the authority of past knowledge as that was transmitted in literary
+documents.
+
+At the outset, the rise of modern science prophesied a restoration of
+the intimate connection of nature and humanity, for it viewed knowledge
+of nature as the means of securing human progress and well-being. But
+the more immediate applications of science were in the interests of
+a class rather than of men in common; and the received philosophic
+formulations of scientific doctrine tended either to mark it off as
+merely material from man as spiritual and immaterial, or else to reduce
+mind to a subjective illusion. In education, accordingly, the tendency
+was to treat the sciences as a separate body of studies, consisting of
+technical information regarding the physical world, and to reserve
+the older literary studies as distinctively humanistic. The account
+previously given of the evolution of knowledge, and of the educational
+scheme of studies based upon it, are designed to overcome the
+separation, and to secure recognition of the place occupied by the
+subject matter of the natural sciences in human affairs.
+
+1 The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church. pp.
+43-44.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
+
+1. Mind as Purely Individual. We have been concerned with the influences
+which have effected a division between work and leisure, knowing and
+doing, man and nature. These influences have resulted in splitting up
+the subject matter of education into separate studies. They have also
+found formulation in various philosophies which have opposed to each
+other body and mind, theoretical knowledge and practice, physical
+mechanism and ideal purpose. Upon the philosophical side, these various
+dualisms culminate in a sharp demarcation of individual minds from
+the world, and hence from one another. While the connection of this
+philosophical position with educational procedure is not so obvious as
+is that of the points considered in the last three chapters, there are
+certain educational considerations which correspond to it; such as the
+antithesis supposed to exist between subject matter (the counterpart of
+the world) and method (the counterpart of mind); such as the tendency to
+treat interest as something purely private, without intrinsic connection
+with the material studied. Aside from incidental educational bearings,
+it will be shown in this chapter that the dualistic philosophy of
+mind and the world implies an erroneous conception of the relationship
+between knowledge and social interests, and between individuality or
+freedom, and social control and authority. The identification of the
+mind with the individual self and of the latter with a private psychic
+consciousness is comparatively modern. In both the Greek and medieval
+periods, the rule was to regard the individual as a channel through
+which a universal and divine intelligence operated. The individual was
+in no true sense the knower; the knower was the "Reason" which operated
+through him. The individual interfered at his peril, and only to the
+detriment of the truth. In the degree in which the individual rather
+than reason "knew," conceit, error, and opinion were substituted for
+true knowledge. In Greek life, observation was acute and alert; and
+thinking was free almost to the point of irresponsible speculations.
+Accordingly the consequences of the theory were only such as were
+consequent upon the lack of an experimental method. Without such a
+method individuals could not engage in knowing, and be checked up by the
+results of the inquiries of others. Without such liability to test
+by others, the minds of men could not be intellectually responsible;
+results were to be accepted because of their aesthetic consistency,
+agreeable quality, or the prestige of their authors. In the barbarian
+period, individuals were in a still more humble attitude to truth;
+important knowledge was supposed to be divinely revealed, and nothing
+remained for the minds of individuals except to work it over after
+it had been received on authority. Aside from the more consciously
+philosophic aspects of these movements, it never occurs to any one to
+identify mind and the personal self wherever beliefs are transmitted by
+custom.
+
+In the medieval period there was a religious individualism. The deepest
+concern of life was the salvation of the individual soul. In the later
+Middle Ages, this latent individualism found conscious formulation in
+the nominalistic philosophies, which treated the structure of knowledge
+as something built up within the individual through his own acts, and
+mental states. With the rise of economic and political individualism
+after the sixteenth century, and with the development of Protestantism,
+the times were ripe for an emphasis upon the rights and duties of the
+individual in achieving knowledge for himself. This led to the view that
+knowledge is won wholly through personal and private experiences. As a
+consequence, mind, the source and possessor of knowledge, was thought
+of as wholly individual. Thus upon the educational side, we find
+educational reformers, like Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, henceforth
+vehemently denouncing all learning which is acquired on hearsay, and
+asserting that even if beliefs happen to be true, they do not constitute
+knowledge unless they have grown up in and been tested by personal
+experience. The reaction against authority in all spheres of life, and
+the intensity of the struggle, against great odds, for freedom of action
+and inquiry, led to such an emphasis upon personal observations and
+ideas as in effect to isolate mind, and set it apart from the world to
+be known.
+
+This isolation is reflected in the great development of that branch
+of philosophy known as epistemology--the theory of knowledge. The
+identification of mind with the self, and the setting up of the self as
+something independent and self-sufficient, created such a gulf between
+the knowing mind and the world that it became a question how knowledge
+was possible at all. Given a subject--the knower--and an object--the
+thing to be known--wholly separate from one another, it is necessary to
+frame a theory to explain how they get into connection with each other
+so that valid knowledge may result. This problem, with the allied one
+of the possibility of the world acting upon the mind and the mind acting
+upon the world, became almost the exclusive preoccupation of philosophic
+thought.
+
+The theories that we cannot know the world as it really is but only the
+impressions made upon the mind, or that there is no world beyond the
+individual mind, or that knowledge is only a certain association of
+the mind's own states, were products of this preoccupation. We are not
+directly concerned with their truth; but the fact that such desperate
+solutions were widely accepted is evidence of the extent to which mind
+had been set over the world of realities. The increasing use of the term
+"consciousness" as an equivalent for mind, in the supposition that there
+is an inner world of conscious states and processes, independent of
+any relationship to nature and society, an inner world more truly and
+immediately known than anything else, is evidence of the same fact.
+In short, practical individualism, or struggle for greater freedom of
+thought in action, was translated into philosophic subjectivism.
+
+2. Individual Mind as the Agent of Reorganization. It should be obvious
+that this philosophic movement misconceived the significance of
+the practical movement. Instead of being its transcript, it was a
+perversion. Men were not actually engaged in the absurdity of striving
+to be free from connection with nature and one another. They were
+striving for greater freedom in nature and society. They wanted greater
+power to initiate changes in the world of things and fellow beings;
+greater scope of movement and consequently greater freedom in
+observations and ideas implied in movement. They wanted not isolation
+from the world, but a more intimate connection with it. They wanted to
+form their beliefs about it at first hand, instead of through tradition.
+They wanted closer union with their fellows so that they might influence
+one another more effectively and might combine their respective actions
+for mutual aims.
+
+So far as their beliefs were concerned, they felt that a great deal
+which passed for knowledge was merely the accumulated opinions of the
+past, much of it absurd and its correct portions not understood when
+accepted on authority. Men must observe for themselves, and form their
+own theories and personally test them. Such a method was the only
+alternative to the imposition of dogma as truth, a procedure which
+reduced mind to the formal act of acquiescing in truth. Such is the
+meaning of what is sometimes called the substitution of inductive
+experimental methods of knowing for deductive. In some sense, men
+had always used an inductive method in dealing with their immediate
+practical concerns. Architecture, agriculture, manufacture, etc., had
+to be based upon observation of the activities of natural objects, and
+ideas about such affairs had to be checked, to some extent, by results.
+But even in such things there was an undue reliance upon mere
+custom, followed blindly rather than understandingly. And this
+observational-experimental method was restricted to these "practical"
+matters, and a sharp distinction maintained between practice and
+theoretical knowledge or truth. (See Ch. XX.) The rise of free cities,
+the development of travel, exploration, and commerce, the evolution
+of new methods of producing commodities and doing business, threw men
+definitely upon their own resources. The reformers of science like
+Galileo, Descartes, and their successors, carried analogous methods into
+ascertaining the facts about nature. An interest in discovery took the
+place of an interest in systematizing and "proving" received beliefs.
+
+A just philosophic interpretation of these movements would, indeed, have
+emphasized the rights and responsibilities of the individual in gaining
+knowledge and personally testing beliefs, no matter by what authorities
+they were vouched for. But it would not have isolated the individual
+from the world, and consequently isolated individuals--in theory--from
+one another. It would have perceived that such disconnection, such
+rupture of continuity, denied in advance the possibility of success in
+their endeavors. As matter of fact every individual has grown up, and
+always must grow up, in a social medium. His responses grow intelligent,
+or gain meaning, simply because he lives and acts in a medium of
+accepted meanings and values. (See ante, p. 30.) Through social
+intercourse, through sharing in the activities embodying beliefs, he
+gradually acquires a mind of his own. The conception of mind as a purely
+isolated possession of the self is at the very antipodes of the truth.
+The self achieves mind in the degree in which knowledge of things
+is incarnate in the life about him; the self is not a separate mind
+building up knowledge anew on its own account.
+
+Yet there is a valid distinction between knowledge which is objective
+and impersonal, and thinking which is subjective and personal. In one
+sense, knowledge is that which we take for granted. It is that which is
+settled, disposed of, established, under control. What we fully know,
+we do not need to think about. In common phrase, it is certain, assured.
+And this does not mean a mere feeling of certainty. It denotes not a
+sentiment, but a practical attitude, a readiness to act without
+reserve or quibble. Of course we may be mistaken. What is taken for
+knowledge--for fact and truth--at a given time may not be such. But
+everything which is assumed without question, which is taken for granted
+in our intercourse with one another and nature is what, at the given
+time, is called knowledge. Thinking on the contrary, starts, as we
+have seen, from doubt or uncertainty. It marks an inquiring, hunting,
+searching attitude, instead of one of mastery and possession. Through
+its critical process true knowledge is revised and extended, and our
+convictions as to the state of things reorganized. Clearly the last few
+centuries have been typically a period of revision and reorganization
+of beliefs. Men did not really throw away all transmitted beliefs
+concerning the realities of existence, and start afresh upon the basis
+of their private, exclusive sensations and ideas. They could not have
+done so if they had wished to, and if it had been possible general
+imbecility would have been the only outcome. Men set out from what had
+passed as knowledge, and critically investigated the grounds upon which
+it rested; they noted exceptions; they used new mechanical appliances to
+bring to light data inconsistent with what had been believed; they used
+their imaginations to conceive a world different from that in which
+their forefathers had put their trust. The work was a piecemeal, a
+retail, business. One problem was tackled at a time. The net results
+of all the revisions amounted, however, to a revolution of prior
+conceptions of the world. What occurred was a reorganization of prior
+intellectual habitudes, infinitely more efficient than a cutting loose
+from all connections would have been.
+
+This state of affairs suggests a definition of the role of the
+individual, or the self, in knowledge; namely, the redirection, or
+reconstruction of accepted beliefs. Every new idea, every conception of
+things differing from that authorized by current belief, must have its
+origin in an individual. New ideas are doubtless always sprouting, but a
+society governed by custom does not encourage their development. On the
+contrary, it tends to suppress them, just because they are deviations
+from what is current. The man who looks at things differently from
+others is in such a community a suspect character; for him to persist
+is generally fatal. Even when social censorship of beliefs is not so
+strict, social conditions may fail to provide the appliances which are
+requisite if new ideas are to be adequately elaborated; or they may fail
+to provide any material support and reward to those who entertain them.
+Hence they remain mere fancies, romantic castles in the air, or aimless
+speculations. The freedom of observation and imagination involved in
+the modern scientific revolution were not easily secured; they had to be
+fought for; many suffered for their intellectual independence. But, upon
+the whole, modern European society first permitted, and then, in some
+fields at least, deliberately encouraged the individual reactions which
+deviate from what custom prescribes. Discovery, research, inquiry in new
+lines, inventions, finally came to be either the social fashion, or in
+some degree tolerable. However, as we have already noted, philosophic
+theories of knowledge were not content to conceive mind in the
+individual as the pivot upon which reconstruction of beliefs turned,
+thus maintaining the continuity of the individual with the world of
+nature and fellow men. They regarded the individual mind as a separate
+entity, complete in each person, and isolated from nature and hence from
+other minds. Thus a legitimate intellectual individualism, the attitude
+of critical revision of former beliefs which is indispensable to
+progress, was explicitly formulated as a moral and social individualism.
+When the activities of mind set out from customary beliefs and strive
+to effect transformations of them which will in turn win general
+conviction, there is no opposition between the individual and the
+social. The intellectual variations of the individual in observation,
+imagination, judgment, and invention are simply the agencies of
+social progress, just as conformity to habit is the agency of social
+conservation. But when knowledge is regarded as originating and
+developing within an individual, the ties which bind the mental life of
+one to that of his fellows are ignored and denied.
+
+When the social quality of individualized mental operations is denied,
+it becomes a problem to find connections which will unite an individual
+with his fellows. Moral individualism is set up by the conscious
+separation of different centers of life. It has its roots in the notion
+that the consciousness of each person is wholly private, a self-inclosed
+continent, intrinsically independent of the ideas, wishes, purposes of
+everybody else. But when men act, they act in a common and public world.
+This is the problem to which the theory of isolated and independent
+conscious minds gave rise: Given feelings, ideas, desires, which have
+nothing to do with one another, how can actions proceeding from them
+be controlled in a social or public interest? Given an egoistic
+consciousness, how can action which has regard for others take place?
+
+Moral philosophies which have started from such premises have developed
+four typical ways of dealing with the question. (i) One method
+represents the survival of the older authoritative position, with
+such concessions and compromises as the progress of events has made
+absolutely inevitable. The deviations and departures characterizing an
+individual are still looked upon with suspicion; in principle they are
+evidences of the disturbances, revolts, and corruptions inhering in
+an individual apart from external authoritative guidance. In fact, as
+distinct from principle, intellectual individualism is tolerated in
+certain technical regions--in subjects like mathematics and physics and
+astronomy, and in the technical inventions resulting therefrom. But
+the applicability of a similar method to morals, social, legal, and
+political matters, is denied. In such matters, dogma is still to be
+supreme; certain eternal truths made known by revelation, intuition,
+or the wisdom of our forefathers set unpassable limits to individual
+observation and speculation. The evils from which society suffers are
+set down to the efforts of misguided individuals to transgress
+these boundaries. Between the physical and the moral sciences, lie
+intermediate sciences of life, where the territory is only grudgingly
+yielded to freedom of inquiry under the pressure of accomplished fact.
+Although past history has demonstrated that the possibilities of human
+good are widened and made more secure by trusting to a responsibility
+built up within the very process of inquiry, the "authority" theory sets
+apart a sacred domain of truth which must be protected from the inroads
+of variation of beliefs. Educationally, emphasis may not be put on
+eternal truth, but it is put on the authority of book and teacher, and
+individual variation is discouraged.
+
+(ii) Another method is sometimes termed rationalism or abstract
+intellectualism. A formal logical faculty is set up in distinction from
+tradition and history and all concrete subject matter. This faculty of
+reason is endowed with power to influence conduct directly. Since it
+deals wholly with general and impersonal forms, when different persons
+act in accord with logical findings, their activities will be externally
+consistent. There is no doubt of the services rendered by this
+philosophy. It was a powerful factor in the negative and dissolving
+criticism of doctrines having nothing but tradition and class interest
+behind them; it accustomed men to freedom of discussion and to the
+notion that beliefs had to be submitted to criteria of reasonableness.
