Democracy and Education
by John Dewey
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life
Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function
Chapter Three: Education as Direction
Chapter Four: Education as Growth
Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive
Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
Chapter Eight: Aims in Education
Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education
Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method
Chapter Fourteen: The Nature of Subject Matter
Chapter Fifteen: Play and Work in the Curriculum
Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History
Chapter Seventeen: Science in the Course of Study
Chapter Eighteen: Educational Values
Chapter Nineteen: Labor and Leisure
Chapter Twenty: Intellectual and Practical Studies
Chapter Twenty-one: Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and   
        Humanism
Chapter Twenty-two: The Individual and the World
Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education
Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education
Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge
Chapter Twenty-six: Theories of Morals

Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life

1. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable
distinction between living and inanimate things is that the
former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck
resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow
struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is
shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to
react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow,
much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its
own continued action. While the living thing may easily be
crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the
energies which act upon it into means of its own further
existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into
smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses
its identity as a living thing.

As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies
in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the
material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it
turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is
growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to
account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it
grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be
said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for
its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use
it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the
environment.

In all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up
indefinitely. After a while they succumb; they die. The
creature is not equal to the task of indefinite self-renewal.
But continuity of the life process is not dependent upon the
prolongation of the existence of any one individual.
Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in continuous
sequence. And though, as the geological record shows, not merely
individuals but also species die out, the life process continues
in increasingly complex forms. As some species die out, forms
better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they
struggled in vain come into being. Continuity of life means
continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living
organisms.

We have been speaking of life in its lowest terms -- as a
physical thing. But we use the word Life" to denote the whole
range of experience, individual and racial. When we see a book
called the Life of Lincoln we do not expect to find within its
covers a treatise on physiology. We look for an account of
social antecedents; a description of early surroundings, of the
conditions and occupation of the family; of the chief episodes in
the development of character; of signal struggles and
achievements; of the individual's hopes, tastes, joys and
sufferings. In precisely similar fashion we speak of the life of
a savage tribe, of the Athenian people, of the American nation.
"Life" covers customs, institutions, beliefs, victories and
defeats, recreations and occupations.

We employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense. And
to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the
principle of continuity through renewal applies. With the
renewal of physical existence goes, in the case of human beings,
the recreation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and
practices. The continuity of any experience, through renewing of
the social group, is a literal fact. Education, in its broadest
sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every one
of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city
as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without
language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual,
each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group,
in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.

The primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one
of the constituent members in a social group determine the
necessity of education. On one hand, there is the contrast
between the immaturity of the new-born members of the group --
its future sole representatives -- and the maturity of the adult
members who possess the knowledge and customs of the group. On
the other hand, there is the necessity that these immature
members be not merely physically preserved in adequate numbers,
but that they be initiated into the interests, purposes,
information, skill, and practices of the mature members:
otherwise the group will cease its characteristic life. Even in
a savage tribe, the achievements of adults are far beyond what
the immature members would be capable of if left to themselves.
With the growth of civilization, the gap between the original
capacities of the immature and the standards and customs of the
elders increases. Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the
bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the
life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of
thoughtful pains are required. Beings who are born not only
unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the
social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively
interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as
biological life. This transmission occurs by means of
communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the
older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals,
hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of
society who are passing out of the group life to those who are
coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members
who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate
the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal
interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of
necessity.

If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it
is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the
death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an
epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in
age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible
through transmission of ideas and practices the constant
reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not
automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and
thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will
relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the
human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves
without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire
the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. The
young of human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency
with the young of many of the lower animals, that even the powers
needed for physical sustentation have to be acquired under
tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to
all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral
achievements of humanity!

2. Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the
necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of
a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism.
But justification is found in the fact that such emphasis is a
means of getting us away from an unduly scholastic and formal
notion of education. Schools are, indeed, one important method
of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature;
but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a
relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the
necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can
we make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true
context.

Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by
communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in
transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal tie
between the words common, community, and communication. Men live
in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common;
and communication is the way in which they come to possess things
in common. What they must have in common in order to form a
community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a
common understanding -- like-mindedness as the

sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from
one to another, like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons
would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces. The
communication which insures participation in a common
understanding is one which secures similar emotional and
intellectual dispositions -- like ways of responding to
expectations and requirements.

Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity,
any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so
many feet or miles removed from others. A book or a letter may
institute a more intimate association between human beings
separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between
dwellers under the same roof. Individuals do not even compose a
social group because they all work for a common end. The parts
of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common
result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were
all cognizant of the common end and all interested in it so that
they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they
would form a community. But this would involve communication.
Each would have to know what the other was about and would have
to have some way of keeping the other informed as to his own
purpose and progress. Consensus demands communication.

We are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most
social group there are many relations which are not as yet
social. A large number of human relationships in any social
group are still upon the machine-like plane. Individuals use one
another so as to get desired results, without reference to the
emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of those used.
Such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of
position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools,
mechanical or fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and
child, teacher and pupil, employer and employee, governor and
governed, remain upon this level, they form no true social group,
no matter how closely their respective activities touch one
another. Giving and taking of orders modifies action and
results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a
communication of interests.

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.
To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and
changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and
felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude
modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. Try
the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some
experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated,
and you will find your own attitude toward your experience
changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations.
The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated.
To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another
would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the
life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can
appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and
catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of
another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's
own experience. All communication is like art. It may fairly be
said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally
social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate
in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine
way does it lose its educative power.

In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching
and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of
living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience;
it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility
for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought. A man
really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would
have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to
extract its net meaning. The inequality of achievement between
the mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the
young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense
stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form which will
render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.

3. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a
marked difference between the education which every one gets from
living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just
continuing to subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young.
In the former case the education is incidental; it is natural and
important, but it is not the express reason of the association.
While it may be said, without exaggeration, that the measure of
the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic,
political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and
improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of its
original motive, which is limited and more immediately practical.
Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to
secure the favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil
influences; family life in the desire to gratify appetites and
secure family perpetuity; systematic labor, for the most part,
because of enslavement to others, etc. Only gradually was the
by-product of the institution, its effect upon the quality and
extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still
was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct
of the institution. Even today, in our industrial life, apart
from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the
intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human
association under which the world's work is carried on receives
little attention as compared with physical output.

But in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as
an immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy
to ignore in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon
their disposition, or to subordinate that educative effect to
some external and tangible result, it is not so easy as in
dealing with adults. The need of training is too evident; the
pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits is
too urgent to leave these consequences wholly out of account.
Since our chief business with them is to enable them to share in
a common life we cannot help considering whether or no we are
forming the powers which will secure this ability. If humanity
has made some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of
every institution is its distinctively human effect -- its effect
upon conscious experience -- we may well believe that this lesson
has been learned largely through dealings with the young.

We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational
process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind
of education -- that of direct tuition or schooling. In
undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching
and training. Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed
dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association
which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special
devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in
connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are
inducted into full social membership. For the most part, they
depend upon children learning the customs of the adults,
acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in
what the elders are doing. In part, this sharing is direct,
taking part in the occupations of adults and thus serving an
apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the dramatic
plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and
thus learn to know what they are like. To savages it would seem
preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was
going on in order that one might learn.

But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of
the young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct
sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly
difficult except in the case of the less advanced occupations.
Much of what adults do is so remote in space and in meaning that
playful imitation is less and less adequate to reproduce its
spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult activities thus
depends upon a prior training given with this end in view.
Intentional agencies -- schools--and explicit material -- studies
-- are devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated
to a special group of persons.

Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all
the resources and achievements of a complex society. It also
opens a way to a kind of experience which would not be accessible
to the young, if they were left to pick up their training in
informal association with others, since books and the symbols of
knowledge are mastered.

But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition
from indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit,
whether directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and
vital. These qualities compensate, in some measure, for the
narrowness of available opportunities. Formal instruction, on
the contrary, easily becomes remote and dead -- abstract and
bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation. What
accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies is at least
put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists
with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within
urgent daily interests.

But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored
in symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and
objects. Such material is relatively technical and superficial.
Taking the ordinary standard of reality as a measure, it is
artificial. For this measure is connection with practical
concerns. Such material exists in a world by itself,
unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression.
There is the standing danger that the material of formal
instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools,
isolated from the subject matter of life- experience. The
permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view.
Those which have not been carried over into the structure of
social life, but which remain largely matters of technical
information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in
schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the
notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with
all human association that affects conscious life, and which
identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and
the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition
of literacy.

Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance
between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the
intentional, modes of education. When the acquiring of
information and of technical intellectual skill do not influence
the formation of a social disposition, ordinary vital experience
fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far, creates
only "sharps" in learning -- that is, egoistic specialists. To
avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are
aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and
what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the
formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes
an increasingly delicate task with every development of special
schooling.

Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in
being. Since this continuance can be secured only by constant
renewals, life is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and
reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social
life. This education consists primarily in transmission through
communication. Communication is a process of sharing experience
till it becomes a common possession. It modifies the disposition
of both the parties who partake in it. That the ulterior
significance of every mode of human association lies in the
contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of
experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the
immature. That is to say, while every social arrangement is
educative in effect, the educative effect first becomes an
important part of the purpose of the association in connection
with the association of the older with the younger. As societies
become more complex in structure and resources, the need of
formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. As formal
teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of
creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in
more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This
danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of
the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and
technical modes of skill.

Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function

1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a
community or social group sustains itself through continuous
self-renewal, and that this renewal takes place by means of the
educational growth of the immature members of the group. By
various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society
transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust
trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a
fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. All of these
words mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth.
We also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up -- words which
express the difference of level which education aims to cover.
Etymologically, the word education means just a process of
leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome of the process
in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, molding
activity -- that is, a shaping into the standard form of social
activity. In this chapter we are concerned with the general
features of the way in which a social group brings up its
immature members into its own social form.

Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of
experience till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas
current in the social group, the problem is evidently not one of
mere physical forming. Things can be physically transported in
space; they may be bodily conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations
cannot be physically extracted and inserted. How then are they
communicated? Given the impossibility of direct contagion or
literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the method by
which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or the
older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves.
The answer, in general formulation, is: By means of the action of
the environment in calling out certain responses. The required
beliefs cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be
plastered on. But the particular medium in which an individual
exists leads him to see and feel one thing rather than another;
it leads him to have certain plans in order that he may act
successfully with others; it strengthens some beliefs and weakens
others as a condition of winning the approval of others. Thus it
gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior, a certain
disposition of action. The words "environment," "medium" denote
something more than surroundings which encompass an individual.
They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his
own active tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course,
continuous with its surroundings; but the environing
circumstances do not, save metaphorically, constitute an
environment. For the inorganic being is not concerned in the
influences which affect it. On the other hand, some things which
are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a
human creature, may form his environment even more truly than
some of the things close to him. The things with which a man
varies are his genuine environment. Thus the activities of the
astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about which
he calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is
most intimately his environment. The environment of an
antiquarian, as an antiquarian, consists of the remote epoch of
human life with which he is concerned, and the relics,
inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes connections with that
period.

In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that
promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic
activities of a living being. Water is the environment of a fish
because it is necessary to the fish's activities -- to its life.
The north pole is a significant element in the environment of an
arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or not,
because it defines his activities, makes them what they
distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive
existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting,
environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as
a sustaining or frustrating condition.

2. The Social Environment. A being whose activities are
associated with others has a social environment. What he does
and what he can do depend upon the expectations, demands,
approvals, and condemnations of others. A being connected with
other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the
activities of others into account. For they are the
indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies.
When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as well
try to imagine a business man doing business, buying and selling,
all by himself, as to conceive it possible to define the
activities of an individual in terms of his isolated actions.
The manufacturer moreover is as truly socially guided in his
activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his own
counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling
his finished goods. Thinking and feeling that have to do with
action in association with others is as much a social mode of
behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.

What we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium
nurtures its immature members. There is no great difficulty in
seeing how it shapes the external habits of action. Even dogs
and horses have their actions modified by association with human
beings; they form different habits because human beings are
concerned with what they do. Human beings control animals by
controlling the natural stimuli which influence them; by creating
a certain environment in other words. Food, bits and bridles,
noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in which the
natural or instinctive responses of horses occur. By operating
steadily to call out certain acts, habits are formed which
function with the same uniformity as the original stimuli. If a
rat is put in a maze and finds food only by making a given number
of turns in a given sequence, his activity is gradually modified
till he habitually takes that course rather than another when he
is hungry.

Human actions are modified in a like fashion. A burnt child
dreads the fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every
time a child touched a certain toy he got burned, the child would
learn to avoid that toy as automatically as he avoids touching
fire. So far, however, we are dealing with what may be called
training in distinction from educative teaching. The changes
considered are in outer action rather than in mental and
emotional dispositions of behavior. The distinction is not,
however, a sharp one. The child might conceivably generate in
time a violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to
the class of toys resembling it. The aversion might even persist
after he had forgotten about the original burns; later on he
might even invent some reason to account for his seemingly
irrational antipathy. In some cases, altering the external habit
of action by changing the environment to affect the stimuli to
action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in the
action. Yet this does not always happen; a person trained to
dodge a threatening blow, dodges automatically with no
corresponding thought or emotion. We have to find, then, some
differentia of training from education.

A clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really
share in the social use to which his action is put. Some one
else uses the horse to secure a result which is advantageous by
making it advantageous to the horse to perform the act -- he gets
food, etc. But the horse, presumably, does not get any new
interest. He remains interested in food, not in the service he
is rendering. He is not a partner in a shared activity. Were he
to become a copartner, he would, in engaging in the conjoint
activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment which
others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.

Now in many cases -- too many cases -- the activity of the
immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which
are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated
like a human being. His instincts remain attached to their
original objects of pain or pleasure. But to get happiness or to
avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a way agreeable to
others. In other cases, he really shares or participates in the
common activity. In this case, his original impulse is modified.
He not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of others,
but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused in him
that animate the others. A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The
successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it
sets store, are connected with fighting and victory. The
presence of this medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy,
first in games, then in fact when he is strong enough. As he
fights he wins approval and advancement; as he refrains, he is
disliked, ridiculed, shut out from favorable recognition. It is
not surprising that his original belligerent tendencies and
emotions are strengthened at the expense of others, and that his
ideas turn to things connected with war. Only in this way can he
become fully a recognized member of his group. Thus his mental
habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his group.

If we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we
shall perceive that the social medium neither implants certain
desires and ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain
purely muscular habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or
dodging a blow. Setting up conditions which stimulate certain
visible and tangible ways of acting is the first step. Making
the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so
that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his
failure, is the completing step. As soon as he is possessed by
the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to
recognize the special ends at which it aims and the means
employed to secure success. His beliefs and ideas, in other
words, will take a form similar to those of others in the group.
He will also achieve pretty much the same stock of knowledge
since that knowledge is an ingredient of his habitual pursuits.

The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the
chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed
directly from one to another. It almost seems as if all we have
to do to convey an idea into the mind of another is to convey a
sound into his ear. Thus imparting knowledge gets assimilated to
a purely physical process. But learning from language will be
found, when analyzed, to confirm the principle just laid down.
It would probably be admitted with little hesitation that a child
gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as other persons do; by
covering the head with it, giving it to others to wear, having it
put on by others when going out, etc. But it may be asked how
this principle of shared activity applies to getting through
speech or reading the idea of, say, a Greek helmet, where no
direct use of any kind enters in. What shared activity is there
in learning from books about the discovery of America?

