Education as Formation. We now come to a type of theory which denies the

 Edexistence 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 upcertain 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,

IMG_0165

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

IMG_0164

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.

IMG_0131

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

IMG_0194

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

IMG_0177

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.

IMG_0180

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

IMG_0101

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

IMG_0171

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

IMG_0163

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

IMG_0137

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

IMG_0133

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

IMG_0123

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

IMG_0102

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

IMG_0193

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

IMG_0179

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

IMG_0097

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

IMG_0154

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

IMG_0122

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

IMG_0108

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 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 with actually exist, and employ

them to criticize undesirable features and

IMG_0182

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

IMG_0174

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.

IMG_0145

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

IMG_0126

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

IMG_0121

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

IMG_0096

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 event 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 that 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

IMG_0103

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

IMG_0184

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

IMG_0166

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.

IMG_0114

Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught

the word. 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

IMG_0139

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

IMG_0129

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.

IMG_0120

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

IMG_0107

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 by 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

IMG_0142

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

IMG_0127

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

IMG_0109

nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the

accidents of circumstance. Not only wassome method required but also some positive

organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the process of instruction. The

“complete end 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 a nationalistic movement in political life—a fact

of incalculable significance for subsequent movements. Under the influence of

German though in particular, education became a civic function and the civic function

was identified with the realization of the

IMG_0192

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

IMG_0178

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

IMG_0159

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

IMG_0138

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

IMG_0110

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

IMG_0106

situation of human intercourse. On the one hand, science, commerce, and art

transcend national boundaries. They are largely international in quality and method.

Τhey 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 that 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, with split society into classes some of which are made

merely tools for the higher

IMG_0099

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 ideas 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

IMG_0162

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.

IMG_0146

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

IMG_0136

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

IMG_0116

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 the 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

IMG_0111

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 towards 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

IMG_0176

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

IMG_0195

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

IMG_0143

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

IMG_0128

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

IMG_0105

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 his 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.

IMG_0191

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, insteagainstad of one another. It would be absurd if the farmer rming, without any reference to these conditions ofset up a purpose of

fa 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

IMG_0119

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 situationsin which they

find themselves. As a recent writer has said: “To lead this boy to read Scott's novels

instead of old Sleuth’sstories; 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 of responsibility. In general,

IMG_0104

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

IMG_0098

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

IMG_0188

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.

IMG_0147

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

IMG_0168

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

IMG_0153

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

IMG_0144

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

IMG_0175

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

IMG_0156

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

IMG_0117

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

IMG_0113

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, add 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

IMG_0173

"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

IMG_0167

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

IMG_0134

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.

IMG_0124

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

IMG_0187

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

IMG_0181

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

IMG_0100

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.

IMG_0189

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

IMG_0169

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

IMG_0140

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,

IMG_0130

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

page 34

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 efficiency which consists in supplying

products to others and the culture

page 35

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

page 36

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.

page 37

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.

(1) An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often referred to as an interest.

Thus we say that a man's interest is politics, or

page 38

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

page 39

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.

page 40

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.

IMG_0135

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.

(1) 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

page 41

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

IMG_0118

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

IMG_0115

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

IMG_0150

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

IMG_0190

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.

page 42

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.

page 43

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

page 44

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

page 45

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

page 46

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 rep resent

qualities and relations of the world in which our action goes on, because they are.

page 47

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

page 48

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.

page 49

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

page 50

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, anducation as Formation. We now come to a type of theory which denies the