+It undermined the power of prejudice, superstition, and brute force, by
+habituating men to reliance upon argument, discussion, and persuasion.
+It made for clarity and order of exposition. But its influence was
+greater in destruction of old falsities than in the construction of new
+ties and associations among men. Its formal and empty nature, due to
+conceiving reason as something complete in itself apart from subject
+matter, its hostile attitude toward historical institutions, its
+disregard of the influence of habit, instinct, and emotion, as operative
+factors in life, left it impotent in the suggestion of specific aims
+and methods. Bare logic, however important in arranging and criticizing
+existing subject matter, cannot spin new subject matter out of itself.
+In education, the correlative is trust in general ready-made rules and
+principles to secure agreement, irrespective of seeing to it that the
+pupil's ideas really agree with one another.
+
+(iii) While this rationalistic philosophy was developing in France,
+English thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest of individuals
+in order to secure outer unity in the acts which issued from isolated
+streams of consciousness. Legal arrangements, especially penal
+administration, and governmental regulations, were to be such as to
+prevent the acts which proceeded from regard for one's own private
+sensations from interfering with the feelings of others. Education was
+to instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others
+and some degree of positive regard for their welfare were necessary for
+security in the pursuit of one's own happiness. Chief emphasis was
+put, however, upon trade as a means of bringing the conduct of one into
+harmony with that of others. In commerce, each aims at the satisfaction
+of his own wants, but can gain his own profit only by furnishing some
+commodity or service to another. Thus in aiming at the increase of his
+own private pleasurable states of consciousness, he contributes to
+the consciousness of others. Again there is no doubt that this view
+expressed and furthered a heightened perception of the values of
+conscious life, and a recognition that institutional arrangements
+are ultimately to be judged by the contributions which they make to
+intensifying and enlarging the scope of conscious experience. It also
+did much to rescue work, industry, and mechanical devices from the
+contempt in which they had been held in communities founded upon the
+control of a leisure class. In both ways, this philosophy promoted a
+wider and more democratic social concern. But it was tainted by
+the narrowness of its fundamental premise: the doctrine that every
+individual acts only from regard for his own pleasures and pains, and
+that so-called generous and sympathetic acts are only indirect ways
+of procuring and assuring one's own comfort. In other words, it made
+explicit the consequences inhering in any doctrine which makes mental
+life a self-inclosed thing, instead of an attempt to redirect and
+readapt common concerns. It made union among men a matter of calculation
+of externals. It lent itself to the contemptuous assertions of Carlyle
+that it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a constable, and recognized only
+a "cash nexus" among men. The educational equivalents of this doctrine
+in the uses made of pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only
+too obvious. (iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path.
+It started from what was essentially the rationalistic philosophy of
+Descartes and his French successors. But while French thought upon
+the whole developed the idea of reason in opposition to the religious
+conception of a divine mind residing in individuals, German thought (as
+in Hegel) made a synthesis of the two. Reason is absolute. Nature is
+incarnate reason. History is reason in its progressive unfolding in
+man. An individual becomes rational only as he absorbs into himself
+the content of rationality in nature and in social institutions. For an
+absolute reason is not, like the reason of rationalism, purely formal
+and empty; as absolute it must include all content within itself. Thus
+the real problem is not that of controlling individual freedom so that
+some measure of social order and concord may result, but of achieving
+individual freedom through developing individual convictions in accord
+with the universal law found in the organization of the state as
+objective Reason. While this philosophy is usually termed absolute or
+objective idealism, it might better be termed, for educational purposes
+at least, institutional idealism. (See ante, p. 59.) It idealized
+historical institutions by conceiving them as incarnations of an
+immanent absolute mind. There can be no doubt that this philosophy was
+a powerful influence in rescuing philosophy in the beginning of the
+nineteenth century from the isolated individualism into which it had
+fallen in France and England. It served also to make the organization of
+the state more constructively interested in matters of public concern.
+It left less to chance, less to mere individual logical conviction, less
+to the workings of private self-interest. It brought intelligence to
+bear upon the conduct of affairs; it accentuated the need of nationally
+organized education in the interests of the corporate state. It
+sanctioned and promoted freedom of inquiry in all technical details of
+natural and historical phenomena. But in all ultimate moral matters, it
+tended to reinstate the principle of authority. It made for efficiency
+of organization more than did any of the types of philosophy previously
+mentioned, but it made no provision for free experimental modification
+of this organization. Political democracy, with its belief in the right
+of individual desire and purpose to take part in readapting even the
+fundamental constitution of society, was foreign to it.
+
+3. Educational Equivalents. It is not necessary to consider in detail
+the educational counterparts of the various defects found in these
+various types of philosophy. It suffices to say that in general the
+school has been the institution which exhibited with greatest clearness
+the assumed antithesis between purely individualistic methods of
+learning and social action, and between freedom and social control. The
+antithesis is reflected in the absence of a social atmosphere and motive
+for learning, and the consequent separation, in the conduct of the
+school, between method of instruction and methods of government; and in
+the slight opportunity afforded individual variations. When learning
+is a phase of active undertakings which involve mutual exchange, social
+control enters into the very process of learning. When the social factor
+is absent, learning becomes a carrying over of some presented material
+into a purely individual consciousness, and there is no inherent reason
+why it should give a more socialized direction to mental and emotional
+disposition. There is tendency on the part of both the upholders and
+the opponents of freedom in school to identify it with absence of social
+direction, or, sometimes, with merely physical unconstraint of movement.
+But the essence of the demand for freedom is the need of conditions
+which will enable an individual to make his own special contribution
+to a group interest, and to partake of its activities in such ways that
+social guidance shall be a matter of his own mental attitude, and not a
+mere authoritative dictation of his acts. Because what is often called
+discipline and "government" has to do with the external side of conduct
+alone, a similar meaning is attached, by reaction, to freedom. But when
+it is perceived that each idea signifies the quality of mind expressed
+in action, the supposed opposition between them falls away. Freedom
+means essentially the part played by thinking--which is personal--in
+learning:--it means intellectual initiative, independence in
+observation, judicious invention, foresight of consequences, and
+ingenuity of adaptation to them.
+
+But because these are the mental phase of behavior, the needed play of
+individuality--or freedom--cannot be separated from opportunity for
+free play of physical movements. Enforced physical quietude may be
+unfavorable to realization of a problem, to undertaking the observations
+needed to define it, and to performance of the experiments which
+test the ideas suggested. Much has been said about the importance of
+"self-activity" in education, but the conception has too frequently been
+restricted to something merely internal--something excluding the free
+use of sensory and motor organs. Those who are at the stage of learning
+from symbols, or who are engaged in elaborating the implications of a
+problem or idea preliminary to more carefully thought-out activity,
+may need little perceptible overt activity. But the whole cycle
+of self-activity demands an opportunity for investigation and
+experimentation, for trying out one's ideas upon things, discovering
+what can be done with materials and appliances. And this is incompatible
+with closely restricted physical activity. Individual activity has
+sometimes been taken as meaning leaving a pupil to work by himself or
+alone. Relief from need of attending to what any one else is doing is
+truly required to secure calm and concentration. Children, like grown
+persons, require a judicious amount of being let alone. But the time,
+place, and amount of such separate work is a matter of detail, not of
+principle. There is no inherent opposition between working with others
+and working as an individual. On the contrary, certain capacities of an
+individual are not brought out except under the stimulus of associating
+with others. That a child must work alone and not engage in group
+activities in order to be free and let his individuality develop, is
+a notion which measures individuality by spatial distance and makes a
+physical thing of it.
+
+Individuality as a factor to be respected in education has a double
+meaning. In the first place, one is mentally an individual only as he
+has his own purpose and problem, and does his own thinking. The phrase
+"think for one's self" is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for one's self,
+it isn't thinking. Only by a pupil's own observations, reflections,
+framing and testing of suggestions can what he already knows be
+amplified and rectified. Thinking is as much an individual matter as
+is the digestion of food. In the second place, there are variations of
+point of view, of appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from person
+to person. When these variations are suppressed in the alleged interests
+of uniformity, and an attempt is made to have a single mold of method
+of study and recitation, mental confusion and artificiality inevitably
+result. Originality is gradually destroyed, confidence in one's own
+quality of mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to
+the opinion of others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild. The harm
+is greater now than when the whole community was governed by customary
+beliefs, because the contrast between methods of learning in school and
+those relied upon outside the school is greater. That systematic advance
+in scientific discovery began when individuals were allowed, and then
+encouraged, to utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject
+matter, no one will deny. If it is said in objection, that pupils
+in school are not capable of any such originality, and hence must be
+confined to appropriating and reproducing things already known by
+the better informed, the reply is twofold. (i) We are concerned with
+originality of attitude which is equivalent to the unforced response of
+one's own individuality, not with originality as measured by product.
+No one expects the young to make original discoveries of just the same
+facts and principles as are embodied in the sciences of nature and man.
+But it is not unreasonable to expect that learning may take place under
+such conditions that from the standpoint of the learner there is genuine
+discovery. While immature students will not make discoveries from
+the standpoint of advanced students, they make them from their own
+standpoint, whenever there is genuine learning. (ii) In the normal
+process of becoming acquainted with subject matter already known to
+others, even young pupils react in unexpected ways. There is something
+fresh, something not capable of being fully anticipated by even the
+most experienced teacher, in the ways they go at the topic, and in
+the particular ways in which things strike them. Too often all this is
+brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are deliberately held to rehearsing
+material in the exact form in which the older person conceives it. The
+result is that what is instinctively original in individuality, that
+which marks off one from another, goes unused and undirected. Teaching
+then ceases to be an educative process for the teacher. At most he
+learns simply to improve his existing technique; he does not get new
+points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual companionship.
+Hence both teaching and learning tend to become conventional and
+mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides therein implied.
+
+As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background of
+familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or
+less random physical experimentation is reduced. Activity is defined or
+specialized in certain channels. To the eyes of others, the student may
+be in a position of complete physical quietude, because his energies are
+confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes
+and vocal organs. But because this attitude is evidence of intense
+mental concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not
+follow that it should be set up as a model for students who still have
+to find their intellectual way about. And even with the adult, it does
+not cover the whole circuit of mental energy. It marks an intermediate
+period, capable of being lengthened with increased mastery of a
+subject, but always coming between an earlier period of more general and
+conspicuous organic action and a later time of putting to use what has
+been apprehended.
+
+When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and body
+in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the need of
+obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to identify the freedom
+which is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking by which
+what a person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. If
+attention is centered upon the conditions which have to be met in order
+to secure a situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take
+care of itself. The individual who has a question which being really a
+question to him instigates his curiosity, which feeds his eagerness for
+information that will help him cope with it, and who has at command
+an equipment which will permit these interests to take effect, is
+intellectually free. Whatever initiative and imaginative vision he
+possesses will be called into play and control his impulses and habits.
+His own purposes will direct his actions. Otherwise, his seeming
+attention, his docility, his memorizings and reproductions, will partake
+of intellectual servility. Such a condition of intellectual subjection
+is needed for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not
+expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders from the
+few set in authority. It is not adapted to a society which intends to be
+democratic.
+
+Summary. True individualism is a product of the relaxation of the grip
+of the authority of custom and traditions as standards of belief. Aside
+from sporadic instances, like the height of Greek thought, it is a
+comparatively modern manifestation. Not but that there have always been
+individual diversities, but that a society dominated by conservative
+custom represses them or at least does not utilize them and promote
+them. For various reasons, however, the new individualism was
+interpreted philosophically not as meaning development of agencies
+for revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an
+assertion that each individual's mind was complete in isolation from
+everything else. In the theoretical phase of philosophy, this produced
+the epistemological problem: the question as to the possibility of any
+cognitive relationship of the individual to the world. In its practical
+phase, it generated the problem of the possibility of a purely
+individual consciousness acting on behalf of general or social
+interests,--the problem of social direction. While the philosophies
+which have been elaborated to deal with these questions have not
+affected education directly, the assumptions underlying them have
+found expression in the separation frequently made between study and
+government and between freedom of individuality and control by others.
+Regarding freedom, the important thing to bear in mind is that it
+designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of
+movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair
+leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc. A
+society based on custom will utilize individual variations only up to
+a limit of conformity with usage; uniformity is the chief ideal within
+each class. A progressive society counts individual variations as
+precious since it finds in them the means of its own growth. Hence
+a democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for
+intellectual freedom and the play of diverse gifts and interests in its
+educational measures.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
+
+1. The Meaning of Vocation. At the present time the conflict of
+philosophic theories focuses in discussion of the proper place and
+function of vocational factors in education. The bald statement that
+significant differences in fundamental philosophical conceptions find
+their chief issue in connection with this point may arouse incredulity:
+there seems to be too great a gap between the remote and general terms
+in which philosophic ideas are formulated and the practical and concrete
+details of vocational education. But a mental review of the intellectual
+presuppositions underlying the oppositions in education of labor and
+leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the
+world, will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and
+cultural education. Traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to
+the notions of leisure, purely contemplative knowledge and a spiritual
+activity not involving the active use of bodily organs. Culture has also
+tended, latterly, to be associated with a purely private refinement, a
+cultivation of certain states and attitudes of consciousness, separate
+from either social direction or service. It has been an escape from the
+former, and a solace for the necessity of the latter.
+
+So deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole
+subject of vocational education, that it is necessary to define the
+meaning of vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the impression
+that an education which centers about it is narrowly practical, if not
+merely pecuniary. A vocation means nothing but such a direction of life
+activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because
+of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates.
+The opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture, but
+aimlessness, capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in
+experience, on the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence
+upon the others, on the social side. Occupation is a concrete term for
+continuity. It includes the development of artistic capacity of any
+kind, of special scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well
+as professional and business occupations, to say nothing of mechanical
+labor or engagement in gainful pursuits.
+
+We must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to the
+occupations where immediately tangible commodities are produced, but
+also the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one
+and only one to each person. Such restricted specialism is impossible;
+nothing could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an
+eye to only one line of activity. In the first place, each individual
+has of necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be
+intelligently effective; and in the second place any one occupation
+loses its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy at something in the
+degree in which it is isolated from other interests. (i) No one is
+just an artist and nothing else, and in so far as one approximates that
+condition, he is so much the less developed human being; he is a kind
+of monstrosity. He must, at some period of his life, be a member of
+a family; he must have friends and companions; he must either support
+himself or be supported by others, and thus he has a business career.