Since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning
about many things, let us see how it works. The baby begins of
course with mere sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning,
expressing, that is, no idea. Sounds are just one kind of
stimulus to direct response, some having a soothing effect,
others tending to make one jump, and so on. The sound h-a-t
would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a seemingly
inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection with an
action which is participated in by a number of people. When the
mother is taking the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she
puts something on the baby's head. Being taken out becomes an
interest to the child; mother and child not only go out with each
other physically, but both are concerned in the going out; they
enjoy it in common. By conjunction with the other factors in
activity the sound "hat" soon gets the same meaning for the child
that it has for the parent; it becomes a sign of the activity
into which it enters. The bare fact that language consists of
sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to
show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared
experience.

In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way
that the thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. And
they acquire the same meaning with the child which they have with
the adult because they are used in a common experience by both.
The guarantee for the same manner of use is found in the fact
that the thing and the sound are first employed in a joint
activity, as a means of setting up an active connection between
the child and a grownup. Similar ideas or meanings spring up
because both persons are engaged as partners in an action where
what each does depends upon and influences what the other does.
If two savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a
certain signal meant "move to the right" to the one who uttered
it, and "move to the left" to the one who heard it, they
obviously could not successfully carry on their hunt together.
Understanding one another means that objects, including sounds,
have the same value for both with respect to carrying on a common
pursuit.

After sounds have got meaning through connection with other
things employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in
connection with other like sounds to develop new meanings,
precisely as the things for which they stand are combined. Thus
the words in which a child learns about, say, the Greek helmet
originally got a meaning (or were understood) by use in an action
having a common interest and end. They now arouse a new meaning
by inciting the one who hears or reads to rehearse imaginatively
the activities in which the helmet has its use. For the time
being, the one who understands the words "Greek helmet" becomes
mentally a partner with those who used the helmet. He engages,
through his imagination, in a shared activity. It is not easy to
get the full meaning of words. Most persons probably stop with
the idea that "helmet" denotes a queer kind of headgear a people
called the Greeks once wore. We conclude, accordingly, that the
use of language to convey and acquire ideas is an extension and
refinement of the principle that things gain meaning by being
used in a shared experience or joint action; in no sense does it
contravene that principle. When words do not enter as factors
into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they
operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or
intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove,
but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning. Thus,
for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act
of writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but
the person performing the act will operate much as an automaton
would unless he realizes the meaning of what he does.

3. The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is
that social environment forms the mental and emotional
disposition of behavior in individuals by engaging them in
activities that arouse and strengthen certain impulses, that have
certain purposes and entail certain consequences. A child
growing up in a family of musicians will inevitably have whatever
capacities he has in music stimulated, and, relatively,
stimulated more than other impulses which might have been
awakened in another environment. Save as he takes an interest in
music and gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he
is unable to share in the life of the group to which he belongs.
Some kinds of participation in the life of those with whom the
individual is connected are inevitable; with respect to them, the
social environment exercises an educative or formative influence
unconsciously and apart from any set purpose.

In savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
(constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we
have spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the
young into the practices and beliefs of the group. Even in
present-day societies, it furnishes the basic nurture of even the
most insistently schooled youth. In accord with the interests
and occupations of the group, certain things become objects of
high esteem; others of aversion. Association does not create
impulses or affection and dislike, but it furnishes the objects
to which they attach themselves. The way our group or class does
things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and
thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation and
memory. What is strange or foreign (that is to say outside the
activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and
intellectually suspect. It seems almost incredible to us, for
example, that things which we know very well could have escaped
recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by
attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by
assuming superior native intelligence on our own part. But the
explanation is that their modes of life did not call for
attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other
things. Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate
them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination
do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands
set up by current social occupations. The main texture of
disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such
influences. What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at
most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to
purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects
which make their activity more productive of meaning.

While this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so
subtle and pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and
mind, it may be worth while to specify a few directions in which
its effect is most marked. First, the habits of language.
Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are
formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a
set means of instruction but as a social necessity. The babe
acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech habits
thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious
teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired
modes of speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into
their really native tongue. Secondly, manners. Example is
notoriously more potent than precept. Good manners come, as we
say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding
is acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli,
not by conveying information. Despite the never ending play of
conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere
and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners. And
manners are but minor morals. Moreover, in major morals,
conscious instruction is likely to be efficacious only in the
degree in which it falls in with the general "walk and
conversation" of those who constitute the child's social
environment. Thirdly, good taste and esthetic appreciation. If
the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having
elegance of form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows
up. The effect of a tawdry, unarranged, and over-decorated
environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as meager
and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty.
Against such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than
convey second-hand information as to what others think. Such
taste never becomes spontaneous and personally engrained, but
remains a labored reminder of what those think to whom one has
been taught to look up. To say that the deeper standards of
judgments of value are framed by the situations into which a
person habitually enters is not so much to mention a fourth
point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned.
We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates
of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of
which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said
that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or
reflection are just the things which determine our conscious
thinking and decide our conclusions. And these habitudes which
lie below the level of reflection are just those which have been
formed in the constant give and take of relationship with others.

4. The School as a Special Environment. The chief importance of
this foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on
willy-nilly is to lead us to note that the only way in which
adults consciously control the kind of education which the
immature get is by controlling the environment in which they act,
and hence think and feel. We never educate directly, but
indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance
environments to do the work, or whether we design environments
for the purpose makes a great difference. And any environment is
a chance environment so far as its educative influence is
concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with
reference to its educative effect. An intelligent home differs
from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and
intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the
thought of their bearing upon the development of children. But
schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments
framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral
disposition of their members.

Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions
are so complex that a considerable part of the social store is
committed to writing and transmitted through written symbols.
Written symbols are even more artificial or conventional than
spoken; they cannot be picked up in accidental intercourse with
others. In addition, the written form tends to select and record
matters which are comparatively foreign to everyday life. The
achievements accumulated from generation to generation are
deposited in it even though some of them have fallen temporarily
out of use. Consequently as soon as a community depends to any
considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and
its own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of
schools to insure adequate transmission of all its resources. To
take an obvious illustration: The life of the ancient Greeks and
Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways in
which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of
our ordinary experiences. In similar fashion, peoples still
existing, but remote in space, British, Germans, Italians,
directly concern our own social affairs, but the nature of the
interaction cannot be understood without explicit statement and
attention. In precisely similar fashion, our daily associations
cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part played in
our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible
structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is
instituted, the school, to care for such matters.

This mode of association has three functions sufficiently
specific, as compared with ordinary associations of life, to be
noted. First, a complex civilization is too complex to be
assimilated in toto. It has to be broken up into portions, as it
were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a gradual and graded way.
The relationships of our present social life are so numerous and
so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable position
could not readily share in many of the most important of them.
Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to
him, would not become a part of his own mental disposition.
There would be no seeing the trees because of the forest.
Business, politics, art, science, religion, would make all at
once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome. The
first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide
a simplified environment. It selects the features which are
fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to by the
young. Then it establishes a progressive order, using the
factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is
more complicated.

In the second place, it is the business of the school environment
to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the
existing environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It
establishes a purified medium of action. Selection aims not only
at simplifying but at weeding out what is undesirable. Every
society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from
the past, and with what is positively perverse. The school has
the duty of omitting such things from the environment which it
supplies, and thereby doing what it can to counteract their
influence in the ordinary social environment. By selecting the
best for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the power of
this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes
that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of
its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better
future society. The school is its chief agency for the
accomplishment of this end.

In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to
balance the various elements in the social environment, and to
see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from
the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to
come into living contact with a broader environment. Such words
as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading, for
they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing
corresponding to the single word. As a matter of fact, a modern
society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each
household with its immediate extension of friends makes a
society; the village or street group of playmates is a community;
each business group, each club, is another. Passing beyond these
more intimate groups, there is in a country like our own a
variety of races, religious affiliations, economic divisions.
Inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal political unity,
there are probably more communities, more differing customs,
traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control, than
existed in an entire continent at an earlier epoch.

Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active
dispositions of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's
household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative
environments for those who enter into their collective or
conjoint activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a
business partnership, or a political party. Each of them is a
mode of associated or community life, quite as much as is a
family, a town, or a state. There are also communities whose
members have little or no direct contact with one another, like
the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the members of the
professional learned class scattered over the face of the earth.
For they have aims in common, and the activity of each member is
directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing.

In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a
geographical matter. There were many societies, but each, within
its own territory, was comparatively homogeneous. But with the
development of commerce, transportation, intercommunication, and
emigration, countries like the United States are composed of a
combination of different groups with different traditional
customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps more than any
other one cause, forced the demand for an educational institution
which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced
environment for the young. Only in this way can the centrifugal
forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and
the same political unit be counteracted. The intermingling in
the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and
unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment.
Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a
broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while
it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public
school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and
balanced appeal.

The school has the function also of coordinating within the
disposition of each individual the diverse influences of the
various social environments into which he enters. One code
prevails in the family; another, on the street; a third, in the
workshop or store; a fourth, in the religious association. As a
person passes from one of the environments to another, he is
subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is in danger of being split
into a being having different standards of judgment and emotion
for different occasions. This danger imposes upon the school a
steadying and integrating office.

Summary. The development within the young of the attitudes and
dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of
a society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs,
emotions, and knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary
of the environment. The environment consists of the sum total of
conditions which are concerned in the execution of the activity
characteristic of a living being. The social environment
consists of all the activities of fellow beings that are bound up
in the carrying on of the activities of any one of its members.
It is truly educative in its effect in the degree in which an
individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity. By
doing his share in the associated activity, the individual
appropriates the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with
its methods and subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is
saturated with its emotional spirit.

The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition
comes, without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake
of the activities of the various groups to which they may belong.
As a society becomes more complex, however, it is found necessary
to provide a special social environment which shall especially
look after nurturing the capacities of the immature. Three of
the more important functions of this special environment are:
simplifying and ordering the factors of the disposition it is
wished to develop; purifying and idealizing the existing social
customs; creating a wider and better balanced environment than
that by which the young would be likely, if left to themselves,
to be influenced.

Chapter Three: Education as Direction

1. The Environment as Directive.

We now pass to one of the special forms which the general
function of education assumes: namely, that of direction,
control, or guidance. Of these three words, direction, control,
and guidance, the last best conveys the idea of assisting through
cooperation the natural capacities of the individuals guided;
control conveys rather the notion of an energy brought to bear
from without and meeting some resistance from the one controlled;
direction is a more neutral term and suggests the fact that the
active tendencies of those directed are led in a certain
continuous course, instead of dispersing aimlessly. Direction
expresses the basic function, which tends at one extreme to
become a guiding assistance and at another, a regulation or
ruling. But in any case, we must carefully avoid a meaning
sometimes read into the term "control." It is sometimes assumed,
explicitly or unconsciously, that an individual's tendencies are
naturally purely individualistic or egoistic, and thus
antisocial. Control then denotes the process by which he is
brought to subordinate his natural impulses to public or common
ends. Since, by conception, his own nature is quite alien to
this process and opposes it rather than helps it, control has in
this view a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it. Systems
of government and theories of the state have been built upon this
notion, and it has seriously affected educational ideas and
practices. But there is no ground for any such view.
Individuals are certainly interested, at times, in having their
own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways of others.
But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon the
whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part
in conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as
a community would be possible. And there would not even be any
one interested in furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of
harmony unless he thought that thereby he could gain some
personal advantage. Control, in truth, means only an emphatic
form of direction of powers, and covers the regulation gained by
an individual through his own efforts quite as much as that
brought about when others take the lead.

In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply
excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object. Put
the other way around, a response is not just a re-action, a
protest, as it were, against being disturbed; it is, as the word
indicates, an answer. It meets the stimulus, and corresponds
with it. There is an adaptation of the stimulus and response to
each other. A light is the stimulus to the eye to see something,
and the business of the eye is to see. If the eyes are open and
there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus is but a condition of
the fulfillment of the proper function of the organ, not an
outside interruption. To some extent, then, all direction or
control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is an
assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to
do.

This general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two
respects. In the first place, except in the case of a small
number of instincts, the stimuli to which an immature human being
is subject are not sufficiently definite to call out, in the
beginning, specific responses. There is always a great deal of
superfluous energy aroused. This energy may be wasted, going
aside from the point; it may also go against the successful
performance of an act. It does harm by getting in the way.
Compare the behavior of a beginner in riding a bicycle with that
of the expert. There is little axis of direction in the energies
put forth; they are largely dispersive and centrifugal.
Direction involves a focusing and fixating of action in order
that it may be truly a response, and this requires an elimination
of unnecessary and confusing movements. In the second place,
although no activity can be produced in which the person does not
cooperate to some extent, yet a response may be of a kind which
does not fit into the sequence and continuity of action. A
person boxing may dodge a particular blow successfully, but in
such a way as to expose himself the next instant to a still
harder blow. Adequate control means that the successive acts are
brought into a continuous order; each act not only meets its
immediate stimulus but helps the acts which follow.

In short, direction is both simultaneous and successive. At a
given time, it requires that, from all the tendencies that are
partially called out, those be selected which center energy upon
the point of need. Successively, it requires that each act be
balanced with those which precede and come after, so that order
of activity is achieved. Focusing and ordering are thus the two
aspects of direction, one spatial, the other temporal. The first
insures hitting the mark; the second keeps the balance required
for further action. Obviously, it is not possible to separate
them in practice as we have distinguished them in idea. Activity
must be centered at a given time in such a way as to prepare for
what comes next. The problem of the immediate response is
complicated by one's having to be on the lookout for future
occurrences.

Two conclusions emerge from these general statements. On the one
hand, purely external direction is impossible. The environment
can at most only supply stimuli to call out responses. These
responses proceed from tendencies already possessed by the
individual. Even when a person is frightened by threats into
doing something, the threats work only because the person has an
instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is
under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him
than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes. While
the customs and rules of adults furnish stimuli which direct as
well as evoke the activities of the young, the young, after all,
participate in the direction which their actions finally take.
In the strict sense, nothing can be forced upon them or into
them. To overlook this fact means to distort and pervert human
nature. To take into account the contribution made by the
existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct them
economically and wisely. Speaking accurately, all direction is
but re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into
another channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which
are already in operation, one's attempts at direction will almost
surely go amiss.

On the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and
regulations of others may be short-sighted. It may accomplish
its immediate effect, but at the expense of throwing the
subsequent action of the person out of balance. A threat may,
for example, prevent a person from doing something to which he is
naturally inclined by arousing fear of disagreeable consequences
if he persists. But he may be left in the position which exposes
him later on to influences which will lead him to do even worse
things. His instincts of cunning and slyness may be aroused, so
that things henceforth appeal to him on the side of evasion and
trickery more than would otherwise have been the case. Those
engaged in directing the actions of others are always in danger
of overlooking the importance of the sequential development of
those they direct.