+He is a member of some organized political unit, and so on. We naturally
+name his vocation from that one of the callings which distinguishes him,
+rather than from those which he has in common with all others. But we
+should not allow ourselves to be so subject to words as to ignore and
+virtually deny his other callings when it comes to a consideration of
+the vocational phases of education.
+
+(ii) As a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized
+phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his
+efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by
+its association with other callings. A person must have experience,
+he must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical
+accomplishment. He cannot find the subject matter of his artistic
+activity within his art; this must be an expression of what he suffers
+and enjoys in other relationships--a thing which depends in turn upon
+the alertness and sympathy of his interests. What is true of an artist
+is true of any other special calling. There is doubtless--in general
+accord with the principle of habit--a tendency for every distinctive
+vocation to become too dominant, too exclusive and absorbing in its
+specialized aspect. This means emphasis upon skill or technical method
+at the expense of meaning. Hence it is not the business of education to
+foster this tendency, but rather to safeguard against it, so that the
+scientific inquirer shall not be merely the scientist, the teacher
+merely the pedagogue, the clergyman merely one who wears the cloth, and
+so on.
+
+2. The Place of Vocational Aims in Education. Bearing in mind the varied
+and connected content of the vocation, and the broad background upon
+which a particular calling is projected, we shall now consider education
+for the more distinctive activity of an individual.
+
+1. An occupation is the only thing which balances the distinctive
+capacity of an individual with his social service. To find out what
+one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to
+happiness. Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one's true
+business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by
+circumstance into an uncongenial calling. A right occupation means
+simply that the aptitudes of a person are in adequate play, working with
+the minimum of friction and the maximum of satisfaction. With reference
+to other members of a community, this adequacy of action signifies, of
+course, that they are getting the best service the person can render.
+It is generally believed, for example, that slave labor was ultimately
+wasteful even from the purely economic point of view--that there was not
+sufficient stimulus to direct the energies of slaves, and that there
+was consequent wastage. Moreover, since slaves were confined to certain
+prescribed callings, much talent must have remained unavailable to the
+community, and hence there was a dead loss. Slavery only illustrates on
+an obvious scale what happens in some degree whenever an individual does
+not find himself in his work. And he cannot completely find himself when
+vocations are looked upon with contempt, and a conventional ideal of
+a culture which is essentially the same for all is maintained. Plato
+(ante, p. 88) laid down the fundamental principle of a philosophy of
+education when he asserted that it was the business of education to
+discover what each person is good for, and to train him to mastery of
+that mode of excellence, because such development would also secure the
+fulfillment of social needs in the most harmonious way. His error was
+not in qualitative principle, but in his limited conception of the scope
+of vocations socially needed; a limitation of vision which reacted to
+obscure his perception of the infinite variety of capacities found in
+different individuals.
+
+2. An occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose. Education
+through occupations consequently combines within itself more of the
+factors conducive to learning than any other method. It calls instincts
+and habits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity. It has an end
+in view; results are to be accomplished. Hence it appeals to thought; it
+demands that an idea of an end be steadily maintained, so that activity
+cannot be either routine or capricious. Since the movement of activity
+must be progressive, leading from one stage to another, observation
+and ingenuity are required at each stage to overcome obstacles and
+to discover and readapt means of execution. In short, an occupation,
+pursued under conditions where the realization of the activity rather
+than merely the external product is the aim, fulfills the requirements
+which were laid down earlier in connection with the discussion of aims,
+interest, and thinking. (See Chapters VIII, X, XII.)
+
+A calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for information
+and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth. It provides an axis
+which runs through an immense diversity of detail; it causes different
+experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with one
+another. The lawyer, the physician, the laboratory investigator in
+some branch of chemistry, the parent, the citizen interested in his own
+locality, has a constant working stimulus to note and relate whatever
+has to do with his concern. He unconsciously, from the motivation of his
+occupation, reaches out for all relevant information, and holds to it.
+The vocation acts as both magnet to attract and as glue to hold. Such
+organization of knowledge is vital, because it has reference to needs;
+it is so expressed and readjusted in action that it never becomes
+stagnant. No classification, no selection and arrangement of facts,
+which is consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever
+compare in solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of
+an occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal, superficial, and
+cold.
+
+3. The only adequate training for occupations is training through
+occupations. The principle stated early in this book (see Chapter VI)
+that the educative process is its own end, and that the only sufficient
+preparation for later responsibilities comes by making the most of
+immediately present life, applies in full force to the vocational phases
+of education. The dominant vocation of all human beings at all times
+is living--intellectual and moral growth. In childhood and youth, with
+their relative freedom from economic stress, this fact is naked and
+unconcealed. To predetermine some future occupation for which education
+is to be a strict preparation is to injure the possibilities of present
+development and thereby to reduce the adequacy of preparation for a
+future right employment. To repeat the principle we have had occasion
+to appeal to so often, such training may develop a machine-like skill in
+routine lines (it is far from being sure to do so, since it may develop
+distaste, aversion, and carelessness), but it will be at the expense of
+those qualities of alert observation and coherent and ingenious planning
+which make an occupation intellectually rewarding. In an autocratically
+managed society, it is often a conscious object to prevent the
+development of freedom and responsibility, a few do the planning and
+ordering, the others follow directions and are deliberately confined to
+narrow and prescribed channels of endeavor. However much such a scheme
+may inure to the prestige and profit of a class, it is evident that it
+limits the development of the subject class; hardens and confines the
+opportunities for learning through experience of the master class, and
+in both ways hampers the life of the society as a whole. (See ante, p.
+260.)
+
+The only alternative is that all the earlier preparation for vocations
+be indirect rather than direct; namely, through engaging in those active
+occupations which are indicated by the needs and interests of the pupil
+at the time. Only in this way can there be on the part of the educator
+and of the one educated a genuine discovery of personal aptitudes so
+that the proper choice of a specialized pursuit in later life may be
+indicated. Moreover, the discovery of capacity and aptitude will be a
+constant process as long as growth continues. It is a conventional and
+arbitrary view which assumes that discovery of the work to be chosen
+for adult life is made once for all at some particular date. One has
+discovered in himself, say, an interest, intellectual and social, in the
+things which have to do with engineering and has decided to make that
+his calling. At most, this only blocks out in outline the field in which
+further growth is to be directed. It is a sort of rough sketch for use
+in direction of further activities. It is the discovery of a profession
+in the sense in which Columbus discovered America when he touched
+its shores. Future explorations of an indefinitely more detailed and
+extensive sort remain to be made. When educators conceive vocational
+guidance as something which leads up to a definitive, irretrievable, and
+complete choice, both education and the chosen vocation are likely to be
+rigid, hampering further growth. In so far, the calling chosen will
+be such as to leave the person concerned in a permanently subordinate
+position, executing the intelligence of others who have a calling which
+permits more flexible play and readjustment. And while ordinary usages
+of language may not justify terming a flexible attitude of readjustment
+a choice of a new and further calling, it is such in effect. If even
+adults have to be on the lookout to see that their calling does not shut
+down on them and fossilize them, educators must certainly be careful
+that the vocational preparation of youth is such as to engage them in a
+continuous reorganization of aims and methods.
+
+3. Present Opportunities and Dangers. In the past, education has been
+much more vocational in fact than in name. (i) The education of the
+masses was distinctly utilitarian. It was called apprenticeship rather
+than education, or else just learning from experience. The schools
+devoted themselves to the three R's in the degree in which ability to go
+through the forms of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements
+in all kinds of labor. Taking part in some special line of work, under
+the direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education.
+The two supplemented each other; the school work in its narrow and
+formal character was as much a part of apprenticeship to a calling as
+that explicitly so termed.
+
+(ii) To a considerable extent, the education of the dominant classes was
+essentially vocational--it only happened that their pursuits of ruling
+and of enjoying were not called professions. For only those things were
+named vocations or employments which involved manual labor, laboring for
+a reward in keep, or its commuted money equivalent, or the rendering of
+personal services to specific persons. For a long time, for example, the
+profession of the surgeon and physician ranked almost with that of the
+valet or barber--partly because it had so much to do with the body,
+and partly because it involved rendering direct service for pay to some
+definite person. But if we go behind words, the business of directing
+social concerns, whether politically or economically, whether in war or
+peace, is as much a calling as anything else; and where education has
+not been completely under the thumb of tradition, higher schools in the
+past have been upon the whole calculated to give preparation for this
+business. Moreover, display, the adornment of person, the kind of social
+companionship and entertainment which give prestige, and the spending
+of money, have been made into definite callings. Unconsciously to
+themselves the higher institutions of learning have been made to
+contribute to preparation for these employments. Even at present, what
+is called higher education is for a certain class (much smaller than it
+once was) mainly preparation for engaging effectively in these pursuits.
+
+In other respects, it is largely, especially in the most advanced work,
+training for the calling of teaching and special research. By a peculiar
+superstition, education which has to do chiefly with preparation for
+the pursuit of conspicuous idleness, for teaching, and for literary
+callings, and for leadership, has been regarded as non-vocational and
+even as peculiarly cultural. The literary training which indirectly
+fits for authorship, whether of books, newspaper editorials, or magazine
+articles, is especially subject to this superstition: many a teacher and
+author writes and argues in behalf of a cultural and humane education
+against the encroachments of a specialized practical education, without
+recognizing that his own education, which he calls liberal, has been
+mainly training for his own particular calling. He has simply got into
+the habit of regarding his own business as essentially cultural and
+of overlooking the cultural possibilities of other employments. At
+the bottom of these distinctions is undoubtedly the tradition which
+recognizes as employment only those pursuits where one is responsible
+for his work to a specific employer, rather than to the ultimate
+employer, the community.
+
+There are, however, obvious causes for the present conscious emphasis
+upon vocational education--for the disposition to make explicit and
+deliberate vocational implications previously tacit. (i) In the first
+place, there is an increased esteem, in democratic communities, of
+whatever has to do with manual labor, commercial occupations, and the
+rendering of tangible services to society. In theory, men and women are
+now expected to do something in return for their support--intellectual
+and economic--by society. Labor is extolled; service is a much-lauded
+moral ideal. While there is still much admiration and envy of those who
+can pursue lives of idle conspicuous display, better moral sentiment
+condemns such lives. Social responsibility for the use of time and
+personal capacity is more generally recognized than it used to be.
+
+(ii) In the second place, those vocations which are specifically
+industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last century
+and a half. Manufacturing and commerce are no longer domestic and local,
+and consequently more or less incidental, but are world-wide. They
+engage the best energies of an increasingly large number of persons. The
+manufacturer, banker, and captain of industry have practically displaced
+a hereditary landed gentry as the immediate directors of social affairs.
+The problem of social readjustment is openly industrial, having to
+do with the relations of capital and labor. The great increase in the
+social importance of conspicuous industrial processes has inevitably
+brought to the front questions having to do with the relationship of
+schooling to industrial life. No such vast social readjustment could
+occur without offering a challenge to an education inherited from
+different social conditions, and without putting up to education new
+problems.
+
+(iii) In the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly
+mentioned: Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical,
+rule-of-thumb procedure, handed down by custom. Its technique is now
+technological: that is to say, based upon machinery resulting from
+discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, bacteriology, etc.
+The economic revolution has stimulated science by setting problems
+for solution, by producing greater intellectual respect for mechanical
+appliances. And industry received back payment from science with
+compound interest. As a consequence, industrial occupations have
+infinitely greater intellectual content and infinitely larger cultural
+possibilities than they used to possess. The demand for such education
+as will acquaint workers with the scientific and social bases and
+bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative, since those who are
+without it inevitably sink to the role of appendages to the machines
+they operate. Under the old regime all workers in a craft were
+approximately equals in their knowledge and outlook. Personal knowledge
+and ingenuity were developed within at least a narrow range, because
+work was done with tools under the direct command of the worker. Now the
+operator has to adjust himself to his machine, instead of his tool to
+his own purposes. While the intellectual possibilities of industry
+have multiplied, industrial conditions tend to make industry, for great
+masses, less of an educative resource than it was in the days of hand
+production for local markets. The burden of realizing the intellectual
+possibilities inhering in work is thus thrown back on the school.
+
+(iv) In the fourth place, the pursuit of knowledge has become, in
+science, more experimental, less dependent upon literary tradition, and
+less associated with dialectical methods of reasoning, and with symbols.
+As a result, the subject matter of industrial occupation presents
+not only more of the content of science than it used to, but greater
+opportunity for familiarity with the method by which knowledge is made.
+The ordinary worker in the factory is of course under too immediate
+economic pressure to have a chance to produce a knowledge like that of
+the worker in the laboratory. But in schools, association with machines
+and industrial processes may be had under conditions where the chief
+conscious concern of the students is insight. The separation of shop
+and laboratory, where these conditions are fulfilled, is largely
+conventional, the laboratory having the advantage of permitting the
+following up of any intellectual interest a problem may suggest; the
+shop the advantage of emphasizing the social bearings of the scientific
+principle, as well as, with many pupils, of stimulating a livelier
+interest.
+
+(v) Finally, the advances which have been made in the psychology of
+learning in general and of childhood in particular fall into line with
+the increased importance of industry in life. For modern psychology
+emphasizes the radical importance of primitive unlearned instincts of
+exploring, experimentation, and "trying on." It reveals that learning is
+not the work of something ready-made called mind, but that mind itself
+is an organization of original capacities into activities having
+significance. As we have already seen (ante, p. 204), in older pupils
+work is to educative development of raw native activities what play is
+for younger pupils. Moreover, the passage from play to work should be
+gradual, not involving a radical change of attitude but carrying into
+work the elements of play, plus continuous reorganization in behalf
+of greater control. The reader will remark that these five points
+practically resume the main contentions of the previous part of the
+work. Both practically and philosophically, the key to the present
+educational situation lies in a gradual reconstruction of school
+materials and methods so as to utilize various forms of occupation
+typifying social callings, and to bring out their intellectual and
+moral content. This reconstruction must relegate purely literary
+methods--including textbooks--and dialectical methods to the position of
+necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent development of consecutive
+and cumulative activities.
+
+But our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational
+reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a
+technical preparation for industries and professions as they now
+operate, much less by merely reproducing existing industrial conditions
+in the school. The problem is not that of making the schools an adjunct
+to manufacture and commerce, but of utilizing the factors of industry
+to make school life more active, more full of immediate meaning, more
+connected with out-of-school experience. The problem is not easy of
+solution. There is a standing danger that education will perpetuate
+the older traditions for a select few, and effect its adjustment to the
+newer economic conditions more or less on the basis of acquiescence
+in the untransformed, unrationalized, and unsocialized phases of our
+defective industrial regime. Put in concrete terms, there is danger that
+vocational education will be interpreted in theory and practice as trade
+education: as a means of securing technical efficiency in specialized
+future pursuits. Education would then become an instrument of
+perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society,
+instead of operating as a means of its transformation. The desired
+transformation is not difficult to define in a formal way. It signifies
+a society in which every person shall be occupied in something which
+makes the lives of others better worth living, and which accordingly
+makes the ties which bind persons together more perceptible--which
+breaks down the barriers of distance between them. It denotes a state
+of affairs in which the interest of each in his work is uncoerced and
+intelligent: based upon its congeniality to his own aptitudes. It goes
+without saying that we are far from such a social state; in a literal
+and quantitative sense, we may never arrive at it. But in principle, the
+quality of social changes already accomplished lies in this direction.