2. Modes of Social Direction. Adults are naturally most
conscious of directing the conduct of others when they are
immediately aiming so to do. As a rule, they have such an aim
consciously when they find themselves resisted; when others are
doing things they do not wish them to do. But the more permanent
and influential modes of control are those which operate from
moment to moment continuously without such deliberate intention
on our part.

1. When others are not doing what we would like them to or are
threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of
controlling them and of the influences by which they are
controlled. In such cases, our control becomes most direct, and
at this point we are most likely to make the mistakes just spoken
of. We are even likely to take the influence of superior force
for control, forgetting that while we may lead a horse to water
we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in
a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent. In all such cases of
immediate action upon others, we need to discriminate between
physical results and moral results. A person may be in such a
condition that forcible feeding or enforced confinement is
necessary for his own good. A child may have to be snatched with
roughness away from a fire so that he shall not be burnt. But no
improvement of disposition, no educative effect, need follow. A
harsh and commanding tone may be effectual in keeping a child
away from the fire, and the same desirable physical effect will
follow as if he had been snatched away. But there may be no more
obedience of a moral sort in one case than in the other. A man
can be prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by
shutting him up, but shutting him up may not alter his
disposition to commit burglary. When we confuse a physical with
an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the
person's own participating disposition in getting the result
desired, and thereby of developing within him an intrinsic and
persisting direction in the right way.

In general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control
should be limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive
that the one performing them has no means of foreseeing their
outcome. If a person cannot foresee the consequences of his act,
and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its
outcome by those with more experience, it is impossible for him
to guide his act intelligently. In such a state, every act is
alike to him. Whatever moves him does move him, and that is all
there is to it. In some cases, it is well to permit him to
experiment, and to discover the consequences for himself in order
that he may act intelligently next time under similar
circumstances. But some courses of action are too discommoding
and obnoxious to others to allow of this course being pursued.
Direct disapproval is now resorted to. Shaming, ridicule,
disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used. Or contrary
tendencies in the child are appealed to to divert him from his
troublesome line of behavior. His sensitiveness to approbation,
his hope of winning favor by an agreeable act, are made use of to
induce action in another direction.

2. These methods of control are so obvious (because so
intentionally employed) that it would hardly be worth while to
mention them if it were not that notice may now be taken, by way
of contrast, of the other more important and permanent mode of
control. This other method resides in the ways in which persons,
with whom the immature being is associated, use things; the
instrumentalities with which they accomplish their own ends. The
very existence of the social medium in which an individual lives,
moves, and has his being is the standing effective agency of
directing his activity.

This fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail
what is meant by the social environment. We are given to
separating from each other the physical and social environments
in which we live. The separation is responsible on one hand for
an exaggeration of the moral importance of the more direct or
personal modes of control of which we have been speaking; and on
the other hand for an exaggeration, in current psychology and
philosophy, of the intellectual possibilities of contact with a
purely physical environment. There is not, in fact, any such
thing as the direct influence of one human being on another apart
from use of the physical environment as an intermediary. A
smile, a frown, a rebuke, a word of warning or encouragement, all
involve some physical change. Otherwise, the attitude of one
would not get over to alter the attitude of another.
Comparatively speaking, such modes of influence may be regarded
as personal. The physical medium is reduced to a mere means of
personal contact. In contrast with such direct modes of mutual
influence, stand associations in common pursuits involving the
use of things as means and as measures of results. Even if the
mother never told her daughter to help her, or never rebuked her
for not helping, the child would be subjected to direction in her
activities by the mere fact that she was engaged, along with the
parent, in the household life. Imitation, emulation, the need of
working together, enforce control.

If the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must
reach the thing in order to get it. Where there is giving there
must be taking. The way the child handles the thing after it is
got, the use to which it is put, is surely influenced by the fact
that the child has watched the mother. When the child sees the
parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to
look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it
was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply such an
instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one
has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving
direction to the activities of the young.

In saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously
about participating in a joint activity as the chief way of
forming disposition. We have explicitly added, however, the
recognition of the part played in the joint activity by the use
of things. The philosophy of learning has been unduly dominated
by a false psychology. It is frequently stated that a person
learns by merely having the qualities of things impressed upon
his mind through the gateway of the senses. Having received a
store of sensory impressions, association or some power of mental
synthesis is supposed to combine them into ideas--into things
with a meaning. An object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is
supposed to convey different impressions of color, shape, size,
hardness, smell, taste, etc., which aggregated together
constitute the characteristic meaning of each thing. But as
matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to which the thing
is put, because of its specific qualities, which supplies the
meaning with which it is identified. A chair is a thing which is
put to one use; a table, a thing which is employed for another
purpose; an orange is a thing which costs so much, which is grown
in warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable
odor and refreshing taste, etc.

The difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a
mental act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its
meaning; the former does not. A noise may make me jump without
my mind being implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get
water and put out a blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound
meant fire, and fire meant need of being extinguished. I bump
into a stone, and kick it to one side purely physically. I put
it to one side for fear some one will stumble upon it,
intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the thing has. I am
startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or not -- more
likely, if I do not recognize it. But if I say, either out loud
or to myself, that is thunder, I respond to the disturbance as a
meaning. My behavior has a mental quality. When things have a
meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they
do not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.

In both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are
directed or controlled. But in the merely blind response,
direction is also blind. There may be training, but there is no
education. Repeated responses to recurrent stimuli may fix a
habit of acting in a certain way. All of us have many habits of
whose import we are quite unaware, since they were formed without
our knowing what we were about. Consequently they possess us,
rather than we them. They move us; they control us. Unless we
become aware of what they accomplish, and pass judgment upon the
worth of the result, we do not control them. A child might be
made to bow every time he met a certain person by pressure on his
neck muscles, and bowing would finally become automatic. It
would not, however, be an act of recognition or deference on his
part, till he did it with a certain end in view -- as having a
certain meaning. And not till he knew what he was about and
performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to
be "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. To have an
idea of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations from
it. It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its
place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the
drift and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us
and of our action upon it. To have the same ideas about things
which others have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to be
really members of a social group, is therefore to attach the same
meanings to things and to acts which others attach. Otherwise,
there is no common understanding, and no community life. But in
a shared activity, each person refers what he is doing to what
the other is doing and vice-versa. That is, the activity of each
is placed in the same inclusive situation. To pull at a rope at
which others happen to be pulling is not a shared or conjoint
activity, unless the pulling is done with knowledge that others
are pulling and for the sake of either helping or hindering what
they are doing. A pin may pass in the course of its manufacture
through the hands of many persons. But each may do his part
without knowledge of what others do or without any reference to
what they do; each may operate simply for the sake of a separate
result--his own pay. There is, in this case, no common
consequence to which the several acts are referred, and hence no
genuine intercourse or association, in spite of juxtaposition,
and in spite of the fact that their respective doings contribute
to a single outcome. But if each views the consequences of his
own acts as having a bearing upon what others are doing and takes
into account the consequences of their behavior upon himself,
then there is a common mind; a common intent in behavior. There
is an understanding set up between the different contributors;
and this common understanding controls the action of each.
Suppose that conditions were so arranged that one person
automatically caught a ball and then threw it to another person
who caught and automatically returned it; and that each so acted
without knowing where the ball came from or went to. Clearly,
such action would be without point or meaning. It might be
physically controlled, but it would not be socially directed.
But suppose that each becomes aware of what the other is doing,
and becomes interested in the other's action and thereby
interested in what he is doing himself as connected with the
action of the other. The behavior of each would then be
intelligent; and socially intelligent and guided. Take one more
example of a less imaginary kind. An infant is hungry, and cries
while food is prepared in his presence. If he does not connect
his own state with what others are doing, nor what they are doing
with his own satisfaction, he simply reacts with increasing
impatience to his own increasing discomfort. He is physically
controlled by his own organic state. But when he makes a back
and forth reference, his whole attitude changes. He takes an
interest, as we say; he takes note and watches what others are
doing. He no longer reacts just to his own hunger, but behaves
in the light of what others are doing for its prospective
satisfaction. In that way, he also no longer just gives way to
hunger without knowing it, but he notes, or recognizes, or
identifies his own state. It becomes an object for him. His
attitude toward it becomes in some degree intelligent. And in
such noting of the meaning of the actions of others and of his
own state, he is socially directed.

It will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. One
of them has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do
not influence mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are
implicated in action for prospective consequences. The other
point is persons modify one another's dispositions only through
the special use they make of physical conditions. Consider first
the case of so-called expressive movements to which others are
sensitive; blushing, smiling, frowning, clinching of fists,
natural gestures of all kinds. In themselves, these are not
expressive. They are organic parts of a person's attitude. One
does not blush to show modesty or embarrassment to others, but
because the capillary circulation alters in response to stimuli.
But others use the blush, or a slightly perceptible tightening of
the muscles of a person with whom they are associated, as a sign
of the state in which that person finds himself, and as an
indication of what course to pursue. The frown signifies an
imminent rebuke for which one must prepare, or an uncertainty and
hesitation which one must, if possible, remove by saying or doing
something to restore confidence. A man at some distance is
waving his arms wildly. One has only to preserve an attitude of
detached indifference, and the motions of the other person will
be on the level of any remote physical change which we happen to
note. If we have no concern or interest, the waving of the arms
is as meaningless to us as the gyrations of the arms of a
windmill. But if interest is aroused, we begin to participate.
We refer his action to something we are doing ourselves or that
we should do. We have to judge the meaning of his act in order
to decide what to do. Is he beckoning for help? Is he warning us
of an explosion to be set off, against which we should guard
ourselves? In one case, his action means to run toward him; in
the other case, to run away. In any case, it is the change he
effects in the physical environment which is a sign to us of how
we should conduct ourselves. Our action is socially controlled
because we endeavor to refer what we are to do to the same
situation in which he is acting.

Language is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this
joint reference of our own action and that of another to a common
situation. Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social
direction. But language would not be this efficacious instrument
were it not that it takes place upon a background of coarser and
more tangible use of physical means to accomplish results. A
child sees persons with whom he lives using chairs, hats, tables,
spades, saws, plows, horses, money in certain ways. If he has
any share at all in what they are doing, he is led thereby to use
things in the same way, or to use other things in a way which
will fit in. If a chair is drawn up to a table, it is a sign
that he is to sit in it; if a person extends his right hand, he
is to extend his; and so on in a never ending stream of detail.
The prevailing habits of using the products of human art and the
raw materials of nature constitute by all odds the deepest and
most pervasive mode of social control. When children go to
school, they already have "minds" -- they have knowledge and
dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to through the use
of language. But these "minds" are the organized habits of
intelligent response which they have previously required by
putting things to use in connection with the way other persons
use things. The control is inescapable; it saturates
disposition. The net outcome of the discussion is that the
fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual.
It is not "moral" in the sense that a person is moved by direct
personal appeal from others, important as is this method at
critical junctures. It consists in the habits of understanding,
which are set up in using objects in correspondence with others,
whether by way of cooperation and assistance or rivalry and
competition. Mind as a concrete thing is precisely the power to
understand things in terms of the use made of them; a socialized
mind is the power to understand them in terms of the use to which
they are turned in joint or shared situations. And mind in this
sense is the method of social control.

3. Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the
defects of a psychology of learning which places the individual
mind naked, as it were, in contact with physical objects, and
which believes that knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from
their interaction. Only comparatively recently has the
predominating influence of association with fellow beings in the
formation of mental and moral disposition been perceived. Even
now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct to an alleged
method of learning by direct contact with things, and as merely
supplementing knowledge of the physical world with knowledge of
persons. The purport of our discussion is that such a view makes
an absurd and impossible separation between persons and things.
Interaction with things may form habits of external adjustment.
But it leads to activity having a meaning and conscious intent
only when things are used to produce a result. And the only way
one person can modify the mind of another is by using physical
conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering
activity from him. Such are our two main conclusions. It is
desirable to amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast
with the theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct
relationships of human beings to one another as an adjunct to the
psychology of the supposed direct relation of an individual to
physical objects. In substance, this so-called social psychology
has been built upon the notion of imitation. Consequently, we
shall discuss the nature and role of imitation in the formation
of mental disposition.

According to this theory, social control of individuals rests
upon the instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy
the actions of others. The latter serve as models. The
imitative instinct is so strong that the young devote themselves
to conforming to the patterns set by others and reproducing them
in their own scheme of behavior. According to our theory, what
is here called imitation is a misleading name for partaking with
others in a use of things which leads to consequences of common
interest. The basic error in the current notion of imitation is
that it puts the cart before the horse. It takes an effect for
the cause of the effect. There can be no doubt that individuals
in forming a social group are like-minded; they understand one
another. They tend to act with the same controlling ideas,
beliefs, and intentions, given similar circumstances. Looked at
from without, they might be said to be engaged in "imitating" one
another. In the sense that they are doing much the same sort of
thing in much the same sort of way, this would be true enough.
But "imitation" throws no light upon why they so act; it repeats
the fact as an explanation of itself. It is an explanation of
the same order as the famous saying that opium puts men to sleep
because of its dormitive power.

Objective likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in
being in conformity with others are baptized by the name
imitation. This social fact is then taken for a psychological
force, which produced the likeness. A considerable portion of
what is called imitation is simply the fact that persons being
alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli.
Quite independently of imitation, men on being insulted get angry
and attack the insulter. This statement may be met by citing the
undoubted fact that response to an insult takes place in
different ways in groups having different customs. In one group,
it may be met by recourse to fisticuffs, in another by a
challenge to a duel, in a third by an exhibition of contemptuous
disregard. This happens, so it is said, because the model set
for imitation is different. But there is no need to appeal to
imitation. The mere fact that customs are different means that
the actual stimuli to behavior are different. Conscious
instruction plays a part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a
large influence. Still more effective is the fact that unless an
individual acts in the way current in his group, he is literally
out of it. He can associate with others on intimate and equal
terms only by behaving in the way in which they behave. The
pressure that comes from the fact that one is let into the group
action by acting in one way and shut out by acting in another way
is unremitting. What is called the effect of imitation is mainly
the product of conscious instruction and of the selective
influence exercised by the unconscious confirmations and
ratifications of those with whom one associates.

Suppose that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and
rolls it back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not
just the sight of the ball, or the sight of the other rolling it.
It is the situation -- the game which is playing. The response
is not merely rolling the ball back; it is rolling it back so
that the other one may catch and return it, -- that the game may
continue. The "pattern" or model is not the action of the other
person. The whole situation requires that each should adapt his
action in view of what the other person has done and is to do.
Imitation may come in but its role is subordinate. The child has
an interest on his own account; he wants to keep it going. He
may then note how the other person catches and holds the ball in
order to improve his own acts. He imitates the means of doing,
not the end or thing to be done. And he imitates the means
because he wishes, on his own behalf, as part of his own
initiative, to take an effective part in the game. One has only
to consider how completely the child is dependent from his
earliest days for successful execution of his purposes upon
fitting his acts into those of others to see what a premium is
put upon behaving as others behave, and of developing an
understanding of them in order that he may so behave. The
pressure for likemindedness in action from this source is so
great that it is quite superfluous to appeal to imitation. As
matter of fact, imitation of ends, as distinct from imitation of
means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and transitory
affair which leaves little effect upon disposition. Idiots are
especially apt at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts
but not the meaning of their performance. When we find children
engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as
we would do if it were an important means of social control) we
are more likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy
cats. Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other
hand, an intelligent act. It involves close observation, and
judicious selection of what will enable one to do better
something which he already is trying to do. Used for a purpose,
the imitative instinct may, like any other instinct, become a
factor in the development of effective action.

This excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing
the conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of
a certain mental disposition; a way of understanding objects,
events, and acts which enables one to participate effectively in
associated activities. Only the friction engendered by meeting
resistance from others leads to the view that it takes place by
forcing a line of action contrary to natural inclinations. Only
failure to take account of the situations in which persons are
mutually concerned (or interested in acting responsively to one
another) leads to treating imitation as the chief agent in
promoting social control.

4. Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group
perpetuate savagery, and a civilized group civilization?
Doubtless the first answer to occur to mind is because savages
are savages; being of low-grade intelligence and perhaps
defective moral sense. But careful study has made it doubtful
whether their native capacities are appreciably inferior to those
of civilized man. It has made it certain that native differences
are not sufficient to account for the difference in culture. In
a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a
cause, of their backward institutions. Their social activities
are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest,
and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as
regards the objects that come within the scope of attention,
primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and
imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind.
Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of
natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small
number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked
for what they are worth. The advance of civilization means that
a larger number of natural forces and objects have been
transformed into instrumentalities of action, into means for
securing ends. We start not so much with superior capacities as
with superior stimuli for evocation and direction of our
capacities. The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have
weighted stimuli. Prior human efforts have made over natural
conditions. As they originally existed they were indifferent to
human endeavors. Every domesticated plant and animal, every
tool, every utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article,
every esthetic decoration, every work of art means a
transformation of conditions once hostile or indifferent to
characteristic human activities into friendly and favoring
conditions. Because the activities of children today are
controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are
able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed
slow, tortured ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all
the successes which have preceded.

Stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as
our system of roads and means of transportation, our ready
command of heat, light, and electricity, our ready-made machines
and apparatus for every purpose, do not, by themselves or in
their aggregate, constitute a civilization. But the uses to
which they are put are civilization, and without the things the
uses would be impossible. Time otherwise necessarily devoted to
wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment and securing a
precarious protection against its inclemencies is freed. A body
of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which is
guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is
incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of
nature. Thus these appliances of art supply a protection,
perhaps our chief protection, against a recrudescence of these
superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and infertile
imaginings about nature in which so much of the best intellectual
power of the past has been spent. If we add one other factor,
namely, that such appliances be not only used, but used in the
interests of a truly shared or associated life, then the
appliances become the positive resources of civilization. If
Greece, with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a
worthy and noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because
Greece operated for social ends such resources as it had.
But whatever the situation, whether one of barbarism or
civilization, whether one of stinted control of physical forces,
or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet made tributary
to a shared experience, things as they enter into action furnish
the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation
of mental and moral disposition.

Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a
specially selected environment, the selection being made on the
basis of materials and method specifically promoting growth in
the desired direction. Since language represents the physical
conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation
in the interests of social life -- physical things which have
lost their original quality in becoming social tools -- it is
appropriate that language should play a large part compared with
other appliances. By it we are led to share vicariously in past
human experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of
the present. We are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to
anticipate situations. In countless ways, language condenses
meanings that record social outcomes and presage social
outlooks. So significant is it of a liberal share in what is
worth while in life that unlettered and uneducated have become
almost synonymous.

The emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however,
its dangers -- dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in
practice. Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by
pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally
condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That
education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an
active and constructive process, is a principle almost as
generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not
this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is
itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written
about. But its enactment into practice requires that the school
environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and
physical materials, to an extent rarely attained. It requires
that methods of instruction and administration be modified to
allow and to secure direct and continuous occupations with
things. Not that the use of language as an educational resource
should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and fruitful
by having its normal connection with shared activities. "These
things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others
undone." And for the school "these things" mean equipment with
the instrumentalities of cooperative or joint activity.

For when the schools depart from the educational conditions
effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily
substitute a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social
spirit. Children doubtless go to school to learn, but it has yet
to be proved that learning occurs most adequately when it is made
a separate conscious business. When treating it as a business of
this sort tends to preclude the social sense which comes from
sharing in an activity of common concern and value, the effort at
isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own aim. We may
secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an
individual by himself, but we cannot thereby get him to
understand the meaning which things have in the life of which he
is a part. We may secure technical specialized ability in
algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence which
directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in a joint
activity, where one person's use of material and tools is
consciously referred to the use other persons are making of their
capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition
attained.

Summary. The natural or native impulses of the young do not
agree with the life-customs of the group into which they are
born. Consequently they have to be directed or guided. This
control is not the same thing as physical compulsion; it consists
in centering the impulses acting at any one time upon some
specific end and in introducing an order of continuity into the
sequence of acts. The action of others is always influenced by
deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions. But in some
cases as in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and disapprovals,
the stimuli proceed from persons with a direct view to
influencing action. Since in such cases we are most conscious of
controlling the action of others, we are likely to exaggerate the
importance of this sort of control at the expense of a more
permanent and effective method. The basic control resides in the
nature of the situations in which the young take part. In social
situations the young have to refer their way of acting to what
others are doing and make it fit in. This directs their action
to a common result, and gives an understanding common to the
participants. For all mean the same thing, even when performing
different acts. This common understanding of the means and ends
of action is the essence of social control. It is indirect, or
emotional and intellectual, not direct or personal. Moreover it
is intrinsic to the disposition of the person, not external and
coercive. To achieve this internal control through identity of
interest and understanding is the business of education. While
books and conversation can do much, these agencies are usually
relied upon too exclusively. Schools require for their full
efficiency more opportunity for conjoint activities in which
those instructed take part, so that they may acquire a social
sense of their own powers and of the materials and appliances
used.

Chapter Four: Education as Growth

1. The Conditions of Growth.

In directing the activities of the young, society determines its
own future in determining that of the young. Since the young at
a given time will at some later date compose the society of that
period, the latter's nature will largely turn upon the direction
children's activities were given at an earlier period. This
cumulative movement of action toward a later result is what is
meant by growth.

The primary condition of growth is immaturity. This may seem to
be a mere truism -- saying that a being can develop only in some
point in which he is undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the
word immaturity means something positive, not a mere void or
lack. It is noteworthy that the terms "capacity" and
"potentiality" have a double meaning, one sense being negative,
the other positive. Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like
the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by potentiality a
merely dormant or quiescent state -- a capacity to become
something different under external influences. But we also mean
by capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency,
force. Now when we say that immaturity means the possibility of
growth, we are not referring to absence of powers which may exist
at a later time; we express a force positively present -- the
ability to develop.

Our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as
something which fills up the gap between the immature and the
mature is due to regarding childhood comparatively, instead of
intrinsically. We treat it simply as a privation because we are
measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard. This fixes
attention upon what the child has not, and will not have till he
becomes a man. This comparative standpoint is legitimate enough
for some purposes, but if we make it final, the question arises
whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption.
Children, if they could express themselves articulately and
sincerely, would tell a different tale; and there is excellent
adult authority for the conviction that for certain moral and
intellectual purposes adults must become as little children.
The seriousness of the assumption of the negative quality of the
possibilities of immaturity is apparent when we reflect that it
sets up as an ideal and standard a static end. The fulfillment
of growing is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is to
say, an Ungrowth, something which is no longer growing. The
futility of the assumption is seen in the fact that every adult
resents the imputation of having no further possibilities of
growth; and so far as he finds that they are closed to him mourns
the fact as evidence of loss, instead of falling back on the
achieved as adequate manifestation of power. Why an unequal
measure for child and man?

Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates
a positive force or ability, -- the pouter to grow. We do not
have to draw out or educe positive activities from a child, as
some educational doctrines would have it. Where there is life,
there are already eager and impassioned activities. Growth is
not something done to them; it is something they do. The
positive and constructive aspect of possibility gives the key to
understanding the two chief traits of immaturity, dependence and
plasticity.

(1) It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something
positive, still more absurd as a power. Yet if helplessness were
all there were in dependence, no development could ever take
place. A merely impotent being has to be carried, forever, by
others. The fact that dependence is accompanied by growth in
ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into parasitism,
suggests that it is already something constructive. Being merely
sheltered by others would not promote growth. For

(2) it would only build a wall around impotence. With reference
to the physical world, the child is helpless. He lacks at birth
and for a long time thereafter power to make his way physically,
to make his own living. If he had to do that by himself, he
would hardly survive an hour. On this side his helplessness is
almost complete. The young of the brutes are immeasurably his
superiors. He is physically weak and not able to turn the
strength which he possesses to coping with the physical
environment.

1. The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests,
however, some compensating power. The relative ability of the
young of brute animals to adapt themselves fairly well to
physical conditions from an early period suggests the fact that
their life is not intimately bound up with the life of those
about them. They are compelled, so to speak, to have physical
gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. Human infants,
on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk and think as
if they simply happened to be physically in a social environment;
as if social forces exclusively existed in the adults who take
care of them, they being passive recipients. If it were said
that children are themselves marvelously endowed with power to
enlist the cooperative attention of others, this would be thought
to be a backhanded way of saying that others are marvelously
attentive to the needs of children. But observation shows that
children are gifted with an equipment of the first order for
social intercourse. Few grown-up persons retain all of the
flexible and sensitive ability of children to vibrate
sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about
them. Inattention to physical things (going with incapacity to
control them) is accompanied by a corresponding intensification
of interest and attention as to the doings of people. The native
mechanism of the child and his impulses all tend to facile social
responsiveness. The statement that children, before adolescence,
are egotistically self-centered, even if it were true, would not
contradict the truth of this statement. It would simply indicate
that their social responsiveness is employed on their own behalf,
not that it does not exist. But the statement is not true as
matter of fact. The facts which are cited in support of the
alleged pure egoism of children really show the intensity and
directness with which they go to their mark. If the ends which
form the mark seem narrow and selfish to adults, it is only
because adults (by means of a similar engrossment in their day)
have mastered these ends, which have consequently ceased to
interest them. Most of the remainder of children's alleged
native egoism is simply an egoism which runs counter to an
adult's egoism. To a grown-up person who is too absorbed in his
own affairs to take an interest in children's affairs, children
doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own affairs.

From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than
a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a
danger that increased personal independence will decrease the
social capacity of an individual. In making him more
self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead
to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so
insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion
of being really able to stand and act alone -- an unnamed form of
insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable
suffering of the world.

2. The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different
from the plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a capacity to
take on change of form in accord with external pressure. It lies
near the pliable elasticity by which some persons take on the
color of their surroundings while retaining their own bent. But
it is something deeper than this. It is essentially the ability
to learn from experience; the power to retain from one experience
something which is of avail in coping with the difficulties of a
later situation. This means power to modify actions on the basis
of the results of prior experiences, the power to develop
dispositions. Without it, the acquisition of habits is
impossible.

It is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and
especially the human young, have to learn to utilize their
instinctive reactions. The human being is born with a greater
number of instinctive tendencies than other animals. But the
instincts of the lower animals perfect themselves for appropriate
action at an early period after birth, while most of those of the
human infant are of little account just as they stand. An
original specialized power of adjustment secures immediate
efficiency, but, like a railway ticket, it is good for one route
only. A being who, in order to use his eyes, ears, hands, and
legs, has to experiment in making varied combinations of their
reactions, achieves a control that is flexible and varied. A
chick, for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few
hours after hatching. This means that definite coordinations of
activities of the eyes in seeing and of the body and head in
striking are perfected in a few trials. An infant requires about
six months to be able to gauge with approximate accuracy the
action in reaching which will coordinate with his visual
activities; to be able, that is, to tell whether he can reach a
seen object and just how to execute the reaching. As a result,
the chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original
endowment. The infant has the advantage of the multitude of
instinctive tentative reactions and of the experiences that
accompany them, even though he is at a temporary disadvantage
because they cross one another. In learning an action, instead
of having it given ready-made, one of necessity learns to vary
its factors, to make varied combinations of them, according to
change of circumstances. A possibility of continuing progress is
opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are
developed good for use in other situations. Still more important
is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning.
He learns to learn.

The importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and
variable control has been summed up in the doctrine of the
significance of prolonged infancy. 1 This prolongation is
significant from the standpoint of the adult members of the group
as well as from that of the young. The presence of dependent and
learning beings is a stimulus to nurture and affection. The need
for constant continued care was probably a chief means in
transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent unions. It
certainly was a chief influence in forming habits of affectionate
and sympathetic watchfulness; that constructive interest in the
well-being of others which is essential to associated life.
Intellectually, this moral development meant the introduction of
many new objects of attention; it stimulated foresight and
planning for the future. Thus there is a reciprocal influence.
Increasing complexity of social life requires a longer period of
infancy in which to acquire the needed powers; this prolongation
of dependence means prolongation of plasticity, or power of
acquiring variable and novel modes of control. Hence it provides
a further push to social progress.

2. Habits as Expressions of Growth. We have already noted that
plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior
experience factors which modify subsequent activities. This
signifies the capacity to acquire habits, or develop definite
dispositions. We have now to consider the salient features of
habits. In the first place, a habit is a form of executive
skill, of efficiency in doing. A habit means an ability to use
natural conditions as means to ends. It is an active control of
the environment through control of the organs of action. We are
perhaps apt to emphasize the control of the body at the expense
of control of the environment. We think of walking, talking,
playing the piano, the specialized skills characteristic of the
etcher, the surgeon, the bridge-builder, as if they were simply
ease, deftness, and accuracy on the part of the organism. They
are that, of course; but the measure of the value of these
qualities lies in the economical and effective control of the
environment which they secure. To be able to walk is to have
certain properties of nature at our disposal--and so with all
other habits.

Education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the
acquisition of those habits that effect an adjustment of an
individual and his environment. The definition expresses an
essential phase of growth. But it is essential that adjustment
be understood in its active sense of control of means for
achieving ends. If we think of a habit simply as a change
wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change
consists in ability to effect subsequent changes in the
environment, we shall be led to think of "adjustment" as a
conformity to environment as wax conforms to the seal which
impresses it. The environment is thought of as something fixed,
providing in its fixity the end and standard of changes taking
place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting ourselves to
this fixity of external conditions. 2 Habit as habituation is
indeed something relatively passive; we get used to our
surroundings -- to our clothing, our shoes, and gloves; to the
atmosphere as long as it is fairly equable; to our daily
associates, etc. Conformity to the environment, a change wrought
in the organism without reference to ability to modify
surroundings, is a marked trait of such habituations. Aside from
the fact that we are not entitled to carry over the traits of
such adjustments (which might well be called accommodations, to
mark them off from active adjustments) into habits of active use
of our surroundings, two features of habituations are worth
notice. In the first place, we get used to things by first using
them.

Consider getting used to a strange city. At first, there is
excessive stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response.
Gradually certain stimuli are selected because of their
relevancy, and others are degraded. We can say either that we do
not respond to them any longer, or more truly that we have
effected a persistent response to them -- an equilibrium of
adjustment. This means, in the second place, that this enduring
adjustment supplies the background upon which are made specific
adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never interested in
changing the whole environment; there is much that we take for
granted and accept just as it already is. Upon this background
our activities focus at certain points in an endeavor to
introduce needed changes. Habituation is thus our adjustment to
an environment which at the time we are not concerned with
modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active habits.
Adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the
environment to our own activities as of our activities to the
environment. A savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain.
It adapts itself. But its adaptation involves a maximum of
accepting, tolerating, putting up with things as they are, a
maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of active control,
of subjection to use. A civilized people enters upon the scene.
It also adapts itself. It introduces irrigation; it searches the
world for plants and animals that will flourish under such
conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are
growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a
rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has
habits which transform the environment.

The significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its
executive and motor phase. It means formation of intellectual
and emotional disposition as well as an increase in ease,
economy, and efficiency of action. Any habit marks an
inclination -- an active preference and choice for the conditions
involved in its exercise. A habit does not wait, Micawber-like,
for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy; it actively
seeks for occasions to pass into full operation. If its
expression is unduly blocked, inclination shows itself in
uneasiness and intense craving. A habit also marks an
intellectual disposition. Where there is a habit, there is
acquaintance with the materials and equipment to which action is
applied. There is a definite way of understanding the situations
in which the habit operates. Modes of thought, of observation
and reflection, enter as forms of skill and of desire into the
habits that make a man an engineer, an architect, a physician, or
a merchant. In unskilled forms of labor, the intellectual
factors are at minimum precisely because the habits involved are
not of a high grade. But there are habits of judging and
reasoning as truly as of handling a tool, painting a picture, or
conducting an experiment. Such statements are, however,
understatements. The habits of mind involved in habits of the
eye and hand supply the latter with their significance. Above
all, the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of
the habit to varied and elastic use, and hence to continued
growth. We speak of fixed habits. Well, the phrase may mean
powers so well established that their possessor always has them
as resources when needed. But the phrase is also used to mean
ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness, open- mindedness, and
originality. Fixity of habit may mean that something has a fixed
hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold upon things.
This fact explains two points in a common notion about habits:
their identification with mechanical and external modes of action
to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the tendency to
give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad habits."
Many a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his
chosen profession called a habit, and would naturally think of
his use of tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the
meaning of habit. A habit is to him something which has a hold
on him, something not easily thrown off even though judgment
condemn it.

Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate
into ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree
in which intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits
are unthinking habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from
reason that they are opposed to the conclusions of conscious
deliberation and decision. As we have seen, the acquiring of
habits is due to an original plasticity of our natures: to our
ability to vary responses till we find an appropriate and
efficient way of acting. Routine habits, and habits that possess
us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to
plasticity. They mark the close of power to vary. There can be
no doubt of the tendency of organic plasticity, of the
physiological basis, to lessen with growing years. The
instinctively mobile and eagerly varying action of childhood, the
love of new stimuli and new developments, too easily passes into
a "settling down," which means aversion to change and a resting
on past achievements. Only an environment which secures the full
use of intelligence in the process of forming habits can
counteract this tendency. Of course, the same hardening of the
organic conditions affects the physiological structures which are
involved in thinking. But this fact only indicates the need of
persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is
invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted method
which falls back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure
external efficiency of habit, motor skill without accompanying
thought, marks a deliberate closing in of surroundings upon
growth.

3. The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development.
We have had so far but little to say in this chapter about
education. We have been occupied with the conditions and
implications of growth. If our conclusions are justified, they
carry with them, however, definite educational consequences.
When it is said that education is development, everything depends
upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion is that
life is development, and that developing, growing, is life.
Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that
the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own
end; and that (ii) the educational process is one of continual
reorganizing, reconstructing, transforming.

1. Development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that
is, with respect to the special traits of child and adult life,
means the direction of power into special channels: the formation
of habits involving executive skill, definiteness of interest,
and specific objects of observation and thought. But the
comparative view is not final. The child has specific powers; to
ignore that fact is to stunt or distort the organs upon which his
growth depends. The adult uses his powers to transform his
environment, thereby occasioning new stimuli which redirect his
powers and keep them developing. Ignoring this fact means
arrested development, a passive accommodation. Normal child and
normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. The
difference between them is not the difference between growth and
no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to
different conditions. With respect to the development of powers
devoted to coping with specific scientific and economic problems
we may say the child should be growing in manhood. With respect
to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness
of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in
childlikeness. One statement is as true as the other.

Three ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely
privative nature of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed
environment, and rigidity of habit, are all connected with a
false idea of growth or development, -- that it is a movement
toward a fixed goal. Growth is regarded as having an end,
instead of being an end. The educational counterparts of the
three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take account of the
instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly, failure to
develop initiative in coping with novel situations; thirdly, an
undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure
automatic skill at the expense of personal perception. In all
cases, the adult environment is accepted as a standard for the
child. He is to be brought up to it.

Natural instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances
-- as obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be
brought into conformity with external standards. Since
conformity is the aim, what is distinctively individual in a
young person is brushed aside, or regarded as a source of
mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to
uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in
the novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and
the unknown. Since the end of growth is outside of and beyond
the process of growing, external agents have to be resorted to to
induce movement toward it. Whenever a method of education is
stigmatized as mechanical, we may be sure that external pressure
is brought to bear to reach an external end.

2. Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative
save more growth, there is nothing to which education is
subordinate save more education. It is a commonplace to say that
education should not cease when one leaves school. The point of
this commonplace is that the purpose of school education is to
insure the continuance of education by organizing the powers that
insure growth. The inclination to learn from life itself and to
make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the
process of living is the finest product of schooling.

When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of
fixed comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to
give up thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits.
Abandoning this notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit
of thinking of instruction as a method of supplying this lack by
pouring knowledge into a mental and moral hole which awaits
filling. Since life means growth, a living creature lives as
truly and positively at one stage as at another, with the same
intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims. Hence education
means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure
growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age. We first look
with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as something to be
got over as rapidly as possible. Then the adult formed by such
educative methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood
and youth as a scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers.
This ironical situation will endure till it is recognized that
living has its own intrinsic quality and that the business of
education is with that quality. Realization that life is growth
protects us from that so-called idealizing of childhood which in
effect is nothing but lazy indulgence. Life is not to be
identified with every superficial act and interest. Even though
it is not always easy to tell whether what appears to be mere
surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained power,
we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as
ends in themselves. They are signs of possible growth. They are
to be turned into means of development, of carrying power
forward, not indulged or cultivated for their own sake.
Excessive attention to surface phenomena (even in the way of
rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to their fixation
and thus to arrested development. What impulses are moving
toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for
parent and teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity
cannot be better put than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the
child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his
solitude. But I hear the outcry which replies to this
suggestion: Would you verily throw up the reins of public and
private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad
career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a
respect for the child's nature? I answer, -- Respect the child,
respect him to the end, but also respect yourself.... The two
points in a boy's training are, to keep his naturel and train off
all but that; to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar,
fooling, and horseplay; keep his nature and arm it with knowledge
in the very direction in which it points." And as Emerson goes on
to show this reverence for childhood and youth instead of opening
up an easy and easy-going path to the instructors, "involves at
once, immense claims on the time, the thought, on the life of the
teacher. It requires time, use, insight, event, all the great
lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it
implies character and profoundness."

Summary. Power to grow depends upon need for others and
plasticity. Both of these conditions are at their height in
childhood and youth. Plasticity or the power to learn from
experience means the formation of habits. Habits give control
over the environment, power to utilize it for human purposes.
Habits take the form both of habituation, or a general and
persistent balance of organic activities with the surroundings,
and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new
conditions. The former furnishes the background of growth; the
latter constitute growing. Active habits involve thought,
invention, and initiative in applying capacities to new aims.
They are opposed to routine which marks an arrest of growth.
Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one
with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the
value of school education is the extent in which it creates a
desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the
desire effective in fact.

1 Intimations of its significance are found in a number of
writers, but John Fiske, in his Excursions of an Evolutionist, is
accredited with its first systematic exposition.

2 This conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the
conceptions of the external relation of stimulus and response,
considered in the last chapter, and of the negative conceptions
of immaturity and plasticity noted in this chapter.

Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline  

1. Education as Preparation. We have laid it down that the
educative process is a continuous process of growth, having as
its aim at every stage an added capacity of growth. This

conception contrasts sharply with other ideas which have
influenced practice. By making the contrast explicit, the
meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to light.
The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process
of preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared for is,
of course, the responsibilities and privileges of adult life.
Children are not regarded as social members in full and regular
standing. They are looked upon as candidates; they are placed on
the waiting list. The conception is only carried a little
farther when the life of adults is considered as not having
meaning on its own account, but as a preparatory probation for
"another life." The idea is but another form of the notion of the
negative and privative character of growth already criticized;
hence we shall not repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the evil
consequences which flow from putting education on this basis.
In the first place, it involves loss of impetus. Motive power is
not utilized. Children proverbially live in the present; that is
not only a fact not to be evaded, but it is an excellence. The
future just as future lacks urgency and body. To get ready for
something, one knows not what nor why, is to throw away the
leverage that exists, and to seek for motive power in a vague
chance. Under such circumstances, there is, in the second place,
a premium put on shilly-shallying and procrastination. The
future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of time will
intervene before it becomes a present. Why be in a hurry about
getting ready for it? The temptation to postpone is much
increased because the present offers so many wonderful
opportunities and proffers such invitations to adventure.
Naturally attention and energy go to them; education accrues
naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education than if the full
stress of effort had been put upon making conditions as educative
as possible. A third undesirable result is the substitution of a
conventional average standard of expectation and requirement for
a standard which concerns the specific powers of the individual
under instruction. For a severe and definite judgment based upon
the strong and weak points of the individual is substituted a
vague and wavering opinion concerning what youth may be expected,
upon the average, to become in some more or less remote future;
say, at the end of the year, when promotions are to take place,
or by the time they are ready to go to college or to enter upon
what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as the
serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the
loss which results from the deflection of attention from the
strategic point to a comparatively unproductive point. It fails
most just where it thinks it is succeeding -- in getting a
preparation for the future.

Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on
a large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and
pain. The future having no stimulating and directing power when
severed from the possibilities of the present, something must be
hitched on to it to make it work. Promises of reward and threats
of pain are employed. Healthy work, done for present reasons and
as a factor in living, is largely unconscious. The stimulus
resides in the situation with which one is actually confronted.
But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to be told that
if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the
future, rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows
how largely systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by
educational systems which neglect present possibilities in behalf
of preparation for a future. Then, in disgust with the harshness
and impotency of this method, the pendulum swings to the opposite
extreme, and the dose of information required against some later
day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be fooled into taking
something which they do not care for.

It is not of course a question whether education should prepare
for the future. If education is growth, it must progressively
realize present possibilities, and thus make individuals better
fitted to cope with later requirements. Growing is not something
which is completed in odd moments; it is a continuous leading
into the future. If the environment, in school and out, supplies
conditions which utilize adequately the present capacities of the
immature, the future which grows out of the present is surely
taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching importance to
preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of
present effort. Because the need of preparation for a
continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every
energy should be bent to making the present experience as rich
and significant as possible. Then as the present merges
insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of.

2. Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education
which professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it
takes back with one hand what it proffers with the other.
Development is conceived not as continuous growing, but as the
unfolding of latent powers toward a definite goal. The goal is
conceived of as completion, -perfection. Life at any stage short
of attainment of this goal is merely an unfolding toward it.
Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the preparation
theory. Practically the two differ in that the adherents of the
latter make much of the practical and professional duties for
which one is preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks
of the ideal and spiritual qualities of the principle which is
unfolding.

The conception that growth and progress are just approximations
to a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in
its transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life.
It simulates the style of the latter. It pays the tribute of
speaking much of development, process, progress. But all of
these operations are conceived to be merely transitional; they
lack meaning on their own account. They possess significance
only as movements toward something away from what is now going
on. Since growth is just a movement toward a completed being,
the final ideal is immobile. An abstract and indefinite future
is in control with all which that connotes in depreciation of
present power and opportunity.

Since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is
very far away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is
unattainable. Consequently, in order to be available for present
guidance it must be translated into something which stands for
it. Otherwise we should be compelled to regard any and every
manifestation of the child as an unfolding from within, and hence
sacred. Unless we set up some definite criterion representing
the ideal end by which to judge whether a given attitude or act
is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is to
withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere
with proper development. Since that is not practicable, a
working substitute is set up. Usually, of course, this is some
idea which an adult would like to have a child acquire.
Consequently, by "suggestive questioning" or some other
pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out" from the
pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that is
evidence that the child is unfolding properly. But as the pupil
generally has no initiative of his own in this direction, the
result is a random groping after what is wanted, and the
formation of habits of dependence upon the cues furnished by
others. Just because such methods simulate a true principle and
claim to have its sanction they may do more harm than would
outright "telling," where, at least, it remains with the child
how much will stick.

Within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two
typical attempts to provide a working representative of the
absolute goal. Both start from the conception of a whole -- an
absolute -- which is "immanent" in human life. The perfect or
complete ideal is not a mere ideal; it is operative here and now.
But it is present only implicitly, "potentially," or in an
enfolded condition. What is termed development is the gradual
making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up. Froebel
and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes referred
to, have different ideas of the path by which the progressive
realization of manifestation of the complete principle is
effected. According to Hegel, it is worked out through a series
of historical institutions which embody the different factors in
the Absolute. According to Froebel, the actuating force is the
presentation of symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding to
the essential traits of the Absolute. When these are presented
to the child, the Whole, or perfection, sleeping within him, is
awakened. A single example may indicate the method. Every one
familiar with the kindergarten is acquainted with the circle in
which the children gather. It is not enough that the circle is a
convenient way of grouping the children. It must be used
"because it is a symbol of the collective life of mankind in
general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the native
capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his
influence in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the
most effective single force in modern educational theory in
effecting widespread acknowledgment of the idea of growth. But
his formulation of the notion of development and his organization
of devices for promoting it were badly hampered by the fact that
he conceived development to be the unfolding of a ready-made
latent principle. He failed to see that growing is growth,
developing is development, and consequently placed the emphasis
upon the completed product. Thus he set up a goal which meant
the arrest of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to
immediate guidance of powers, save through translation into
abstract and symbolic formulae.

A remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical
philosophic language, transcendental. That is, it is something
apart from direct experience and perception. So far as
experience is concerned, it is empty; it represents a vague
sentimental aspiration rather than anything which can be
intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be
compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the
connection between the concrete facts of experience and the
transcendental ideal of development by regarding the former as
symbols of the latter. To regard known things as symbols,
according to some arbitrary a priori formula -- and every a
priori conception must be arbitrary -- is an invitation to
romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal to it and
treat them as laws. After the scheme of symbolism has been
settled upon, some definite technique must be invented by which
the inner meaning of the sensible symbols used may be brought
home to children. Adults being the formulators of the symbolism
are naturally the authors and controllers of the technique. The
result was that Froebel's love of abstract symbolism often got
the better of his sympathetic insight; and there was substituted
for development as arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of
dictation as the history of instruction has ever seen.