+There are more ample resources for its achievement now than ever there
+have been before. No insuperable obstacles, given the intelligent will
+for its realization, stand in the way.
+
+Success or failure in its realization depends more upon the adoption of
+educational methods calculated to effect the change than upon anything
+else. For the change is essentially a change in the quality of mental
+disposition--an educative change. This does not mean that we can change
+character and mind by direct instruction and exhortation, apart from
+a change in industrial and political conditions. Such a conception
+contradicts our basic idea that character and mind are attitudes of
+participative response in social affairs. But it does mean that we may
+produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like
+to realize, and by forming minds in accord with it gradually modify the
+larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society. Sentimentally,
+it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present regime is
+not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the
+fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them,
+which are pursued simply for the money reward that accrues. For such
+callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill will, and a desire
+to slight and evade. Neither men's hearts nor their minds are in their
+work. On the other hand, those who are not only much better off in
+worldly goods, but who are in excessive, if not monopolistic, control of
+the activities of the many are shut off from equality and generality of
+social intercourse. They are stimulated to pursuits of indulgence and
+display; they try to make up for the distance which separates them from
+others by the impression of force and superior possession and enjoyment
+which they can make upon others.
+
+It would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational
+education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form. Taking its
+stand upon a dogma of social predestination, it would assume that some
+are to continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like
+the present, and would aim simply to give them what is termed a trade
+education--that is, greater technical efficiency. Technical proficiency
+is often sadly lacking, and is surely desirable on all accounts--not
+merely for the sake of the production of better goods at less cost, but
+for the greater happiness found in work. For no one cares for what one
+cannot half do. But there is a great difference between a proficiency
+limited to immediate work, and a competency extended to insight into its
+social bearings; between efficiency in carrying out the plans of others
+and in one forming one's own. At present, intellectual and emotional
+limitation characterizes both the employing and the employed class.
+While the latter often have no concern with their occupation beyond the
+money return it brings, the former's outlook may be confined to
+profit and power. The latter interest generally involves much greater
+intellectual initiation and larger survey of conditions. For it involves
+the direction and combination of a large number of diverse factors,
+while the interest in wages is restricted to certain direct muscular
+movements. But none the less there is a limitation of intelligence to
+technical and non-humane, non-liberal channels, so far as the work does
+not take in its social bearings. And when the animating motive is desire
+for private profit or personal power, this limitation is inevitable. In
+fact, the advantage in immediate social sympathy and humane disposition
+often lies with the economically unfortunate, who have not experienced
+the hardening effects of a one-sided control of the affairs of others.
+
+Any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of departure
+from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely to assume and
+to perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and thus to become an
+instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.
+Those who are in a position to make their wishes good, will demand a
+liberal, a cultural occupation, and one which fits for directive power
+the youth in whom they are directly interested. To split the system, and
+give to others, less fortunately situated, an education conceived mainly
+as specific trade preparation, is to treat the schools as an agency
+for transferring the older division of labor and leisure, culture and
+service, mind and body, directed and directive class, into a society
+nominally democratic. Such a vocational education inevitably discounts
+the scientific and historic human connections of the materials and
+processes dealt with. To include such things in narrow trade education
+would be to waste time; concern for them would not be "practical." They
+are reserved for those who have leisure at command--the leisure due to
+superior economic resources. Such things might even be dangerous to the
+interests of the controlling class, arousing discontent or ambitions
+"beyond the station" of those working under the direction of others. But
+an education which acknowledges the full intellectual and social meaning
+of a vocation would include instruction in the historic background
+of present conditions; training in science to give intelligence and
+initiative in dealing with material and agencies of production; and
+study of economics, civics, and politics, to bring the future worker
+into touch with the problems of the day and the various methods proposed
+for its improvement. Above all, it would train power of readaptation
+to changing conditions so that future workers would not become blindly
+subject to a fate imposed upon them. This ideal has to contend not only
+with the inertia of existing educational traditions, but also with the
+opposition of those who are entrenched in command of the industrial
+machinery, and who realize that such an educational system if made
+general would threaten their ability to use others for their own ends.
+But this very fact is the presage of a more equitable and enlightened
+social order, for it gives evidence of the dependence of social
+reorganization upon educational reconstruction. It is accordingly an
+encouragement to those believing in a better order to undertake the
+promotion of a vocational education which does not subject youth to
+the demands and standards of the present system, but which utilizes its
+scientific and social factors to develop a courageous intelligence, and
+to make intelligence practical and executive.
+
+Summary. A vocation signifies any form of continuous activity which
+renders service to others and engages personal powers in behalf of the
+accomplishment of results. The question of the relation of vocation to
+education brings to a focus the various problems previously discussed
+regarding the connection of thought with bodily activity; of individual
+conscious development with associated life; of theoretical culture with
+practical behavior having definite results; of making a livelihood
+with the worthy enjoyment of leisure. In general, the opposition to
+recognition of the vocational phases of life in education (except for
+the utilitarian three R's in elementary schooling) accompanies the
+conservation of aristocratic ideals of the past. But, at the present
+juncture, there is a movement in behalf of something called vocational
+training which, if carried into effect, would harden these ideas into
+a form adapted to the existing industrial regime. This movement would
+continue the traditional liberal or cultural education for the few
+economically able to enjoy it, and would give to the masses a narrow
+technical trade education for specialized callings, carried on under the
+control of others. This scheme denotes, of course, simply a perpetuation
+of the older social division, with its counterpart intellectual and
+moral dualisms. But it means its continuation under conditions where it
+has much less justification for existence. For industrial life is now
+so dependent upon science and so intimately affects all forms of social
+intercourse, that there is an opportunity to utilize it for development
+of mind and character. Moreover, a right educational use of it would
+react upon intelligence and interest so as to modify, in connection with
+legislation and administration, the socially obnoxious features of the
+present industrial and commercial order. It would turn the increasing
+fund of social sympathy to constructive account, instead of leaving it a
+somewhat blind philanthropic sentiment.
+
+It would give those who engage in industrial callings desire and ability
+to share in social control, and ability to become masters of their
+industrial fate. It would enable them to saturate with meaning the
+technical and mechanical features which are so marked a feature of our
+machine system of production and distribution. So much for those who now
+have the poorer economic opportunities. With the representatives of the
+more privileged portion of the community, it would increase sympathy
+for labor, create a disposition of mind which can discover the
+culturing elements in useful activity, and increase a sense of social
+responsibility. The crucial position of the question of vocational
+education at present is due, in other words, to the fact that it
+concentrates in a specific issue two fundamental questions:--Whether
+intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity which puts
+nature to human use, and whether individual culture is best secured
+under egoistic or social conditions. No discussion of details is
+undertaken in this chapter, because this conclusion but summarizes the
+discussion of the previous chapters, XV to XXII, inclusive.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
+
+1. A Critical Review. Although we are dealing with the philosophy of
+education, DO definition of philosophy has yet been given; nor has
+there been an explicit consideration of the nature of a philosophy of
+education. This topic is now introduced by a summary account of the
+logical order implied in the previous discussions, for the purpose
+of bringing out the philosophic issues involved. Afterwards we shall
+undertake a brief discussion, in more specifically philosophical
+terms, of the theories of knowledge and of morals implied in different
+educational ideals as they operate in practice. The prior chapters fall
+logically into three parts.
+
+I. The first chapters deal with education as a social need and function.
+Their purpose is to outline the general features of education as the
+process by which social groups maintain their continuous existence.
+Education was shown to be a process of renewal of the meanings of
+experience through a process of transmission, partly incidental to
+the ordinary companionship or intercourse of adults and youth, partly
+deliberately instituted to effect social continuity. This process was
+seen to involve control and growth of both the immature individual and
+the group in which he lives.
+
+This consideration was formal in that it took no specific account of the
+quality of the social group concerned--the kind of society aiming at
+its own perpetuation through education. The general discussion was
+then specified by application to social groups which are intentionally
+progressive, and which aim at a greater variety of mutually shared
+interests in distinction from those which aim simply at the preservation
+of established customs. Such societies were found to be democratic in
+quality, because of the greater freedom allowed the constituent
+members, and the conscious need of securing in individuals a consciously
+socialized interest, instead of trusting mainly to the force of customs
+operating under the control of a superior class. The sort of education
+appropriate to the development of a democratic community was then
+explicitly taken as the criterion of the further, more detailed analysis
+of education.
+
+II. This analysis, based upon the democratic criterion, was seen to
+imply the ideal of a continuous reconstruction or reorganizing of
+experience, of such a nature as to increase its recognized meaning or
+social content, and as to increase the capacity of individuals to act as
+directive guardians of this reorganization. (See Chapters VI-VII.)
+This distinction was then used to outline the respective characters of
+subject matter and method. It also defined their unity, since method
+in study and learning upon this basis is just the consciously directed
+movement of reorganization of the subject matter of experience. From
+this point of view the main principles of method and subject matter of
+learning were developed (Chapters XIII-XIV.)
+
+III. Save for incidental criticisms designed to illustrate principles
+by force of contrast, this phase of the discussion took for granted the
+democratic criterion and its application in present social life. In the
+subsequent chapters (XVIII-XXII) we considered the present limitation of
+its actual realization. They were found to spring from the notion that
+experience consists of a variety of segregated domains, or interests,
+each having its own independent value, material, and method, each
+checking every other, and, when each is kept properly bounded by the
+others, forming a kind of "balance of powers" in education. We then
+proceeded to an analysis of the various assumptions underlying this
+segregation. On the practical side, they were found to have their cause
+in the divisions of society into more or less rigidly marked-off classes
+and groups--in other words, in obstruction to full and flexible social
+interaction and intercourse. These social ruptures of continuity were
+seen to have their intellectual formulation in various dualisms
+or antitheses--such as that of labor and leisure, practical and
+intellectual activity, man and nature, individuality and association,
+culture and vocation. In this discussion, we found that these different
+issues have their counterparts in formulations which have been made in
+classic philosophic systems; and that they involve the chief problems of
+philosophy--such as mind (or spirit) and matter, body and mind, the
+mind and the world, the individual and his relationships to others, etc.
+Underlying these various separations we found the fundamental assumption
+to be an isolation of mind from activity involving physical conditions,
+bodily organs, material appliances, and natural objects. Consequently,
+there was indicated a philosophy which recognizes the origin, place, and
+function of mind in an activity which controls the environment. Thus we
+have completed the circuit and returned to the conceptions of the
+first portion of this book: such as the biological continuity of human
+impulses and instincts with natural energies; the dependence of the
+growth of mind upon participation in conjoint activities having a common
+purpose; the influence of the physical environment through the uses made
+of it in the social medium; the necessity of utilization of individual
+variations in desire and thinking for a progressively developing
+society; the essential unity of method and subject matter; the intrinsic
+continuity of ends and means; the recognition of mind as thinking which
+perceives and tests the meanings of behavior. These conceptions are
+consistent with the philosophy which sees intelligence to be the
+purposive reorganization, through action, of the material of experience;
+and they are inconsistent with each of the dualistic philosophies
+mentioned.
+
+2. The Nature of Philosophy. Our further task is to extract and make
+explicit the idea of philosophy implicit in these considerations. We
+have already virtually described, though not defined, philosophy in
+terms of the problems with which it deals; and we have pointed out that
+these problems originate in the conflicts and difficulties of social
+life. The problems are such things as the relations of mind and matter;
+body and soul; humanity and physical nature; the individual and the
+social; theory--or knowing, and practice--or doing. The philosophical
+systems which formulate these problems record the main lineaments and
+difficulties of contemporary social practice. They bring to explicit
+consciousness what men have come to think, in virtue of the quality of
+their current experience, about nature, themselves, and the reality they
+conceive to include or to govern both.
+
+As we might expect, then, philosophy has generally been defined in ways
+which imply a certain totality, generality, and ultimateness of both
+subject matter and method. With respect to subject matter, philosophy
+is an attempt to _comprehend_--that is, to gather together the varied
+details of the world and of life into a single inclusive whole, which
+shall either be a unity, or, as in the dualistic systems, shall reduce
+the plural details to a small number of ultimate principles. On the
+side of the attitude of the philosopher and of those who accept his
+conclusions, there is the endeavor to attain as unified, consistent,
+and complete an outlook upon experience as is possible. This aspect is
+expressed in the word 'philosophy'--love of wisdom. Whenever philosophy
+has been taken seriously, it has always been assumed that it signified
+achieving a wisdom which would influence the conduct of life. Witness
+the fact that almost all ancient schools of philosophy were also
+organized ways of living, those who accepted their tenets being
+committed to certain distinctive modes of conduct; witness the intimate
+connection of philosophy with the theology of the Roman church in the
+middle ages, its frequent association with religious interests, and, at
+national crises, its association with political struggles.
+
+This direct and intimate connection of philosophy with an outlook upon
+life obviously differentiates philosophy from science. Particular facts
+and laws of science evidently influence conduct. They suggest things to
+do and not do, and provide means of execution. When science denotes not
+simply a report of the particular facts discovered about the world but
+a _general attitude_ toward it--as distinct from special things to do
+--it merges into philosophy. For an underlying disposition represents an
+attitude not to this and that thing nor even to the aggregate of known
+things, but to the considerations which govern conduct.
+
+Hence philosophy cannot be defined simply from the side of subject
+matter. For this reason, the definition of such conceptions as
+generality, totality, and ultimateness is most readily reached from
+the side of the disposition toward the world which they connote. In any
+literal and quantitative sense, these terms do not apply to the subject
+matter of knowledge, for completeness and finality are out of the
+question. The very nature of experience as an ongoing, changing process
+forbids. In a less rigid sense, they apply to science rather than to
+philosophy. For obviously it is to mathematics, physics, chemistry,
+biology, anthropology, history, etc. that we must go, not to philosophy,
+to find out the facts of the world. It is for the sciences to say what
+generalizations are tenable about the world and what they specifically
+are. But when we ask what sort of permanent disposition of action
+toward the world the scientific disclosures exact of us we are raising a
+philosophic question.
+
+
+From this point of view, "totality" does not mean the hopeless task of a
+quantitative summation. It means rather consistency of mode of response
+in reference to the plurality of events which occur. Consistency does
+not mean literal identity; for since the same thing does not happen
+twice, an exact repetition of a reaction involves some maladjustment.