With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete
counterpart of the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional,
rather than symbolic, form. His philosophy, like Froebel's,
marks in one direction an indispensable contribution to a valid
conception of the process of life. The weaknesses of an abstract
individualistic philosophy were evident to him; he saw the
impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical institutions,
of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and nurtured in
fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated the
efforts of a whole series of German writers -- Lessing, Herder,
Kant, Schiller, Goethe -- to appreciate the nurturing influence
of the great collective institutional products of humanity. For
those who learned the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth
impossible to conceive of institutions or of culture as
artificial. It destroyed completely -- in idea, not in fact --
the psychology that regarded "mind" as a ready-made possession of
a naked individual by showing the significance of "objective
mind" -- language, government, art, religion -- in the formation
of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the
conception of an absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange
institutions as they concretely exist, on a stepladder of
ascending approximations. Each in its time and place is
absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing
process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its
existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an
integral element in the total, which is Reason. Against
institutions as they are, individuals have no spiritual rights;
personal development, and nurture, consist in obedient
assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions. Conformity,
not transformation, is the essence of education. Institutions
change as history shows; but their change, the rise and fall of
states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the
great "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit,
have no share or lot in it. In the later nineteenth century,
this type of idealism was amalgamated with the doctrine of
biological evolution.

"Evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end. As
against it, or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and
preference of individuals are impotent. Or, rather, they are but
the means by which it works itself out. Social progress is an
"organic growth," not an experimental selection. Reason is all
powerful, but only Absolute Reason has any power.

The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the
Greeks) that great historic institutions are active factors in
the intellectual nurture of mind was a great contribution to
educational philosophy. It indicated a genuine advance beyond
Rousseau, who had marred his assertion that education must be a
natural development and not something forced or grafted upon
individuals from without, by the notion that social conditions
are not natural. But in its notion of a complete and
all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory swallowed
up concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual in
the abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the
claims of the Whole and of individuality by the conception of
society as an organic whole, or organism. That social
organization is presupposed in the adequate exercise of
individual capacity is not to be doubted. But the social
organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of the
body to each other and to the whole body, means that each
individual has a certain limited place and function, requiring to
be supplemented by the place and functions of the other organs.
As one portion of the bodily tissue is differentiated so that it
can be the hand and the hand only, another, the eye, and so on,
all taken together making the organism, so one individual is
supposed to be differentiated for the exercise of the mechanical
operations of society, another for those of a statesman, another
for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion of "organism" is
thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class distinctions in
social organization--a notion which in its educational
application again means external dictation instead of growth.

3. Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had
great vogue and which came into existence before the notion of
growth had much influence is known as the theory of "formal
discipline. "It has in view a correct ideal; one outcome of
education should be the creation of specific powers of
accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do the chief
things which it is important for him to do better than he could
without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency,
economy, promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education
was indicated in what was said about habits as the product of
educative development. But the theory in question takes, as it
were, a short cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named)
as the direct and conscious aims of instruction, and not simply
as the results of growth. There is a definite number of powers
to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of strokes which
a golfer has to master. Consequently education should get
directly at the business of training them. But this implies that
they are already there in some untrained form; otherwise their
creation would have to be an indirect product of other activities
and agencies. Being there already in some crude form, all that
remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions,
and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase
"formal discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline"
refers both to the outcome of trained power and to the method of
training through repeated exercise.

The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties
of perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending,
willing, feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then
shaped by exercise upon material presented. In its classic form,
this theory was expressed by Locke. On the one hand, the outer
world presents the material or content of knowledge through
passively received sensations. On the other hand, the mind has
certain ready powers, attention, observation, retention,
comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. Knowledge results if
the mind discriminates and combines things as they are united and
divided in nature itself. But the important thing for education
is the exercise or practice of the faculties of the mind till
they become thoroughly established habitudes. The analogy
constantly employed is that of a billiard player or gymnast, who
by repeated use of certain muscles in a uniform way at last
secures automatic skill. Even the faculty of thinking was to be
formed into a trained habit by repeated exercises in making and
combining simple distinctions, for which, Locke thought,
mathematics affords unrivaled opportunity.

Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It
seemed to do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and
the world. One of the two supplied the matter of knowledge and
the object upon which mind should work. The other supplied
definite mental powers, which were few in number and which might
be trained by specific exercises. The scheme appeared to give
due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and yet it
insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception and
storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of
attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization.
It was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material
whatever is received from without; it was idealistic in that
final stress fell upon the formation of intellectual powers. It
was objective and impersonal in its assertion that the individual
cannot possess or generate any true ideas on his own account; it
was individualistic in placing the end of education in the
perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset by the
individual. This kind of distribution of values expressed with
nicety the state of opinion in the generations following upon
Locke. It became, without explicit reference to Locke, a
common-place of educational theory and of psychology.
Practically, it seemed to provide the educator with definite,
instead of vague, tasks. It made the elaboration of a technique
of instruction relatively easy. All that was necessary was to
provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers. This
practice consists in repeated acts of attending, observing,
memorizing, etc. By grading the difficulty of the acts, making
each set of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set
which preceded it, a complete scheme of instruction is evolved.
There are various ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing this
conception, in both its alleged foundations and in its
educational application. (1) Perhaps the most direct mode of
attack consists in pointing out that the supposed original
faculties of observation, recollection, willing, thinking, etc.,
are purely mythological. There are no such ready-made powers
waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. There are, indeed,
a great number of original native tendencies, instinctive modes
of action, based on the original connections of neurones in the
central nervous system. There are impulsive tendencies of the
eyes to follow and fixate light; of the neck muscles to turn
toward light and sound; of the hands to reach and grasp; and turn
and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to make sounds; of
the mouth to spew out unpleasant substances; to gag and to curl
the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number. But these
tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off
from one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with
one another in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being
latent intellectual powers, requiring only exercise for their
perfecting, they are tendencies to respond in certain ways to
changes in the environment so as to bring about other changes.
Something in the throat makes one cough; the tendency is to eject
the obnoxious particle and thus modify the subsequent stimulus.
The hand touches a hot thing; it is impulsively, wholly
unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal alters the
stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with the
needs of the organism. It is by such specific changes of organic
activities in response to specific changes in the medium that
that control of the environment of which we have spoken (see
ante, p. 24) is effected. Now all of our first seeings and
hearings and touchings and smellings and tastings are of this
kind. In any legitimate sense of the words mental or
intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these qualities,
and no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any
intellectual properties of observation, judgment, or intentional
action (volition) upon them.

(2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive
activities is not a refinement and perfecting achieved by
"exercise" as one might strengthen a muscle by practice. It
consists rather (a) in selecting from the diffused responses
which are evoked at a given time those which are especially
adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to say,
among the reactions of the body in general

occur upon stimulation of the eye by light, all except those
which are specifically adapted to reaching, grasping, and
manipulating the object effectively are gradually eliminated--or
else no training occurs. As we have already noted, the primary
reactions, with a very few exceptions are too diffused and
general to be practically of much use in the case of the human
infant. Hence the identity of training with selective response.
(Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important is the specific
coordination of different factors of response which takes place.
There is not merely a selection of the hand reactions which
effect grasping, but of the particular visual stimuli which call
out just these reactions and no others, and an establishment of
connection between the two. But the coordinating does not stop
here. Characteristic temperature reactions may take place when
the object is grasped. These will also be brought in; later, the
temperature reaction may be connected directly with the optical
stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed--as a bright flame,
independent of close contact, may steer one away. Or the child
in handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a
sound issues. The ear response is then brought into the system
of response. If a certain sound (the conventional name) is made
by others and accompanies the activity, response of both ear and
the vocal apparatus connected with auditory stimulation will also
become an associated factor in the complex response. 2

(3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus
to each other (for, taking the sequence of activities into
account, the stimuli are adapted to reactions as well as
reactions to stimuli) the more rigid and the less generally
available is the training secured. In equivalent language, less
intellectual or educative quality attaches to the training. The
usual way of stating this fact is that the more specialized the
reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing and
perfecting it transferable to other modes of behavior. According
to the orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in studying
his spelling lesson acquires, besides ability to spell those
particular words, an increase of power of observation, attention,
and recollection which may be employed whenever these powers are
needed. As matter of fact, the more he confines himself to
noticing and fixating the forms of words, irrespective of
connection with other things (such as the meaning of the words,
the context in which they are habitually used, the derivation and
classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely is he to
acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the mere
noting of verbal visual forms. He may not even be increasing his
ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to
say nothing of ability to observe in general. He is merely
selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and
the motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. The scope
of coordination (to use our prior terminology) is extremely
limited. The connections which are employed in other
observations and recollections (or reproductions) are
deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon
forms of letters and words. Having been excluded, they cannot be
restored when needed. The ability secured to observe and to
recall verbal forms is not available for perceiving and recalling
other things. In the ordinary phraseology, it is not
transferable. But the wider the context--that is to say, the
more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated--the more the
ability acquired is available for the effective performance of
other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any
"transfer," but because the wide range of factors employed in the
specific act is equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a
flexible, instead of to a narrow and rigid, coordination.
(4) Going to the root of the matter, the fundamental fallacy of
the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its separation of
activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no such
thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there
is only the ability to see or hear or remember something. To
talk about training a power, mental or physical, in general,
apart from the subject matter involved in its exercise, is
nonsense. Exercise may react upon circulation, breathing, and
nutrition so as to develop vigor or strength, but this reservoir
is available for specific ends only by use in connection with the
material means which accomplish them. Vigor will enable a man to
play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he would if he
were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and club,
sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any
one of them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another
only so far as it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular
coordinations or as the same kind of coordination is involved in
all of them. Moreover, the difference between the training of
ability to spell which comes from taking visual forms in a narrow
context and one which takes them in connection with the
activities required to grasp meaning, such as context,
affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the difference
between exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to
"develop" certain muscles, and a game or sport. The former is
uniform and mechanical; it is rigidly specialized. The latter is
varied from moment to moment; no two acts are quite alike; novel
emergencies have to be met; the coordinations forming have to be
kept flexible and elastic. Consequently, the training is much
more "general"; that is to say, it covers a wider territory and
includes more factors. Exactly the same thing holds of special
and general education of the mind.

A monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill
in one special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it
bookkeeping or calculations in logarithms or experiments in
hydrocarbons. One may be an authority in a particular field and
yet of more than usually poor judgment in matters not closely
allied, unless the training in the special field has been of a
kind to ramify into the subject matter of the other fields.
(5) Consequently, such powers as observation, recollection,
judgment, esthetic taste, represent organized results of the
occupation of native active tendencies with certain subject
matters. A man does not observe closely and fully by pressing a
button for the observing faculty to get to work (in other words
by "willing" to observe); but if he has something to do which can
be accomplished successfully only through intensive and extensive
use of eye and hand, he naturally observes. Observation is an
outcome, a consequence, of the interaction of sense organ and
subject matter. It will vary, accordingly, with the subject
matter employed.

It is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development
of faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first
determined what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to
become expert in observing and recalling and for what purpose.
And it is only repeating in another form what has already been
said, to declare that the criterion here must be social. We want
the person to note and recall and judge those things which make
him an effective competent member of the group in which he is
associated with others. Otherwise we might as well set the pupil
to observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to
memorizing meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue--which
is about what we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of
formal discipline. If the observing habits of a botanist or
chemist or engineer are better habits than those which are thus
formed, it is because they deal with subject matter which is more
significant in life. In concluding this portion of the
discussion, we note that the distinction between special and
general education has nothing to do with the transferability of
function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer is
miraculous and impossible. But some activities are broad; they
involve a coordination of many factors. Their development
demands continuous alternation and readjustment. As conditions
change, certain factors are subordinated, and others which had
been of minor importance come to the front. There is constant
redistribution of the focus of the action, as is seen in the
illustration of a game as over against pulling a fixed weight by
a series of uniform motions. Thus there is practice in prompt
making of new combinations with the focus of activity shifted to
meet change in subject matter. Wherever an activity is broad in
scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of
sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to
change direction in its progressive development, general
education is bound to result. For this is what "general" means;
broad and flexible. In practice, education meets these
conditions, and hence is general, in the degree in which it takes
account of social relationships. A person may become expert in
technical philosophy, or philology, or mathematics or engineering
or financiering, and be inept and ill-advised in his action and
judgment outside of his specialty. If however his concern with
these technical subject matters has been connected with human
activities having social breadth, the range of active responses
called into play and flexibly integrated is much wider.
Isolation of subject matter from a social context is the chief
obstruction in current practice to securing a general training of
mind. Literature, art, religion, when thus dissociated, are just
as narrowing as the technical things which the professional
upholders of general education strenuously oppose.

Summary. The conception that the result of the educative process
is capacity for further education stands in contrast with some
other ideas which have profoundly influenced practice. The first
contrasting conception considered is that of preparing or getting
ready for some future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects
were pointed out which result from the fact that this aim diverts
attention of both teacher and taught from the only point to which
it may be fruitfully directed -- namely, taking advantage of the
needs and possibilities of the immediate present. Consequently
it defeats its own professed purpose. The notion that education
is an unfolding from within appears to have more likeness to the
conception of growth which has been set forth. But as worked out
in the theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves ignoring the
interaction of present organic tendencies with the present
environment, just as much as the notion of preparation. Some
implicit whole is regarded as given ready-made and the
significance of growth is merely transitory; it is not an end in
itself, but simply a means of making explicit what is already
implicit. Since that which is not explicit cannot be made
definite use of, something has to be found to represent it.
According to Froebel, the mystic symbolic value of certain
objects and acts (largely mathematical) stand for the Absolute
Whole which is in process of unfolding. According to Hegel,
existing institutions are its effective actual representatives.
Emphasis upon symbols and institutions tends to divert perception
from the direct growth of experience in richness of meaning.
Another influential but defective theory is that which conceives
that mind has, at birth, certain mental faculties or powers, such
as perceiving, remembering, willing, judging, generalizing,
attending, etc., and that education is the training of these
faculties through repeated exercise. This theory treats subject
matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its value
residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of the
general powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of
the alleged powers from one another and from the material upon
which they act. The outcome of the theory in practice was shown
to be an undue emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized
modes of skill at the expense of initiative, inventiveness, and
readaptability -- qualities which depend upon the broad and
consecutive interaction of specific activities with one another.
1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is so great, there are
so many paths of construction, that every stimulus brings about
some change in all of the organs of response. We are accustomed
however to ignore most of these modifications of the total
organic activity, concentrating upon that one which is most
specifically adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the moment.
2 This statement should be compared with what was said earlier
about the sequential ordering of responses (p. 25). It is
merely a more explicit statement of the way in which that
consecutive arrangement occurs.

Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive

1. Education as Formation. We now come to a type of theory
which denies the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique
role of subject matter in the development of mental and

moral disposition. according to it, education is neither a
process of unfolding from within nor is it a training of
faculties resident in mind itself. It is rather the formation of
mind by setting up certain associations or connections of content
by means of a subject matter presented from without. Education
proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a
building into the mind from without. That education is formative
of mind is not questioned; it is the conception already
propounded. But formation here has a technical meaning dependent
upon the idea of something operating from without. Herbart is
the best historical representative of this type of theory. He
denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties. The mind is
simply endowed with the power of producing various qualities in
reaction to the various realities which act upon it. These
qualitatively different reactions are called presentations
(Vorstellungen) . Every presentation once called into being
persists; it may be driven below the "threshold" of consciousness
by new and stronger presentations, produced by the reaction of
the soul to new material, but its activity continues by its own
inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness. What are
termed faculties -- attention, memory, thinking, perception, even
the sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and
complications, formed by the interaction of these submerged
presentations with one another and with new presentations.
Perception, for example, is the complication of presentations
which result from the rise of old presentations to greet and
combine with new ones; memory is the evoking of an old
presentation above the threshold of consciousness by getting
entangled with another presentation, etc. Pleasure is the result
of reinforcement among the independent activities of
presentations; pain of their pulling different ways, etc.

The concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the
various arrangements formed by the various presentations in their
different qualities. The "furniture" of the mind is the mind.
Mind is wholly a matter of "contents." The educational
implications of this doctrine are threefold.

(1) This or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects
which evoke this or that kind of reaction and which produce this
or that arrangement among the reactions called out. The
formation of mind is wholly a matter of the presentation of the
proper educational materials.

(2) Since the earlier presentations constitute the "apperceiving
organs" which control the assimilation of new presentations,
their character is all important. The effect of new
presentations is to reinforce groupings previously formed. The
business of the educator is, first, to select the proper material
in order to fix the nature of the original reactions, and,
secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations on
the basis of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions.
The control is from behind, from the past, instead of, as in the
unfolding conception, in the ultimate goal.

(3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid
down. Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the
central thing, but since knowing consists in the way in which
this interacts with the contents already submerged below
consciousness, the first thing is the step of "preparation," --
that is, calling into special activity and getting above the
floor of consciousness those older presentations which are to
assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation, follow the
processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the
application of the newly formed content to the performance of
some task. Everything must go through this course; consequently
there is a perfectly uniform method in instruction in all
subjects for all pupils of all ages.

Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of
the region of routine and accident. He brought it into the
sphere of conscious method; it became a conscious business with a
definite aim and procedure, instead of being a compound of casual
inspiration and subservience to tradition. Moreover, everything
in teaching and discipline could be specified, instead of our
having to be content with vague and more or less mystic
generalities about ultimate ideals and speculative spiritual
symbols. He abolished the notion of ready-made faculties, which
might be trained by exercise upon any sort of material, and made
attention to concrete subject matter, to the content,
all-important. Herbart undoubtedly has had a greater influence
in bringing to the front questions connected with the material of
study than any other educational philosopher. He stated problems
of method from the standpoint of their connection with subject
matter: method having to do with the manner and sequence of
presenting new subject matter to insure its proper interaction
with old.

The fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring
the existence in a living being of active and specific functions
which are developed in the redirection and combination which
occur as they are occupied with their environment. The theory
represents the Schoolmaster come to his own. This fact expresses
at once its strength and its weakness. The conception that the
mind consists of what has been taught, and that the importance of
what has been taught consists in its availability for further
teaching, reflects the pedagogue's view of life. The philosophy
is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in instructing pupils;
it is almost silent regarding his privilege of learning. It
emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment upon the
mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves a
personal sharing in common experiences. It exaggerates beyond
reason the possibilities of consciously formulated and used
methods, and underestimates the role of vital, unconscious,
attitudes. It insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly
over the operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It
takes, in brief, everything educational into account save its
essence, -- vital energy seeking opportunity for effective
exercise. All education forms character, mental and moral, but
formation consists in the selection and coordination of native
activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the
social environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a
formation of native activities, but it takes place through them.
It is a process of reconstruction, reorganization.

2. Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar
combination of the ideas of development and formation from
without has given rise to the recapitulation theory of education,
biological and cultural. The individual develops, but his proper
development consists in repeating in orderly stages the past
evolution of animal life and human history. The former
recapitulation occurs physiologically; the latter should be made
to occur by means of education. The alleged biological truth
that the individual in his growth from the simple embryo to
maturity repeats the history of the evolution of animal life in
the progress of forms from the simplest to the most complex (or
expressed technically, that ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis)
does not concern us, save as it is supposed to afford scientific
foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past. Cultural
recapitulation says, first, that children at a certain age are in
the mental and moral condition of savagery; their instincts are
vagrant and predatory because their ancestors at one time lived
such a life. Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper
subject matter of their education at this time is the
material -- especially the literary material of myths, folk-tale,
and song -- produced by humanity in the analogous stage. Then
the child passes on to something corresponding, say, to the
pastoral stage, and so on till at the time when he is ready to
take part in contemporary life, he arrives at the present epoch
of culture.

In this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a
small school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part)
, has had little currency. But the idea which underlies it is
that education is essentially retrospective; that it looks
primarily to the past and especially to the literary products of
the past, and that mind is adequately formed in the degree in
which it is patterned upon the spiritual heritage of the past.
This idea has had such immense influence upon higher instruction
especially, that it is worth examination in its extreme
formulation.

In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious.
Embyronic growth of the human infant preserves, without doubt,
some of the traits of lower forms of life. But in no respect is
it a strict traversing of past stages. If there were any strict
"law" of repetition, evolutionary development would clearly not
have taken place. Each new generation would simply have repeated
its predecessors' existence. Development, in short, has taken
place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in the prior
scheme of growth. And this suggests that the aim of education is
to facilitate such short-circuited growth. The great advantage
of immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to
emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown
past. The business of education is rather to liberate the young
from reviving and retraversing the past than to lead them to a
recapitulation of it. The social environment of the young is
constituted by the presence and action of the habits of thinking
and feeling of civilized men. To ignore the directive influence
of this present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate
the educational function. A biologist has said: "The history of
development in different animals . . . offers to us . . . a
series of ingenious, determined, varied but more or less
unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of
recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral method a more
direct method. " Surely it would be foolish if education did not
deliberately attempt to facilitate similar efforts in conscious
experience so that they become increasingly successful.

The two factors of truth in the conception may easily be
disentangled from association with the false context which
perverts them. On the biological side we have simply the fact
that any infant starts with precisely the assortment of impulsive
activities with which he does start, they being blind, and many
of them conflicting with one another, casual, sporadic, and
unadapted to their immediate environment. The other point is
that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of past
history so far as they are of help for the future. Since they
represent the results of prior experience, their value for future
experience may, of course, be indefinitely great. Literatures
produced in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and
use of them, a part of the present environment of individuals;
but there is an enormous difference between availing ourselves of
them as present resources and taking them as standards and
patterns in their retrospective character.

(1) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through
misuse of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity
means that past life has somehow predetermined the main traits of
an individual, and that they are so fixed that little serious
change can be introduced into them. Thus taken, the influence of
heredity is opposed to that of the environment, and the efficacy
of the latter belittled. But for educational purposes heredity
means neither more nor less than the original endowment of an
individual. Education must take the being as he is; that a
particular individual has just such and such an equipment of
native activities is a basic fact. That they were produced in
such and such a way, or that they are derived from one's
ancestry, is not especially important for the educator, however
it may be with the biologist, as compared with the fact that they
now exist. Suppose one had to advise or direct a person
regarding his inheritance of property. The fallacy of assuming
that the fact it is an inheritance, predetermines its future use,
is obvious. The advisor is concerned with making the best use of
what is there -- putting it at work under the most favorable
conditions. Obviously he cannot utilize what is not there;
neither can the educator. In this sense, heredity is a limit of
education. Recognition of this fact prevents the waste of energy
and the irritation that ensue from the too prevalent habit of
trying to make by instruction something out of an individual
which he is not naturally fitted to become. But the doctrine
does not determine what use shall be made of the capacities which
exist. And, except in the case of the imbecile, these original
capacities are much more varied and potential, even in the case
of the more stupid, than we as yet know properly how to utilize.
Consequently, while a careful study of the native aptitudes and
deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary necessity,
the subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment
which will adequately function whatever activities are present.
The relation of heredity and environment is well expressed in the
case of language. If a being had no vocal organs from which
issue articulate sounds, if he had no auditory or other sense-
receptors and no connections between the two sets of apparatus,
it would be a sheer waste of time to try to teach him to
converse. He is born short in that respect, and education must
accept the limitation. But if he has this native equipment, its
possession in no way guarantees that he will ever talk any
language or what language he will talk. The environment in which
his activities occur and by which they are carried into execution
settles these things. If he lived in a dumb unsocial environment
where men refused to talk to one another and used only that
minimum of gestures without which they could not get along, vocal
language would be as unachieved by him as if he had no vocal
organs. If the sounds which he makes occur in a medium of
persons speaking the Chinese language, the activities which make
like sounds will be selected and coordinated. This illustration
may be applied to the entire range of the educability of any
individual. It places the heritage from the past in its right
connection with the demands and opportunities of the present.

(2) The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is
found in the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or
more specifically in the particular literatures which were
produced in the culture epoch which is supposed to correspond
with the stage of development of those taught) affords another
instance of that divorce between the process and product of
growth which has been criticized. To keep the process alive, to
keep it alive in ways which make it easier to keep it alive in
the future, is the function of educational subject matter. But
an individual can live only in the present. The present is not
just something which comes after the past; much less something
produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind
it. The study of past products will not help us understand the
present, because the present is not due to the products, but to
the life of which they were the products. A knowledge of the
past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters
into the present, hut not otherwise. And the mistake of making
the records and remains of the past the main material of
education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and
past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the
present a more or less futile imitation of the past. Under such
circumstances, culture becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge
and an asylum. Men escape from the crudities of the present to
live in its imagined refinements, instead of using what the past
offers as an agency for ripening these crudities. The present,
in short, generates the problems which lead us to search the past
for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when
we search. The past is the past precisely because it does not
include what is characteristic in the present. The moving
present includes the past on condition that it uses the past to
direct its own movement. The past is a great resource for the
imagination; it adds a new dimension to life, but OD condition
that it be seen as the past of the present, and not as another
and disconnected world. The principle which makes little of the
present act of living and operation of growing, the only thing
always present, naturally looks to the past because the future
goal which it sets up is remote and empty. But having turned its
back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it laden
with the spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive
to the needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the
liveliest of motives for interest in the background of the
present, and will never have to hunt for a way back because it
will never have lost connection.

3. Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas
both of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the
formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the
cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the
conception that education is a constant reorganizing or
reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an immediate
end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that
end -- the direct transformation of the quality of experience.
Infancy, youth, adult life, -- all stand on the same educative
level in the sense that what is really learned at any and every
stage of experience constitutes the value of that experience, and
in the sense that it is the chief business of life at every point
to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of its own
perceptible meaning.

We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the
meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the
course of subsequent experience. (1) The increment of meaning
corresponds to the increased perception of the connections and
continuities of the activities in which we are engaged. The
activity begins in an impulsive form; that is, it is blind. It
does not know what it is about; that is to say, what are its
interactions with other activities. An activity which brings
education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of the
connections which had been imperceptible. To recur to our simple
example, a child who reaches for a bright light gets burned.
Henceforth he knows that a certain act of touching in connection
with a certain act of vision (and vice-versa) means heat and
pain; or, a certain light means a source of heat. The acts by
which a scientific man in his laboratory learns more about flame
differ no whit in principle. By doing certain things, he makes
perceptible certain connections of heat with other things, which
had been previously ignored. Thus his acts in relation to these
things get more meaning; he knows better what he is doing or "is
about" when he has to do with them; he can intend consequences
instead of just letting them happen -- all synonymous ways of
saying the same thing. At the same stroke, the flame has gained
in meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation, about
light and temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its
intellectual content.

(2) The other side of an educative experience is an added power
of subsequent direction or control. To say that one knows what
he is about, or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of
course, that he can better anticipate what is going to happen;
that he can, therefore, get ready or prepare in advance so as to
secure beneficial consequences and avert undesirable ones. A
genuinely educative experience, then, one in which instruction is
conveyed and ability increased, is contradistinguished from a
routine activity on one hand, and a capricious activity on the
other. (a) In the latter one "does not care what happens"; one
just lets himself go and avoids connecting the consequences of
one's act (the evidences of its connections with other things)
with the act. It is customary to frown upon such aimless random
activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or
lawlessness. But there is a tendency to seek the cause of such
aimless activities in the youth's own disposition, isolated from
everything else. But in fact such activity is explosive, and due
to maladjustment with surroundings. Individuals act capriciously
whenever they act under external dictation, or from being told,
without having a purpose of their own or perceiving the bearing
of the deed upon other acts. One may learn by doing something
which he does not understand; even in the most intelligent
action, we do much which we do not mean, because the largest
portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend are
not perceived or anticipated. But we learn only because after
the act is performed we note results which we had not noted
before. But much work in school consists in setting up rules by
which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils
have acted, they are not led to see the connection between the
result -- say the answer -- and the method pursued. So far as
they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of
miracle. Such action is essentially capricious, and leads to
capricious habits. (b) Routine action, action which is
automatic, may increase skill to do a particular thing. In so
far, it might be said to have an educative effect. But it does
not lead to new perceptions of bearings and connections; it
limits rather than widens the meaning-horizon. And since the
environment changes and our way of acting has to be modified in
order successfully to keep a balanced connection with things, an
isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at some
critical moment. The vaunted "skill" turns out gross ineptitude.

The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have
been criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it
identifies the end (the result) and the process. This is
verbally self-contradictory, but only verbally. It means that
experience as an active process occupies time and that its later
period completes its earlier portion; it brings to light
connections involved, but hitherto unperceived. The later
outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the
experience as a whole establishes a bent or disposition toward
the things possessing this meaning. Every such continuous
experience or activity is educative, and all education resides in
having such experiences.

It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample
attention later) that the reconstruction of experience may be
social as well as personal. For purposes of simplification we
have spoken in the earlier chapters somewhat as if the education
of the immature which fills them with the spirit of the social
group to which they belong, were a sort of catching up of the
child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult group. In
static societies, societies which make the maintenance of
established custom their measure of value, this conception
applies in the main. But not in progressive communities. They
endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of
reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and
thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own.
Men have long had some intimation of the extent to which
education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social
evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce
these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be
made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we
are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of
education as a constructive agency of improving society, from
realizing that it represents not only a development of children
and youth but also of the future society of which they will be
the constituents.

Summary. Education may be conceived either retrospectively or
prospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as process of
accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the
past for a resource in a developing future. The former finds its
standards and patterns in what has gone before. The mind may be
regarded as a group of contents resulting from having certain
things presented. In this case, the earlier presentations
constitute the material to which the later are to be assimilated.
Emphasis upon the value of the early experiences of immature
beings is most important, especially because of the tendency to
regard them as of little account. But these experiences do not
consist of externally presented material, but of interaction of
native activities with the environment which progressively
modifies both the activities and the environment. The defect of
the Herbartian theory of formation through presentations
consists in slighting this constant interaction and change.
The same principle of criticism applies to theories which find
the primary subject matter of study in the cultural products --
especially the literary products -- of man's history. Isolated
from their connection with the present environment in which
individuals have to act, they become a kind of rival and
distracting environment. Their value lies in their use to
increase the meaning of the things with which we have actively to
do at the present time. The idea of education advanced in these
chapters is formally summed up in the idea of continuous
reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off from
education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as
external formation, and as recapitulation of the past.

Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education

For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been
concerned with education as it may exist in any social group. We
have now to make explicit the differences in the spirit,
material, and method of education as it operates in different
types of community life. To say that education is a social
function, securing direction and development in the immature
through their participation in the life of the group to which
they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with
the quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is
it true that a society which not only changes but-which has the
ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different
standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at
the perpetuation of its own customs. To make the general ideas
set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is,
therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature
of present social life.