+Totality means continuity--the carrying on of a former habit of action
+with the readaptation necessary to keep it alive and growing. Instead of
+signifying a ready-made complete scheme of action, it means keeping
+the balance in a multitude of diverse actions, so that each borrows and
+gives significance to every other. Any person who is open-minded
+and sensitive to new perceptions, and who has concentration and
+responsibility in connecting them has, in so far, a philosophic
+disposition. One of the popular senses of philosophy is calm and
+endurance in the face of difficulty and loss; it is even supposed to be
+a power to bear pain without complaint. This meaning is a tribute to the
+influence of the Stoic philosophy rather than an attribute of
+philosophy in general. But in so far as it suggests that the wholeness
+characteristic of philosophy is a power to learn, or to extract meaning,
+from even the unpleasant vicissitudes of experience and to embody what
+is learned in an ability to go on learning, it is justified in any
+scheme. An analogous interpretation applies to the generality
+and ultimateness of philosophy. Taken literally, they are absurd
+pretensions; they indicate insanity. Finality does not mean, however,
+that experience is ended and exhausted, but means the disposition to
+penetrate to deeper levels of meaning--to go below the surface and find
+out the connections of any event or object, and to keep at it. In like
+manner the philosophic attitude is general in the sense that it is
+averse to taking anything as isolated; it tries to place an act in its
+context--which constitutes its significance. It is of assistance to
+connect philosophy with thinking in its distinction from knowledge.
+Knowledge, grounded knowledge, is science; it represents objects which
+have been settled, ordered, disposed of rationally. Thinking, on
+the other hand, is prospective in reference. It is occasioned by an
+unsettlement and it aims at overcoming a disturbance. Philosophy is
+thinking what the known demands of us--what responsive attitude it
+exacts. It is an idea of what is possible, not a record of accomplished
+fact. Hence it is hypothetical, like all thinking. It presents an
+assignment of something to be done--something to be tried. Its value
+lies not in furnishing solutions (which can be achieved only in action)
+but in defining difficulties and suggesting methods for dealing with
+them. Philosophy might almost be described as thinking which has become
+conscious of itself--which has generalized its place, function, and
+value in experience.
+
+More specifically, the demand for a "total" attitude arises because
+there is the need of integration in action of the conflicting various
+interests in life. Where interests are so superficial that they glide
+readily into one another, or where they are not sufficiently organized
+to come into conflict with one another, the need for philosophy is not
+perceptible. But when the scientific interest conflicts with, say, the
+religious, or the economic with the scientific or aesthetic, or when the
+conservative concern for order is at odds with the progressive interest
+in freedom, or when institutionalism clashes with individuality, there
+is a stimulus to discover some more comprehensive point of view from
+which the divergencies may be brought together, and consistency or
+continuity of experience recovered. Often these clashes may be settled
+by an individual for himself; the area of the struggle of aims is
+limited and a person works out his own rough accommodations. Such
+homespun philosophies are genuine and often adequate. But they do not
+result in systems of philosophy. These arise when the discrepant claims
+of different ideals of conduct affect the community as a whole, and the
+need for readjustment is general. These traits explain some things which
+are often brought as objections against philosophies, such as the
+part played in them by individual speculation, and their controversial
+diversity, as well as the fact that philosophy seems to be repeatedly
+occupied with much the same questions differently stated. Without doubt,
+all these things characterize historic philosophies more or less. But
+they are not objections to philosophy so much as they are to human
+nature, and even to the world in which human nature is set. If there
+are genuine uncertainties in life, philosophies must reflect that
+uncertainty. If there are different diagnoses of the cause of a
+difficulty, and different proposals for dealing with it; if, that is,
+the conflict of interests is more or less embodied in different sets of
+persons, there must be divergent competing philosophies. With respect
+to what has happened, sufficient evidence is all that is needed to bring
+agreement and certainty. The thing itself is sure. But with reference
+to what it is wise to do in a complicated situation, discussion is
+inevitable precisely because the thing itself is still indeterminate.
+One would not expect a ruling class living at ease to have the same
+philosophy of life as those who were having a hard struggle for
+existence. If the possessing and the dispossessed had the same
+fundamental disposition toward the world, it would argue either
+insincerity or lack of seriousness. A community devoted to industrial
+pursuits, active in business and commerce, is not likely to see the
+needs and possibilities of life in the same way as a country with high
+aesthetic culture and little enterprise in turning the energies of
+nature to mechanical account. A social group with a fairly continuous
+history will respond mentally to a crisis in a very different way from
+one which has felt the shock of abrupt breaks. Even if the same data
+were present, they would be evaluated differently. But the different
+sorts of experience attending different types of life prevent just the
+same data from presenting themselves, as well as lead to a different
+scheme of values. As for the similarity of problems, this is often
+more a matter of appearance than of fact, due to old discussions being
+translated into the terms of contemporary perplexities. But in certain
+fundamental respects the same predicaments of life recur from time to
+time with only such changes as are due to change of social context,
+including the growth of the sciences.
+
+The fact that philosophic problems arise because of widespread and
+widely felt difficulties in social practice is disguised because
+philosophers become a specialized class which uses a technical language,
+unlike the vocabulary in which the direct difficulties are stated. But
+where a system becomes influential, its connection with a conflict of
+interests calling for some program of social adjustment may always be
+discovered. At this point, the intimate connection between philosophy
+and education appears. In fact, education offers a vantage ground
+from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical,
+significance of philosophic discussions. The student of philosophy "in
+itself" is always in danger of taking it as so much nimble or severe
+intellectual exercise--as something said by philosophers and concerning
+them alone. But when philosophic issues are approached from the side
+of the kind of mental disposition to which they correspond, or the
+differences in educational practice they make when acted upon, the
+life-situations which they formulate can never be far from view. If
+a theory makes no difference in educational endeavor, it must be
+artificial. The educational point of view enables one to envisage the
+philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at
+home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice.
+If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming
+fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature
+and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of
+education. Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic--or verbal--or
+a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its
+auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect
+in conduct. Public agitation, propaganda, legislative and administrative
+action are effective in producing the change of disposition which a
+philosophy indicates as desirable, but only in the degree in which they
+are educative--that is to say, in the degree in which they modify mental
+and moral attitudes. And at the best, such methods are compromised by
+the fact they are used with those whose habits are already largely set,
+while education of youth has a fairer and freer field of operation.
+On the other side, the business of schooling tends to become a routine
+empirical affair unless its aims and methods are animated by such a
+broad and sympathetic survey of its place in contemporary life as it is
+the business of philosophy to provide. Positive science always implies
+practically the ends which the community is concerned to achieve.
+Isolated from such ends, it is matter of indifference whether its
+disclosures are used to cure disease or to spread it; to increase the
+means of sustenance of life or to manufacture war material to wipe
+life out. If society is interested in one of these things rather than
+another, science shows the way of attainment. Philosophy thus has a
+double task: that of criticizing existing aims with respect to the
+existing state of science, pointing out values which have become
+obsolete with the command of new resources, showing what values are
+merely sentimental because there are no means for their realization; and
+also that of interpreting the results of specialized science in their
+bearing on future social endeavor. It is impossible that it should have
+any success in these tasks without educational equivalents as to what to
+do and what not to do. For philosophic theory has no Aladdin's lamp
+to summon into immediate existence the values which it intellectually
+constructs. In the mechanical arts, the sciences become methods of
+managing things so as to utilize their energies for recognized aims.
+By the educative arts philosophy may generate methods of utilizing
+the energies of human beings in accord with serious and thoughtful
+conceptions of life. Education is the laboratory in which philosophic
+distinctions become concrete and are tested.
+
+It is suggestive that European philosophy originated (among the
+Athenians) under the direct pressure of educational questions. The
+earlier history of philosophy, developed by the Greeks in Asia Minor and
+Italy, so far as its range of topics is concerned, is mainly a chapter
+in the history of science rather than of philosophy as that word is
+understood to-day. It had nature for its subject, and speculated as to
+how things are made and changed. Later the traveling teachers, known as
+the Sophists, began to apply the results and the methods of the natural
+philosophers to human conduct.
+
+When the Sophists, the first body of professional educators in Europe,
+instructed the youth in virtue, the political arts, and the management
+of city and household, philosophy began to deal with the relation of
+the individual to the universal, to some comprehensive class, or to some
+group; the relation of man and nature, of tradition and reflection, of
+knowledge and action. Can virtue, approved excellence in any line, be
+learned, they asked? What is learning? It has to do with knowledge.
+What, then, is knowledge? How is it achieved? Through the senses, or by
+apprenticeship in some form of doing, or by reason that has undergone
+a preliminary logical discipline? Since learning is coming to know, it
+involves a passage from ignorance to wisdom, from privation to fullness
+from defect to perfection, from non-being to being, in the Greek way
+of putting it. How is such a transition possible? Is change, becoming,
+development really possible and if so, how? And supposing such questions
+answered, what is the relation of instruction, of knowledge, to virtue?
+This last question led to opening the problem of the relation of reason
+to action, of theory to practice, since virtue clearly dwelt in action.
+Was not knowing, the activity of reason, the noblest attribute of man?
+And consequently was not purely intellectual activity itself the highest
+of all excellences, compared with which the virtues of neighborliness
+and the citizen's life were secondary? Or, on the other hand, was
+the vaunted intellectual knowledge more than empty and vain pretense,
+demoralizing to character and destructive of the social ties that bound
+men together in their community life? Was not the only true, because the
+only moral, life gained through obedient habituation to the customary
+practices of the community? And was not the new education an enemy to
+good citizenship, because it set up a rival standard to the established
+traditions of the community?
+
+In the course of two or three generations such questions were cut loose
+from their original practical bearing upon education and were
+discussed on their own account; that is, as matters of philosophy as an
+independent branch of inquiry. But the fact that the stream of European
+philosophical thought arose as a theory of educational procedure
+remains an eloquent witness to the intimate connection of philosophy and
+education. "Philosophy of education" is not an external application of
+ready-made ideas to a system of practice having a radically different
+origin and purpose: it is only an explicit formulation of the problems
+of the formation of right mental and moral habitudes in respect to
+the difficulties of contemporary social life. The most penetrating
+definition of philosophy which can be given is, then, that it is the
+theory of education in its most general phases.
+
+The reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social ideals and
+methods thus go hand in hand. If there is especial need of educational
+reconstruction at the present time, if this need makes urgent a
+reconsideration of the basic ideas of traditional philosophic systems,
+it is because of the thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying
+the advance of science, the industrial revolution, and the development
+of democracy. Such practical changes cannot take place without demanding
+an educational reformation to meet them, and without leading men to ask
+what ideas and ideals are implicit in these social changes, and what
+revisions they require of the ideas and ideals which are inherited
+from older and unlike cultures. Incidentally throughout the whole book,
+explicitly in the last few chapters, we have been dealing with just
+these questions as they affect the relationship of mind and body, theory
+and practice, man and nature, the individual and social, etc. In our
+concluding chapters we shall sum up the prior discussions with respect
+first to the philosophy of knowledge, and then to the philosophy of
+morals.
+
+Summary. After a review designed to bring out the philosophic issues
+implicit in the previous discussions, philosophy was defined as the
+generalized theory of education. Philosophy was stated to be a form
+of thinking, which, like all thinking, finds its origin in what is
+uncertain in the subject matter of experience, which aims to locate the
+nature of the perplexity and to frame hypotheses for its clearing up to
+be tested in action. Philosophic thinking has for its differentia the
+fact that the uncertainties with which it deals are found in widespread
+social conditions and aims, consisting in a conflict of organized
+interests and institutional claims. Since the only way of bringing
+about a harmonious readjustment of the opposed tendencies is through a
+modification of emotional and intellectual disposition, philosophy is
+at once an explicit formulation of the various interests of life and a
+propounding of points of view and methods through which a better balance
+of interests may be effected. Since education is the process through
+which the needed transformation may be accomplished and not remain a
+mere hypothesis as to what is desirable, we reach a justification of the
+statement that philosophy is the theory of education as a deliberately
+conducted practice.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
+
+1. Continuity versus Dualism. A number of theories of knowing have been
+criticized in the previous pages. In spite of their differences from one
+another, they all agree in one fundamental respect which contrasts
+with the theory which has been positively advanced. The latter
+assumes continuity; the former state or imply certain basic divisions,
+separations, or antitheses, technically called dualisms. The origin of
+these divisions we have found in the hard and fast walls which mark off
+social groups and classes within a group: like those between rich and
+poor, men and women, noble and baseborn, ruler and ruled. These barriers
+mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent
+to the setting up of different types of life-experience, each with
+isolated subject matter, aim, and standard of values. Every such social
+condition must be formulated in a dualistic philosophy, if philosophy is
+to be a sincere account of experience. When it gets beyond dualism--as
+many philosophies do in form--it can only be by appeal to something
+higher than anything found in experience, by a flight to some
+transcendental realm. And in denying duality in name such theories
+restore it in fact, for they end in a division between things of this
+world as mere appearances and an inaccessible essence of reality.
+
+So far as these divisions persist and others are added to them, each
+leaves its mark upon the educational system, until the scheme of
+education, taken as a whole, is a deposit of various purposes and
+procedures. The outcome is that kind of check and balance of segregated
+factors and values which has been described. (See Chapter XVIII.)
+The present discussion is simply a formulation, in the terminology of
+philosophy, of various antithetical conceptions involved in the theory
+of knowing. In the first place, there is the opposition of empirical and
+higher rational knowing. The first is connected with everyday affairs,
+serves the purposes of the ordinary individual who has no specialized
+intellectual
+
+pursuit, and brings his wants into some kind of working connection with
+the immediate environment. Such knowing is depreciated, if not despised,
+as purely utilitarian, lacking in cultural significance. Rational
+knowledge is supposed to be something which touches reality in ultimate,
+intellectual fashion; to be pursued for its own sake and properly to
+terminate in purely theoretical insight, not debased by application
+in behavior. Socially, the distinction corresponds to that of the
+intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a learned
+class remote from concern with the means of living. Philosophically, the
+difference turns about the distinction of the particular and universal.
+Experience is an aggregate of more or less isolated particulars,
+acquaintance with each of which must be separately made. Reason deals
+with universals, with general principles, with laws, which lie above the
+welter of concrete details. In the educational precipitate, the pupil
+is supposed to have to learn, on one hand, a lot of items of specific
+information, each standing by itself, and upon the other hand, to
+become familiar with a certain number of laws and general relationships.
+Geography, as often taught, illustrates the former; mathematics, beyond
+the rudiments of figuring, the latter. For all practical purposes, they
+represent two independent worlds.
+
+Another antithesis is suggested by the two senses of the word
+"learning." On the one hand, learning is the sum total of what is
+known, as that is handed down by books and learned men. It is something
+external, an accumulation of cognitions as one might store material
+commodities in a warehouse. Truth exists ready-made somewhere. Study is
+then the process by which an individual draws on what is in storage. On
+the other hand, learning means something which the individual does when
+he studies. It is an active, personally conducted affair. The dualism
+here is between knowledge as something external, or, as it is often
+called, objective, and knowing as something purely internal, subjective,
+psychical. There is, on one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on
+the other, a ready-made mind equipped with a faculty of knowing--if it
+only wills to exercise it, which it is often strangely loath to do. The
+separation, often touched upon, between subject matter and method is the
+educational equivalent of this dualism. Socially the distinction has
+to do with the part of life which is dependent upon authority and
+that where individuals are free to advance. Another dualism is that of
+activity and passivity in knowing. Purely empirical and physical things
+are often supposed to be known by receiving impressions. Physical
+things somehow stamp themselves upon the mind or convey themselves
+into consciousness by means of the sense organs. Rational knowledge and
+knowledge of spiritual things is supposed, on the contrary, to spring
+from activity initiated within the mind, an activity carried on better
+if it is kept remote from all sullying touch of the senses and external
+objects. The distinction between sense training and object lessons
+and laboratory exercises, and pure ideas contained in books, and
+appropriated--so it is thought--by some miraculous output of mental
+energy, is a fair expression in education of this distinction. Socially,
+it reflects a division between those who are controlled by direct
+concern with things and those who are free to cultivate themselves.
+
+Another current opposition is that said to exist between the intellect
+and the emotions. The emotions are conceived to be purely private and
+personal, having nothing to do with the work of pure intelligence in
+apprehending facts and truths,--except perhaps the single emotion of
+intellectual curiosity. The intellect is a pure light; the emotions are
+a disturbing heat. The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions
+turn inward to considerations of personal advantage and loss. Thus in
+education we have that systematic depreciation of interest which
+has been noted, plus the necessity in practice, with most pupils, of
+recourse to extraneous and irrelevant rewards and penalties in order to
+induce the person who has a mind (much as his clothes have a pocket) to
+apply that mind to the truths to be known. Thus we have the spectacle
+of professional educators decrying appeal to interest while they uphold
+with great dignity the need of reliance upon examinations, marks,
+promotions and emotions, prizes, and the time-honored paraphernalia of
+rewards and punishments. The effect of this situation in crippling
+the teacher's sense of humor has not received the attention which it
+deserves.
+
+All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and doing,
+theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of action and
+the body as its organ and means. We shall not repeat what has been said
+about the source of this dualism in the division of society into a class
+laboring with their muscles for material sustenance and a class
+which, relieved from economic pressure, devotes itself to the arts of
+expression and social direction. Nor is it necessary to speak again
+of the educational evils which spring from the separation. We shall be
+content to summarize the forces which tend to make the untenability of
+this conception obvious and to replace it by the idea of continuity.
+(i) The advance of physiology and the psychology associated with it have
+shown the connection of mental activity with that of the nervous system.
+Too often recognition of connection has stopped short at this point; the
+older dualism of soul and body has been replaced by that of the brain
+and the rest of the body. But in fact the nervous system is only
+a specialized mechanism for keeping all bodily activities working
+together. Instead of being isolated from them, as an organ of knowing
+from organs of motor response, it is the organ by which they interact
+responsively with one another. The brain is essentially an organ
+for effecting the reciprocal adjustment to each other of the stimuli
+received from the environment and responses directed upon it. Note that
+the adjusting is reciprocal; the brain not only enables organic activity
+to be brought to bear upon any object of the environment in response to
+a sensory stimulation, but this response also determines what the next
+stimulus will be. See what happens, for example, when a carpenter is
+at work upon a board, or an etcher upon his plate--or in any case of a
+consecutive activity. While each motor response is adjusted to the
+state of affairs indicated through the sense organs, that motor response
+shapes the next sensory stimulus. Generalizing this illustration, the
+brain is the machinery for a constant reorganizing of activity so as to
+maintain its continuity; that is to say, to make such modifications in
+future action as are required because of what has already been done. The
+continuity of the work of the carpenter distinguishes it from a routine
+repetition of identically the same motion, and from a random
+activity where there is nothing cumulative. What makes it continuous,
+consecutive, or concentrated is that each earlier act prepares the way
+for later acts, while these take account of or reckon with the results
+already attained--the basis of all responsibility. No one who has
+realized the full force of the facts of the connection of knowing with
+the nervous system and of the nervous system with the readjusting of
+activity continuously to meet new conditions, will doubt that knowing
+has to do with reorganizing activity, instead of being something
+isolated from all activity, complete on its own account.
+
+(ii) The development of biology clinches this lesson, with its discovery
+of evolution. For the philosophic significance of the doctrine of
+evolution lies precisely in its emphasis upon continuity of simpler
+and more complex organic forms until we reach man. The development of
+organic forms begins with structures where the adjustment of environment
+and organism is obvious, and where anything which can be called mind is
+at a minimum. As activity becomes more complex, coordinating a greater
+number of factors in space and time, intelligence plays a more and more
+marked role, for it has a larger span of the future to forecast and plan
+for. The effect upon the theory of knowing is to displace the notion
+that it is the activity of a mere onlooker or spectator of the world,
+the notion which goes with the idea of knowing as something complete in
+itself. For the doctrine of organic development means that the living
+creature is a part of the world, sharing its vicissitudes and fortunes,
+and making itself secure in its precarious dependence only as it
+intellectually identifies itself with the things about it, and,
+forecasting the future consequences of what is going on, shapes its own
+activities accordingly. If the living, experiencing being is an intimate
+participant in the activities of the world to which it belongs, then
+knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable in the degree in which it
+is effective. It cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned spectator.
+
+(iii) The development of the experimental method as the method of
+getting knowledge and of making sure it is knowledge, and not mere
+opinion--the method of both discovery and proof--is the remaining great
+force in bringing about a transformation in the theory of knowledge.
+The experimental method has two sides. (i) On one hand, it means that we
+have no right to call anything knowledge except where our activity has
+actually produced certain physical changes in things, which agree with
+and confirm the conception entertained. Short of such specific changes,
+our beliefs are only hypotheses, theories, suggestions, guesses, and
+are to be entertained tentatively and to be utilized as indications of
+experiments to be tried. (ii) On the other hand, the experimental method
+of thinking signifies that thinking is of avail; that it is of avail in
+just the degree in which the anticipation of future consequences is
+made on the basis of thorough observation of present conditions.
+Experimentation, in other words, is not equivalent to blind reacting.
+Such surplus activity--a surplus with reference to what has been
+observed and is now anticipated--is indeed an unescapable factor in all
+our behavior, but it is not experiment save as consequences are noted
+and are used to make predictions and plans in similar situations in the
+future. The more the meaning of the experimental method is perceived,
+the more our trying out of a certain way of treating the material
+resources and obstacles which confront us embodies a prior use of
+intelligence. What we call magic was with respect to many things the
+experimental method of the savage; but for him to try was to try his
+luck, not his ideas. The scientific experimental method is, on
+the contrary, a trial of ideas; hence even when practically--or
+immediately--unsuccessful, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we learn
+from our failures when our endeavors are seriously thoughtful.
+
+The experimental method is new as a scientific resource--as a
+systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as
+a practical device. Hence it is not surprising that men have not
+recognized its full scope. For the most part, its significance is
+regarded as belonging to certain technical and merely physical matters.
+It will doubtless take a long time to secure the perception that it
+holds equally as to the forming and testing of ideas in social and
+moral matters. Men still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed
+by authority, to relieve them of the trouble of thinking and the
+responsibility of directing their activity by thought. They tend to
+confine their own thinking to a consideration of which one among the
+rival systems of dogma they will accept. Hence the schools are better
+adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers. But
+every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to
+aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative methods
+of forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the past, and to
+transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active concern
+with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing temporal reach
+and deploying greater range of things in space. In time the theory of
+knowing must be derived from the practice which is most successful in
+making knowledge; and then that theory will be employed to improve the
+methods which are less successful.
+
+2. Schools of Method. There are various systems of philosophy with
+characteristically different conceptions of the method of knowing. Some
+of them are named scholasticism, sensationalism, rationalism, idealism,
+realism, empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, etc. Many of
+them have been criticized in connection with the discussion of some
+educational problem. We are here concerned with them as involving
+deviations from that method which has proved most effective in achieving
+knowledge, for a consideration of the deviations may render clearer
+the true place of knowledge in experience. In brief, the function
+of knowledge is to make one experience freely available in other
+experiences. The word "freely" marks the difference between the
+principle of knowledge and that of habit. Habit means that an individual
+undergoes a modification through an experience, which modification forms
+a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction
+in the future. Thus it also has the function of making one experience
+available in subsequent experiences. Within certain limits, it performs
+this function successfully. But habit, apart from knowledge, does not
+make allowance for change of conditions, for novelty. Prevision of
+change is not part of its scope, for habit assumes the essential
+likeness of the new situation with the old. Consequently it often leads
+astray, or comes between a person and the successful performance of
+his task, just as the skill, based on habit alone, of the mechanic
+will desert him when something unexpected occurs in the running of the
+machine. But a man who understands the machine is the man who knows what
+he is about. He knows the conditions under which a given habit works,
+and is in a position to introduce the changes which will readapt it to
+new conditions.
+
+In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an
+object which determine its applicability in a given situation. To
+take an extreme example; savages react to a flaming comet as they are
+accustomed to react to other events which threaten the security of
+their life. Since they try to frighten wild animals or their enemies by
+shrieks, beating of gongs, brandishing of weapons, etc., they use the
+same methods to scare away the comet. To us, the method is plainly
+absurd--so absurd that we fail to note that savages are simply falling
+back upon habit in a way which exhibits its limitations. The only reason
+we do not act in some analogous fashion is because we do not take
+the comet as an isolated, disconnected event, but apprehend it in
+its connections with other events. We place it, as we say, in the
+astronomical system. We respond to its connections and not simply to
+the immediate occurrence. Thus our attitude to it is much freer. We may
+approach it, so to speak, from any one of the angles provided by its
+connections. We can bring into play, as we deem wise, any one of the
+habits appropriate to any one of the connected objects. Thus we get at
+a new event indirectly instead of immediately--by invention, ingenuity,
+resourcefulness. An ideally perfect knowledge would represent such a
+network of interconnections that any past experience would offer a
+point of advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new
+experience. In fine, while a habit apart from knowledge supplies us with
+a single fixed method of attack, knowledge means that selection may be
+made from a much wider range of habits.
+
+Two aspects of this more general and freer availability of former
+experiences for subsequent ones may be distinguished. (See ante, p. 77.)
+(i) One, the more tangible, is increased power of control. What cannot
+be managed directly may be handled indirectly; or we can interpose
+barriers between us and undesirable consequences; or we may evade them
+if we cannot overcome them. Genuine knowledge has all the practical
+value attaching to efficient habits in any case. (ii) But it also
+increases the meaning, the experienced significance, attaching to an
+experience. A situation to which we respond capriciously or by routine
+has only a minimum of conscious significance; we get nothing mentally
+from it. But wherever knowledge comes into play in determining a new
+experience there is mental reward; even if we fail practically in
+getting the needed control we have the satisfaction of experiencing a
+meaning instead of merely reacting physically.
+
+While the content of knowledge is what has happened, what is taken
+as finished and hence settled and sure, the reference of knowledge
+is future or prospective. For knowledge furnishes the means of
+understanding or giving meaning to what is still going on and what is
+to be done. The knowledge of a physician is what he has found out by
+personal acquaintance and by study of what others have ascertained and
+recorded. But it is knowledge to him because it supplies the resources
+by which he interprets the unknown things which confront him, fills out
+the partial obvious facts with connected suggested phenomena, foresees
+their probable future, and makes plans accordingly. When knowledge is
+cut off from use in giving meaning to what is blind and baffling,
+it drops out of consciousness entirely or else becomes an object of
+aesthetic contemplation. There is much emotional satisfaction to be had
+from a survey of the symmetry and order of possessed knowledge, and the
+satisfaction is a legitimate one. But this contemplative attitude is
+aesthetic, not intellectual. It is the same sort of joy that comes from
+viewing a finished picture or a well composed landscape. It would make
+no difference if the subject matter were totally different, provided
+it had the same harmonious organization. Indeed, it would make no
+difference if it were wholly invented, a play of fancy. Applicability to
+the world means not applicability to what is past and gone--that is out
+of the question by the nature of the case; it means applicability to
+what is still going on, what is still unsettled, in the moving scene in
+which we are implicated. The very fact that we so easily overlook
+this trait, and regard statements of what is past and out of reach as
+knowledge is because we assume the continuity of past and future. We
+cannot entertain the conception of a world in which knowledge of its
+past would not be helpful in forecasting and giving meaning to its
+future. We ignore the prospective reference just because it is so
+irretrievably implied.
+
+Yet many of the philosophic schools of method which have been mentioned
+transform the ignoring into a virtual denial. They regard knowledge as
+something complete in itself irrespective of its availability in dealing
+with what is yet to be. And it is this omission which vitiates them
+and which makes them stand as sponsors for educational methods which an
+adequate conception of knowledge condemns. For one has only to call to
+mind what is sometimes treated in schools as acquisition of knowledge
+to realize how lacking it is in any fruitful connection with the ongoing
+experience of the students--how largely it seems to be believed that the
+mere appropriation of subject matter which happens to be stored in books
+constitutes knowledge. No matter how true what is learned to those who
+found it out and in whose experience it functioned, there is nothing
+which makes it knowledge to the pupils. It might as well be something
+about Mars or about some fanciful country unless it fructifies in the
+individual's own life.
+
+At the time when scholastic method developed, it had relevancy to social
+conditions. It was a method for systematizing and lending rational
+sanction to material accepted on authority. This subject matter meant
+so much that it vitalized the defining and systematizing brought to
+bear upon it. Under present conditions the scholastic method, for most
+persons, means a form of knowing which has no especial connection
+with any particular subject matter. It includes making distinctions,
+definitions, divisions, and classifications for the mere sake of making
+them--with no objective in experience. The view of thought as a purely
+physical activity having its own forms, which are applied to any
+material as a seal may be stamped on any plastic stuff, the view which
+underlies what is termed formal logic is essentially the scholastic
+method generalized. The doctrine of formal discipline in education is
+the natural counterpart of the scholastic method.
+
+The contrasting theories of the method of knowledge which go by the name
+of sensationalism and rationalism correspond to an exclusive emphasis
+upon the particular and the general respectively--or upon bare facts on
+one side and bare relations on the other. In real knowledge, there is a
+particularizing and a generalizing function working together. So far as
+a situation is confused, it has to be cleared up; it has to be resolved
+into details, as sharply defined as possible. Specified facts and
+qualities constitute the elements of the problem to be dealt with, and
+it is through our sense organs that they are specified. As setting
+forth the problem, they may well be termed particulars, for they are
+fragmentary. Since our task is to discover their connections and to
+recombine them, for us at the time they are partial. They are to be
+given meaning; hence, just as they stand, they lack it. Anything which
+is to be known, whose meaning has still to be made out, offers itself as
+particular. But what is already known, if it has been worked over with
+a view to making it applicable to intellectually mastering new
+particulars, is general in function. Its function of introducing
+connection into what is otherwise unconnected constitutes its
+generality. Any fact is general if we use it to give meaning to the
+elements of a new experience. "Reason" is just the ability to bring the
+subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the significance
+of the subject matter of a new experience. A person is reasonable in
+the degree in which he is habitually open to seeing an event which
+immediately strikes his senses not as an isolated thing but in its
+connection with the common experience of mankind.
+
+Without the particulars as they are discriminated by the active
+responses of sense organs, there is no material for knowing and no
+intellectual growth. Without placing these particulars in the context of
+the meanings wrought out in the larger experience of the past--without
+the use of reason or thought--particulars are mere excitations or
+irritations. The mistake alike of the sensational and the rationalistic
+schools is that each fails to see that the function of sensory
+stimulation and thought is relative to reorganizing experience in
+applying the old to the new, thereby maintaining the continuity or
+consistency of life. The theory of the method of knowing which is
+advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature
+is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which
+purposely modifies the environment. It holds that knowledge in its
+strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual
+resources--of all the habits that render our action intelligent. Only
+that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to
+adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims and desires
+to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. Knowledge is
+not just something which we are now conscious of, but consists of the
+dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now happens.
+Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to
+consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by
+conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world in which we
+live.
+
+Summary. Such social divisions as interfere with free and full
+intercourse react to make the intelligence and knowing of members of
+the separated classes one-sided. Those whose experience has to do
+with utilities cut off from the larger end they subserve are practical
+empiricists; those who enjoy the contemplation of a realm of meanings
+in whose active production they have had no share are practical
+rationalists. Those who come in direct contact with things and have to
+adapt their activities to them immediately are, in effect, realists;
+those who isolate the meanings of these things and put them in a
+religious or so-called spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect,
+idealists. Those concerned with progress, who are striving to change
+received beliefs, emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those
+whose chief business it is to withstand change and conserve received
+truth emphasize the universal and the fixed--and so on. Philosophic
+systems in their opposed theories of knowledge present an explicit
+formulation of the traits characteristic of these cut-off and one-sided
+segments of experience--one-sided because barriers to intercourse
+prevent the experience of one from being enriched and supplemented by
+that of others who are differently situated.
+
+In an analogous way, since democracy stands in principle for free
+interchange, for social continuity, it must develop a theory of
+knowledge which sees in knowledge the method by which one experience is
+made available in giving direction and meaning to another. The recent
+advances in physiology, biology, and the logic of the experimental
+sciences supply the specific intellectual instrumentalities demanded to
+work out and formulate such a theory. Their educational equivalent
+is the connection of the acquisition of knowledge in the schools with
+activities, or occupations, carried on in a medium of associated life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals
+
+1. The Inner and the Outer.
+
+Since morality is concerned with conduct, any dualisms which are set
+up between mind and activity must reflect themselves in the theory of
+morals. Since the formulations of the separation in the philosophic
+theory of morals are used to justify and idealize the practices employed
+in moral training, a brief critical discussion is in place. It is a
+commonplace of educational theory that the establishing of character is
+a comprehensive aim of school instruction and discipline. Hence it is
+important that we should be on our guard against a conception of the
+relations of intelligence to character which hampers the realization
+of the aim, and on the look-out for the conditions which have to be
+provided in order that the aim may be successfully acted upon. The first
+obstruction which meets us is the currency of moral ideas which
+split the course of activity into two opposed factors, often named
+respectively the inner and outer, or the spiritual and the physical.
+This division is a culmination of the dualism of mind and the world,
+soul and body, end and means, which we have so frequently noted. In
+morals it takes the form of a sharp demarcation of the motive of
+action from its consequences, and of character from conduct. Motive and
+character are regarded as something purely "inner," existing exclusively
+in consciousness, while consequences and conduct are regarded as outside
+of mind, conduct having to do simply with the movements which carry out
+motives; consequences with what happens as a result. Different schools
+identify morality with either the inner state of mind or the outer act
+and results, each in separation from the other. Action with a purpose is
+deliberate; it involves a consciously foreseen end and a mental weighing
+of considerations pro and eon. It also involves a conscious state of
+longing or desire for the end. The deliberate choice of an aim and of
+a settled disposition of desire takes time. During this time complete
+overt action is suspended. A person who does not have his mind made up,
+does not know what to do. Consequently he postpones definite action
+so far as possible. His position may be compared to that of a man
+considering jumping across a ditch. If he were sure he could or could
+not make it, definite activity in some direction would occur. But if
+he considers, he is in doubt; he hesitates. During the time in which a
+single overt line of action is in suspense, his activities are confined
+to such redistributions of energy within the organism as will prepare
+a determinate course of action. He measures the ditch with his eyes;
+he brings himself taut to get a feel of the energy at his disposal; he
+looks about for other ways across, he reflects upon the importance of
+getting across. All this means an accentuation of consciousness; it
+means a turning in upon the individual's own attitudes, powers, wishes,
+etc.
+
+Obviously, however, this surging up of personal factors into conscious
+recognition is a part of the whole activity in its temporal development.
+There is not first a purely psychical process, followed abruptly by
+a radically different physical one. There is one continuous behavior,
+proceeding from a more uncertain, divided, hesitating state to a more
+overt, determinate, or complete state. The activity at first consists
+mainly of certain tensions and adjustments within the organism; as
+these are coordinated into a unified attitude, the organism as a whole
+acts--some definite act is undertaken. We may distinguish, of course,
+the more explicitly conscious phase of the continuous activity as mental
+or psychical. But that only identifies the mental or psychical to mean
+the indeterminate, formative state of an activity which in its fullness
+involves putting forth of overt energy to modify the environment.
+
+Our conscious thoughts, observations, wishes, aversions are important,
+because they represent inchoate, nascent activities. They fulfill their
+destiny in issuing, later on, into specific and perceptible acts. And
+these inchoate, budding organic readjustments are important because
+they are our sole escape from the dominion of routine habits and
+blind impulse. They are activities having a new meaning in process
+of development. Hence, normally, there is an accentuation of personal
+consciousness whenever our instincts and ready formed habits find
+themselves blocked by novel conditions. Then we are thrown back upon
+ourselves to reorganize our own attitude before proceeding to a definite
+and irretrievable course of action. Unless we try to drive our way
+through by sheer brute force, we must modify our organic resources to
+adapt them to the specific features of the situation in which we find
+ourselves. The conscious deliberating and desiring which precede overt
+action are, then, the methodic personal readjustment implied in activity
+in uncertain situations. This role of mind in continuous activity is not
+always maintained, however. Desires for something different, aversion to
+the given state of things caused by the blocking of successful activity,
+stimulates the imagination. The picture of a different state of things
+does not always function to aid ingenious observation and recollection
+to find a way out and on. Except where there is a disciplined
+disposition, the tendency is for the imagination to run loose. Instead
+of its objects being checked up by conditions with reference to their
+practicability in execution, they are allowed to develop because of
+the immediate emotional satisfaction which they yield. When we find the
+successful display of our energies checked by uncongenial surroundings,
+natural and social, the easiest way out is to build castles in the air
+and let them be a substitute for an actual achievement which involves
+the pains of thought. So in overt action we acquiesce, and build up
+an imaginary world in, mind. This break between thought and conduct is
+reflected in those theories which make a sharp separation between mind
+as inner and conduct and consequences as merely outer.
+
+For the split may be more than an incident of a particular individual's
+experience. The social situation may be such as to throw the class
+given to articulate reflection back into their own thoughts and desires
+without providing the means by which these ideas and aspirations can
+be used to reorganize the environment. Under such conditions, men
+take revenge, as it were, upon the alien and hostile environment by
+cultivating contempt for it, by giving it a bad name. They seek refuge
+and consolation within their own states of mind, their own imaginings
+and wishes, which they compliment by calling both more real and more
+ideal than the despised outer world. Such periods have recurred in
+history. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the influential
+moral systems of Stoicism, of monastic and popular Christianity and
+other religious movements of the day, took shape under the influence of
+such conditions. The more action which might express prevailing ideals
+was checked, the more the inner possession and cultivation of ideals was
+regarded as self-sufficient--as the essence of morality. The external
+world in which activity belongs was thought of as morally indifferent.
+Everything lay in having the right motive, even though that motive
+was not a moving force in the world. Much the same sort of situation
+recurred in Germany in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth
+centuries; it led to the Kantian insistence upon the good will as
+the sole moral good, the will being regarded as something complete in
+itself, apart from action and from the changes or consequences effected
+in the world. Later it led to any idealization of existing institutions
+as themselves the embodiment of reason.
+
+The purely internal morality of "meaning well," of having a good
+disposition regardless of what comes of it, naturally led to a reaction.
+This is generally known as either hedonism or utilitarianism. It was
+said in effect that the important thing morally is not what a man is
+inside of his own consciousness, but what he does--the consequences
+which issue, the charges he actually effects. Inner morality was
+attacked as sentimental, arbitrary, dogmatic, subjective--as giving men
+leave to dignify and shield any dogma congenial to their self-interest
+or any caprice occurring to imagination by calling it an intuition or an
+ideal of conscience. Results, conduct, are what counts; they afford
+the sole measure of morality. Ordinary morality, and hence that of the
+schoolroom, is likely to be an inconsistent compromise of both views.
+On one hand, certain states of feeling are made much of; the individual
+must "mean well," and if his intentions are good, if he had the right
+sort of emotional consciousness, he may be relieved of responsibility
+for full results in conduct. But since, on the other hand, certain
+things have to be done to meet the convenience and the requirements of
+others, and of social order in general, there is great insistence upon
+the doing of certain things, irrespective of whether the individual has
+any concern or intelligence in their doing. He must toe the mark; he
+must have his nose held to the grindstone; he must obey; he must form
+useful habits; he must learn self-control,--all of these precepts being
+understood in a way which emphasizes simply the immediate thing tangibly
+done, irrespective of the spirit of thought and desire in which it is
+done, and irrespective therefore of its effect upon other less obvious
+doings.
+
+It is hoped that the prior discussion has sufficiently elaborated the
+method by which both of these evils are avoided. One or both of these
+evils must result wherever individuals, whether young or old, cannot
+engage in a progressively cumulative undertaking under conditions which
+engage their interest and require their reflection. For only in such
+cases is it possible that the disposition of desire and thinking should
+be an organic factor in overt and obvious conduct. Given a consecutive
+activity embodying the student's own interest, where a definite result
+is to be obtained, and where neither routine habit nor the following of
+dictated directions nor capricious improvising will suffice, and
+there the rise of conscious purpose, conscious desire, and deliberate
+reflection are inevitable. They are inevitable as the spirit and quality
+of an activity having specific consequences, not as forming an isolated
+realm of inner consciousness.
+
+2. The Opposition of Duty and Interest. Probably there is no antithesis
+more often set up in moral discussion than that between acting
+from "principle" and from "interest." To act on principle is to act
+disinterestedly, according to a general law, which is above all personal
+considerations. To act according to interest is, so the allegation runs,
+to act selfishly, with one's own personal profit in view. It substitutes
+the changing expediency of the moment for devotion to unswerving moral
+law. The false idea of interest underlying this opposition has already
+been criticized (See Chapter X), but some moral aspects of the question
+will now be considered. A clew to the matter may be found in the fact
+that the supporters of the "interest" side of the controversy habitually
+use the term "self-interest." Starting from the premises that unless
+there is interest in an object or idea, there is no motive force, they
+end with the conclusion that even when a person claims to be acting from
+principle or from a sense of duty, he really acts as he does because
+there "is something in it" for himself. The premise is sound; the
+conclusion false. In reply the other school argues that since man is
+capable of generous self-forgetting and even self-sacrificing action, he
+is capable of acting without interest. Again the premise is sound, and
+the conclusion false. The error on both sides lies in a false notion of
+the relation of interest and the self.
+
+Both sides assume that the self is a fixed and hence isolated quantity.
+As a consequence, there is a rigid dilemma between acting for an
+interest of the self and without interest. If the self is something
+fixed antecedent to action, then acting from interest means trying to
+get more in the way of possessions for the self--whether in the way
+of fame, approval of others, power over others, pecuniary profit, or
+pleasure. Then the reaction from this view as a cynical depreciation
+of human nature leads to the view that men who act nobly act with no
+interest at all. Yet to an unbiased judgment it would appear plain that
+a man must be interested in what he is doing or he would not do it. A
+physician who continues to serve the sick in a plague at almost certain
+danger to his own life must be interested in the efficient performance
+of his profession--more interested in that than in the safety of his
+own bodily life. But it is distorting facts to say that this interest
+is merely a mask for an interest in something else which he gets by
+continuing his customary services--such as money or good repute or
+virtue; that it is only a means to an ulterior selfish end. The moment
+we recognize that the self is not something ready-made, but something
+in continuous formation through choice of action, the whole situation
+clears up. A man's interest in keeping at his work in spite of danger to
+life means that his self is found in that work; if he finally gave up,
+and preferred his personal safety or comfort, it would mean that he
+preferred to be that kind of a self. The mistake lies in making a
+separation between interest and self, and supposing that the latter
+is the end to which interest in objects and acts and others is a mere
+means. In fact, self and interest are two names for the same fact;
+the kind and amount of interest actively taken in a thing reveals
+and measures the quality of selfhood which exists. Bear in mind that
+interest means the active or moving identity of the self with a certain
+object, and the whole alleged dilemma falls to the ground.
+
+Unselfishness, for example, signifies neither lack of interest in
+what is done (that would mean only machine-like indifference) nor
+selflessness--which would mean absence of virility and character. As
+employed everywhere outside of this particular theoretical controversy,
+the term "unselfishness" refers to the kind of aims and objects which
+habitually interest a man. And if we make a mental survey of the kind
+of interests which evoke the use of this epithet, we shall see that
+they have two intimately associated features. (i) The generous self
+consciously identifies itself with the full range of relationships
+implied in its activity, instead of drawing a sharp line between itself
+and considerations which are excluded as alien or indifferent; (ii)
+it readjusts and expands its past ideas of itself to take in new
+consequences as they become perceptible. When the physician began
+his career he may not have thought of a pestilence; he may not have
+consciously identified himself with service under such conditions. But,
+if he has a normally growing or active self, when he finds that his
+vocation involves such risks, he willingly adopts them as integral
+portions of his activity. The wider or larger self which means inclusion
+instead of denial of relationships is identical with a self which
+enlarges in order to assume previously unforeseen ties.
+
+In such crises of readjustment--and the crisis may be slight as well
+as great--there may be a transitional conflict of "principle" with
+"interest." It is the nature of a habit to involve ease in the
+accustomed line of activity. It is the nature of a readjusting of habit
+to involve an effort which is disagreeable--something to which a man
+has deliberately to hold himself. In other words, there is a tendency to
+identify the self--or take interest--in what one has got used to, and to
+turn away the mind with aversion or irritation when an unexpected thing
+which involves an unpleasant modification of habit comes up. Since
+in the past one has done one's duty without having to face such a
+disagreeable circumstance, why not go on as one has been? To yield to
+this temptation means to narrow and isolate the thought of the self--to
+treat it as complete. Any habit, no matter how efficient in the past,
+which has become set, may at any time bring this temptation with it. To
+act from principle in such an emergency is not to act on some abstract
+principle, or duty at large; it is to act upon the principle of a course
+of action, instead of upon the circumstances which have attended it. The
+principle of a physician's conduct is its animating aim and spirit--the
+care for the diseased. The principle is not what justifies an activity,
+for the principle is but another name for the continuity of the
+activity. If the activity as manifested in its consequences is
+undesirable, to act upon principle is to accentuate its evil. And a man
+who prides himself upon acting upon principle is likely to be a man who
+insists upon having his own way without learning from experience what
+is the better way. He fancies that some abstract principle justifies
+his course of action without recognizing that his principle needs
+justification.
+
+Assuming, however, that school conditions are such as to provide
+desirable occupations, it is interest in the occupation as a whole--that
+is, in its continuous development--which keeps a pupil at his work in
+spite of temporary diversions and unpleasant obstacles. Where there is
+no activity having a growing significance, appeal to principle is either
+purely verbal, or a form of obstinate pride or an appeal to extraneous
+considerations clothed with a dignified title. Undoubtedly there are
+junctures where momentary interest ceases and attention flags, and
+where reinforcement is needed. But what carries a person over these hard
+stretches is not loyalty to duty in the abstract, but interest in his
+occupation. Duties are "offices"--they are the specific acts needed for
+the fulfilling of a function--or, in homely language--doing one's job.
+And the man who is genuinely interested in his job is the man who
+is able to stand temporary discouragement, to persist in the face of
+obstacles, to take the lean with the fat: he makes an interest out of
+meeting and overcoming difficulties and distraction.
+
+3. Intelligence and Character. A noteworthy paradox often accompanies
+discussions of morals. On the one hand, there is an identification of
+the moral with the rational. Reason is set up as a faculty from which
+proceed ultimate moral intuitions, and sometimes, as in the Kantian
+theory, it is said to supply the only proper moral motive. On the
+other hand, the value of concrete, everyday intelligence is constantly
+underestimated, and even deliberately depreciated. Morals is often
+thought to be an affair with which ordinary knowledge has nothing to
+do. Moral knowledge is thought to be a thing apart, and conscience is
+thought of as something radically different from consciousness. This
+separation, if valid, is of especial significance for education.
+Moral education in school is practically hopeless when we set up the
+development of character as a supreme end, and at the same time treat
+the acquiring of knowledge and the development of understanding, which
+of necessity occupy the chief part of school time, as having nothing
+to do with character. On such a basis, moral education is inevitably
+reduced to some kind of catechetical instruction, or lessons about
+morals. Lessons "about morals" signify as matter of course lessons
+in what other people think about virtues and duties. It amounts to
+something only in the degree in which pupils happen to be already
+animated by a sympathetic and dignified regard for the sentiments of
+others. Without such a regard, it has no more influence on character
+than information about the mountains of Asia; with a servile regard, it
+increases dependence upon others, and throws upon those in authority the
+responsibility for conduct. As a matter of fact, direct instruction in
+morals has been effective only in social groups where it was a part of
+the authoritative control of the many by the few. Not the teaching as
+such but the reinforcement of it by the whole regime of which it was
+an incident made it effective. To attempt to get similar results from
+lessons about morals in a democratic society is to rely upon sentimental
+magic.
+
+At the other end of the scale stands the Socratic-Platonic teaching
+which identifies knowledge and virtue--which holds that no man does evil
+knowingly but only because of ignorance of the good. This doctrine is
+commonly attacked on the ground that nothing is more common than for a
+man to know the good and yet do the bad: not knowledge, but habituation
+or practice, and motive are what is required. Aristotle, in fact, at
+once attacked the Platonic teaching on the ground that moral virtue is
+like an art, such as medicine; the experienced practitioner is better
+than a man who has theoretical knowledge but no practical experience of
+disease and remedies. The issue turns, however, upon what is meant by
+knowledge. Aristotle's objection ignored the gist of Plato's teaching to
+the effect that man could not attain a theoretical insight into the
+good except as he had passed through years of practical habituation and
+strenuous discipline. Knowledge of the good was not a thing to be got
+either from books or from others, but was achieved through a prolonged
+education. It was the final and culminating grace of a mature experience
+of life. Irrespective of Plato's position, it is easy to perceive that
+the term knowledge is used to denote things as far apart as intimate
+and vital personal realization,--a conviction gained and tested in
+experience,--and a second-handed, largely symbolic, recognition that
+persons in general believe so and so--a devitalized remote information.
+That the latter does not guarantee conduct, that it does not profoundly
+affect character, goes without saying. But if knowledge means something
+of the same sort as our conviction gained by trying and testing that
+sugar is sweet and quinine bitter, the case stands otherwise. Every time
+a man sits on a chair rather than on a stove, carries an umbrella when
+it rains, consults a doctor when ill--or in short performs any of the
+thousand acts which make up his daily life, he proves that knowledge of
+a certain kind finds direct issue in conduct. There is every reason to
+suppose that the same sort of knowledge of good has a like expression;
+in fact "good" is an empty term unless it includes the satisfactions
+experienced in such situations as those mentioned. Knowledge that other
+persons are supposed to know something might lead one to act so as to
+win the approbation others attach to certain actions, or at least so
+as to give others the impression that one agrees with them; there is no
+reason why it should lead to personal initiative and loyalty in behalf
+of the beliefs attributed to them.
+
+It is not necessary, accordingly, to dispute about the proper meaning
+of the term knowledge. It is enough for educational purposes to note
+the different qualities covered by the one name, to realize that it
+is knowledge gained at first hand through the exigencies of experience
+which affects conduct in significant ways. If a pupil learns things
+from books simply in connection with school lessons and for the sake of
+reciting what he has learned when called upon, then knowledge will have
+effect upon some conduct--namely upon that of reproducing statements at
+the demand of others. There is nothing surprising that such "knowledge"
+should not have much influence in the life out of school. But this is
+not a reason for making a divorce between knowledge and conduct, but for
+holding in low esteem this kind of knowledge. The same thing may be
+said of knowledge which relates merely to an isolated and technical
+specialty; it modifies action but only in its own narrow line. In truth,
+the problem of moral education in the schools is one with the problem of
+securing knowledge--the knowledge connected with the system of impulses
+and habits. For the use to which any known fact is put depends upon its
+connections. The knowledge of dynamite of a safecracker may be identical
+in verbal form with that of a chemist; in fact, it is different, for it
+is knit into connection with different aims and habits, and thus has a
+different import.
+
+Our prior discussion of subject-matter as proceeding from direct
+activity having an immediate aim, to the enlargement of meaning found in
+geography and history, and then to scientifically organized knowledge,
+was based upon the idea of maintaining a vital connection between
+knowledge and activity. What is learned and employed in an occupation
+having an aim and involving cooperation with others is moral knowledge,
+whether consciously so regarded or not. For it builds up a social
+interest and confers the intelligence needed to make that interest
+effective in practice. Just because the studies of the curriculum
+represent standard factors in social life, they are organs of initiation
+into social values. As mere school studies, their acquisition has only
+a technical worth. Acquired under conditions where their social
+significance is realized, they feed moral interest and develop moral
+insight. Moreover, the qualities of mind discussed under the topic
+of method of learning are all of them intrinsically moral qualities.
+Open-mindedness, single-mindedness, sincerity, breadth of outlook,
+thoroughness, assumption of responsibility for developing the
+consequences of ideas which are accepted, are moral traits. The habit
+of identifying moral characteristics with external conformity to
+authoritative prescriptions may lead us to ignore the ethical value of
+these intellectual attitudes, but the same habit tends to reduce morals
+to a dead and machinelike routine. Consequently while such an attitude
+has moral results, the results are morally undesirable--above all in a
+democratic society where so much depends upon personal disposition.
+
+4. The Social and the Moral. All of the separations which we have been
+criticizing--and which the idea of education set forth in the
+previous chapters is designed to avoid--spring from taking morals too
+narrowly,--giving them, on one side, a sentimental goody-goody turn
+without reference to effective ability to do what is socially needed,
+and, on the other side, overemphasizing convention and tradition so
+as to limit morals to a list of definitely stated acts. As a matter of
+fact, morals are as broad as acts which concern our relationships with
+others. And potentially this includes all our acts, even though their
+social bearing may not be thought of at the time of performance. For
+every act, by the principle of habit, modifies disposition--it sets up
+a certain kind of inclination and desire. And it is impossible to tell
+when the habit thus strengthened may have a direct and perceptible
+influence on our association with others. Certain traits of character
+have such an obvious connection with our social relationships that we
+call them "moral" in an emphatic sense--truthfulness, honesty, chastity,
+amiability, etc. But this only means that they are, as compared with
+some other attitudes, central:--that they carry other attitudes with
+them. They are moral in an emphatic sense not because they are isolated
+and exclusive, but because they are so intimately connected with
+thousands of other attitudes which we do not explicitly recognize--which
+perhaps we have not even names for. To call them virtues in their
+isolation is like taking the skeleton for the living body. The bones
+are certainly important, but their importance lies in the fact that they
+support other organs of the body in such a way as to make them capable
+of integrated effective activity. And the same is true of the qualities
+of character which we specifically designate virtues. Morals concern
+nothing less than the whole character, and the whole character is
+identical with the man in all his concrete make-up and manifestations.
+To possess virtue does not signify to have cultivated a few namable
+and exclusive traits; it means to be fully and adequately what one is
+capable of becoming through association with others in all the offices
+of life.
+
+The moral and the social quality of conduct are, in the last analysis,
+identical with each other. It is then but to restate explicitly
+the import of our earlier chapters regarding the social function of
+education to say that the measure of the worth of the administration,
+curriculum, and methods of instruction of the school is the extent to
+which they are animated by a social spirit. And the great danger which
+threatens school work is the absence of conditions which make possible
+a permeating social spirit; this is the great enemy of effective moral
+training. For this spirit can be actively present only when certain
+conditions are met.
+
+(i) In the first place, the school must itself be a community life
+in all which that implies. Social perceptions and interests can be
+developed only in a genuinely social medium--one where there is give and
+take in the building up of a common experience. Informational statements
+about things can be acquired in relative isolation by any one who
+previously has had enough intercourse with others to have learned
+language. But realization of the meaning of the linguistic signs is
+quite another matter. That involves a context of work and play in
+association with others. The plea which has been made for education
+through continued constructive activities in this book rests upon the
+fact they afford an opportunity for a social atmosphere. In place of a
+school set apart from life as a place for learning lessons, we have
+a miniature social group in which study and growth are incidents of
+present shared experience. Playgrounds, shops, workrooms, laboratories
+not only direct the natural active tendencies of youth, but they
+involve intercourse, communication, and cooperation,--all extending the
+perception of connections.
+
+(ii) The learning in school should be continuous with that out of
+school. There should be a free interplay between the two. This is
+possible only when there are numerous points of contact between the
+social interests of the one and of the other. A school is conceivable in
+which there should be a spirit of companionship and shared activity,
+but where its social life would no more represent or typify that of the
+world beyond the school walls than that of a monastery. Social concern
+and understanding would be developed, but they would not be available
+outside; they would not carry over. The proverbial separation of
+town and gown, the cultivation of academic seclusion, operate in
+this direction. So does such adherence to the culture of the past as
+generates a reminiscent social spirit, for this makes an individual feel
+more at home in the life of other days than in his own. A professedly
+cultural education is peculiarly exposed to this danger. An idealized
+past becomes the refuge and solace of the spirit; present-day concerns
+are found sordid, and unworthy of attention. But as a rule, the absence
+of a social environment in connection with which learning is a need and
+a reward is the chief reason for the isolation of the school; and this
+isolation renders school knowledge inapplicable to life and so infertile
+in character.
+
+
+A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to
+recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education
+are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social
+efficiency, are moral traits--marks of a person who is a worthy member
+of that society which it is the business of education to further. There
+is an old saying to the effect that it is not enough for a man to be
+good; he must be good for something. The something for which a man must
+be good is capacity to live as a social member so that what he gets from
+living with others balances with what he contributes. What he gets and
+gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions, and ideas, is
+not external possessions, but a widening and deepening of conscious
+life--a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of
+meanings. What he materially receives and gives is at most opportunities
+and means for the evolution of conscious life. Otherwise, it is neither
+giving nor taking, but a shifting about of the position of things in
+space, like the stirring of water and sand with a stick. Discipline,
+culture, social efficiency, personal refinement, improvement of
+character are but phases of the growth of capacity nobly to share in
+such a balanced experience. And education is not a mere means to such a
+life. Education is such a life. To maintain capacity for such education
+is the essence of morals. For conscious life is a continual beginning
+afresh.
+
+Summary. The most important problem of moral education in the school
+concerns the relationship of knowledge and conduct. For unless the
+learning which accrues in the regular course of study affects character,
+it is futile to conceive the moral end as the unifying and culminating
+end of education. When there is no intimate organic connection between
+the methods and materials of knowledge and moral growth, particular
+lessons and modes of discipline have to be resorted to: knowledge is
+not integrated into the usual springs of action and the outlook on life,
+while morals become moralistic--a scheme of separate virtues.
+
+The two theories chiefly associated with the separation of learning
+from activity, and hence from morals, are those which cut off inner
+disposition and motive--the conscious personal factor--and deeds
+as purely physical and outer; and which set action from interest
+in opposition to that from principle. Both of these separations are
+overcome in an educational scheme where learning is the accompaniment of
+continuous activities or occupations which have a social aim and utilize
+the materials of typical social situations. For under such conditions,
+the school becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community
+and one in close interaction with other modes of associated experience
+beyond school walls. All education which develops power to share
+effectively in social life is moral. It forms a character which not only
+does the particular deed socially necessary but one which is interested
+in that continuous readjustment which is essential to growth. Interest
+in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral
+interest.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
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