1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word,
but many things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and
for all kinds of purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude
of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite
different. It often seems as if they had nothing in common
except that they are modes of associated life. Within every
larger social organization there are numerous minor groups: not
only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific,
religious, associations. There are political parties with
differing aims, social sets, cliques, gangs, corporations,
partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties of blood, and
so on in endless variety. In many modern states and in some
ancient, there is great diversity of populations, of varying
languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities,
for example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies,
rather than an inclusive and permeating community of action and
thought. (See ante, p. 20.)

The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both
a eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a
meaning de jure and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy,
the former connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is
conceived as one by its very nature. The qualities which
accompany this unity, praiseworthy community of purpose and
welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of sympathy, are
emphasized. But when we look at the facts which the term denotes
instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation,
we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad.
Men banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business
aggregations that prey upon the public while serving it,
political machines held together by the interest of plunder, are
included. If it is said that such organizations are not
societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the
notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of
society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having no
reference to facts; and in part, that each of these
organizations, no matter how opposed to the interests of other
groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of "Society"
which hold it together. There is honor among thieves, and a band
of robbers has a common interest as respects its members. Gangs
are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense
loyalty to their own codes. Family life may be marked by
exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and
yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education
given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality
and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims
of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the
worth of any given mode of social life. In seeking this measure,
we have to avoid two extremes. We cannot set up, out of our
heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We must base our
conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have
any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we
have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which
are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable
traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and
employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest
improvement. Now in any social group whatever, even in a gang of
thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a
certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with
other groups. From these two traits we derive our standard. How
numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously
shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of
association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal
band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members
together are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest
in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate the
group from other groups with respect to give and take of the
values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is
partial and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind
of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there
are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all
participate and that the progress of one member has worth for the
experience of other members -- it is readily communicable -- and
that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately
into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all
the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar groups,
and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in
return receives support from it. In short, there are many
interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are
varied and free points of contact with other modes of
association.

I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a
despotically governed state. It is not true there is no common
interest in such an organization between governed and governors.
The authorities in command must make some appeal to the native
activities of the subjects, must call some of their powers into
play. Talleyrand said that a government could do everything with
bayonets except sit on them. This cynical declaration is at
least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of
coercive force. It may be said, however, that the activities
appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading -- that such a
government calls into functioning activity simply capacity for
fear. In a way, this statement is true. But it overlooks the
fact that fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience.
Caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future
events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are
as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is
cowardice and abject submission. The real difficulty is that the
appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread and hope of
specific tangible reward -- say comfort and ease -- many other
capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but
in such a way as to pervert them. Instead of operating on their
own account they are reduced to mere servants of attaining
pleasure and avoiding pain.

This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of
common interests; there is no free play back and forth among the
members of the social group. Stimulation and response are
exceedingly one-sided. In order to have a large number of values
in common, all the members of the group must have an equable
opportunity to receive and to take from others. There must be a
large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise,
the influences which educate some into masters, educate others
into slaves. And the experience of each party loses in meaning,
when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience is
arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject-class
prevents social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the
superior class are less material and less perceptible, but
equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned
back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and
artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge
overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.

Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a
variety of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation
unbalanced. Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty
means challenge to thought. The more activity is restricted to a
few definite lines -- as it is when there are rigid class lines
preventing adequate interplay of experiences -- the more action
tends to become routine on the part of the class at a
disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part
of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato
defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes
which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where
there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men
are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose
service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.
Much is said about scientific management of work. It is a narrow
view which restricts the science which secures efficiency of
operation to movements of the muscles. The chief opportunity for
science is the discovery of the relations of a man to his
work--including his relations to others who take part -- which
will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is doing.
Efficiency in production often demands division of labor. But it
is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the
technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in
what they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation
furnished by such perceptions. The tendency to reduce such
things as efficiency of activity and scientific management to
purely technical externals is evidence of the one-sided
stimulation of thought given to those in control of industry --
those who supply its aims. Because of their lack of all-round
and well-balanced social interest, there is not sufficient
stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in
industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very
acute and intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be
developed, but the failure to take into account the significant
social factors means none the less an absence of mind, and a
corresponding distortion of emotional life. II. This
illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations
lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point.
The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its
antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found
wherever one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out
from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing
purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of
reorganization and progress through wider relationships. It
marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which
seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with
a larger life; schools when separated from the interest of home
and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and
unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for
rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and
selfish ideals within the group. That savage tribes regard
aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. It springs
from the fact that they have identified their experience with
rigid adherence to their past customs. On such a basis it is
wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact
might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion
reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding
mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the
physical environment. But the principle applies even more
significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it -- the
sphere of social contacts. Every expansive era in the history of
mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have
tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes
previously hemmed off from one another. Even the alleged
benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse
between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one
another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic
and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down
external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and
more perceptible connection with one another. It remains for the
most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance
of this physical annihilation of space.

2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both
point to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous
and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater
reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in
social control. The second means not only freer interaction
between social groups (once isolated so far as intention could
keep up a separation) but change in social habit -- its
continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations
produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are
precisely what characterize the democratically constituted
society.

Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of
a form of social life in which interests are mutually
interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an
important consideration, makes a democratic community more
interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate
and systematic education. The devotion of democracy to education
is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a
government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful
unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated.
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external
authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and
interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a
deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of
government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of
conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the
number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each
has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider
the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is
equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race,
and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full
import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied
points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which
an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on
variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers
which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are
partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness
shuts out many interests.

The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation
of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize
a democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and
conscious effort. On the contrary, they were caused by the
development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel,
migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the command
of science over natural energy. But after greater
individualization on one hand, and a broader community of
interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of
deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously a
society to which stratification into separate classes would be
fatal, must see to it that intellectual opportunities are
accessible to all on equable and easy terms. A society marked
off into classes need he specially attentive only to the
education of its ruling elements. A society which is mobile,
which is full of channels for the distribution of a change
occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated
to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be
overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose
significance or connections they do not perceive. The result
will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves
the results of the blind and externally directed activities of
others.

3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters
will be devoted to making explicit the implications of the
democratic ideas in education. In the remaining portions of this
chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which have
been evolved in three epochs when the social import of education
was especially conspicuous. The first one to be considered is
that of Plato. No one could better express than did he the fact
that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing
that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be
useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he
belongs); and that it is the business of education to discover
these aptitudes and progressively to train them for social use.
Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first
consciously taught the world. But conditions which he could not
intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in their
application. He never got any conception of the indefinite
plurality of activities which may characterize an individual and
a social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited
number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements.
Plato's starting point is that the organization of society
depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we
do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and
caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no
criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are
which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be
ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and
distribution of activities -- what he called justice -- as a
trait of both individual and social organization. But how is the
knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved? In
dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly insuperable
obstacle that such knowledge is not possible save in a just and
harmonious social order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted
and misled by false valuations and false perspectives. A
disorganized and factional society sets up a number of different
models and standards. Under such conditions it is impossible for
the individual to attain consistency of mind. Only a complete
whole is fully self-consistent. A society which rests upon the
supremacy of some factor over another irrespective of its
rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads thought
astray. It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over
others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and
distorted. Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns
furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just
state will these be such as to give the right education; and only
those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize
the end, and ordering principle of things. We seem to be caught
in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out. A few
men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom -- or truth -- may by study
learn at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence.
If a powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns,
then its regulations could be preserved. An education could be
given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were
good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in
life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part, and
never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
maintained.

It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic
thought a more adequate recognition on one hand of the
educational significance of social arrangements and, on the
other, of the dependence of those arrangements upon the means
used to educate the young. It would be impossible to find a
deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and
developing personal capacities, and training them so that they
would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society in
which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato
could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he
clearly saw.

While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual
in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any
conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the
process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of
individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into
a very small number of classes at that. Consequently the testing
and sifting function of education only shows to which one of
three classes an individual belongs. There being no recognition
that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be no
recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable.
There were only three types of faculties or powers in the
individual's constitution. Hence education would soon reach a
static limit in each class, for only diversity makes change and
progress.

In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are
assigned to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and
supplies human wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over
and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively
courageous disposition. They become the citizen-subjects of the
state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace.
But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a
capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are
capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time the
legislators of the state -- for laws are the universals which
control the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that
in intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole.
But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of
every individual, his incommensurability with others, and
consequently not recognizing that a society might change and yet
be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net
effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality. We
cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is happy and
society well organized when each individual engages in those
activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his
conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover
this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective
use. But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the
superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their
original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has
taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and
variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in
the degree in which society has become democratic, social
organization means utilization of the specific and variable
qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.
Although his educational philosophy was revolutionary, it was
none the less in bondage to static ideals. He thought that
change or alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true
reality was unchangeable. Hence while he would radically change
the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state
in which change would subsequently have no place. The final end
of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not
even minor details are to be altered. Though they might not be
inherently important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds
of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and
anarchic. The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in
the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in
education to bring about a better society which should then
improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education
could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and
after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation.
For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some
happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to
coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.

4. The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In
the eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very
different circle of ideas. "Nature" still means something
antithetical to existing social organization; Plato exercised a
great influence upon Rousseau. But the voice of nature now
speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for the need of
free development of individuality in all its variety. Education
in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of
instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original
endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even
as antisocial. Social arrangements were thought of as mere
external expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might
secure a greater amount of private happiness for themselves.
Nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate idea of
the true significance of the movement. In reality its chief
interest was in progress and in social progress. The seeming
antisocial philosophy

was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and
freer society -- toward cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was
humanity. In membership in humanity, as distinct from a state,
man's capacities would be liberated; while in existing political
organizations his powers were hampered and distorted to meet the
requirements and selfish interests of the rulers of the state.
The doctrine of extreme individualism was but the counterpart,
the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite perfectibility of man
and of a social organization having a scope as wide as humanity.
The emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a
comprehensive and progressive society.

The heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of
the social estate in which they found themselves. They
attributed these evils to the limitations imposed upon the free
powers of man. Such limitation was both distorting and
corrupting. Their impassioned devotion to emancipation of life
from external restrictions which operated to the exclusive
advantage of the class to whom a past feudal system consigned
power, found intellectual formulation in a worship of nature. To
give "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial, corrupt,
and inequitable social order by a new and better kingdom of
humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a
working power was strengthened by the advances of natural
science. Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial restraints
of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of
law. The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of
natural law, was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force
balanced with every other. Natural law would accomplish the same
result in human relations, if men would only get rid of the
artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.

Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step
in insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen that
economic and political limitations were ultimately dependent upon
limitations of thought and feeling. The first step in freeing
men from external chains was to emancipate them from the internal
chains of false beliefs and ideals. What was called social life,
existing institutions, were too false and corrupt to be intrusted
with this work. How could it be expected to undertake it when
the undertaking meant its own destruction? "Nature" must then be
the power to which the enterprise was to be left. Even the
extreme sensationalistic theory of knowledge which was current
derived itself from this conception. To insist that mind is
originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the
possibilities of education. If the mind was a wax tablet to be
written upon by objects, there were no limits to the possibility
of education by means of the natural environment. And since the
natural world of objects is a scene of harmonious "truth," this
education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.

5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first
enthusiasm for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the
constructive side became obvious. Merely to leave everything to
nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea of education;
it was to trust to the accidents of circumstance. Not only was
some method required but also some positive organ, some
administrative agency for carrying on the process of instruction.
The "complete and harmonious development of all powers," having
as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive
humanity, required definite organization for its realization.
Private individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel;
they could not execute the work. A Pestalozzi could try
experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined persons having
wealth and power to follow his example. But even Pestalozzi saw
that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required
the support of the state. The realization of the new education
destined to produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon
the activities of existing states. The movement for the
democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly
conducted and administered schools.

So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified
the movement for a state-supported education with the
nationalistic movement in political life -- a fact of
incalculable significance for subsequent movements. Under the
influence of German thought in particular, education became a
civic function and the civic function was identified with the
realization of the ideal of the national state. The "state" was
substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to
nationalism. To form the citizen, not the "man," became the aim
of education. 1 The historic situation to which reference is
made is the after-effects of the Napoleonic conquests, especially
in Germany. The German states felt (and subsequent events
demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that systematic
attention to education was the best means of recovering and
maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they
were weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian
statesmen they made this condition a stimulus to the development
of an extensive and thoroughly grounded system of public
education.

This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in
theory. The individualistic theory receded into the background.
The state furnished not only the instrumentalities of public
education but also its goal. When the actual practice was such
that the school system, from the elementary grades through the
university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen and soldier
and the future state official and administrator and furnished the
means for military, industrial, and political defense and
expansion, it was impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim
of social efficiency. And with the immense importance attached
to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and
more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to
interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan
humanitarianism. Since the maintenance of a particular national
sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior
interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles
for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was
understood to imply a like subordination. The educational
process was taken to be one of disciplinary training rather than
of personal development. Since, however, the ideal of culture as
complete development of personality persisted, educational
philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. The
reconciliation took the form of the conception of the "organic"
character of the state. The individual in his isolation is
nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and
meaning of organized institutions does he attain true
personality. What appears to be his subordination to political
authority and the demand for sacrifice of himself to the commands
of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective
reason manifested in the state -- the only way in which he can
become truly rational. The notion of development which we have
seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the
Hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine
the two ideas of complete realization of personality and
thoroughgoing "disciplinary" subordination to existing
institutions. The extent of the transformation of educational
philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation occupied
by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence, may
be gathered from Kant, who well expresses the earlier
individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics,
consisting of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth
century, he defines education as the process by which man becomes
man. Mankind begins its history submerged in nature -- not as
Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only
instinct and appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which
education is to develop and perfect. The peculiarity of truly
human life is that man has to create himself by his own voluntary
efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational, and free
being. This creative effort is carried on by the educational
activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon
men consciously striving to educate their successors not for the
existing state of affairs but so as to make possible a future
better humanity. But there is the great difficulty. Each
generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in
the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of
education: the promotion of the best possible realization of
humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that
they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of
their own purposes.

Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve?
We must depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their
private capacity. "All culture begins with private men and
spreads outward from them. Simply through the efforts of persons
of enlarged inclinations, who are capable of grasping the ideal
of a future better condition, is the gradual approximation of
human nature to its end possible. Rulers are simply interested
in such training as will make their subjects better tools for
their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of privately
conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. For the rulers'
interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is
best for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the
schools, wish to draw their plans. We have in this view an
express statement of the points characteristic of the eighteenth
century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full development of
private personality is identified with the aims of humanity as a
whole and with the idea of progress. In addition we have an
explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and
state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas.
But in less than two decades after this time, Kant's philosophic
successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief
function of the state is educational; that in particular the
regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education
carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being,
enslaved to his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits
voluntarily to the educative discipline of state institutions and
laws. In this spirit, Germany was the first country to undertake
a public, universal, and compulsory system of education extending
from the primary school through the university, and to submit to
jealous state regulation and supervision all private educational
enterprises. Two results should stand out from this brief
historical survey. The first is that such terms as the
individual and the social conceptions of education are quite
meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato
had the ideal of an education which should equate individual
realization and social coherency and stability. His situation
forced his ideal into the notion of a society organized in
stratified classes, losing the individual in the class. The
eighteenth century educational philosophy was highly
individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a noble
and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include
humanity, and providing for the indefinite perfectibility of
mankind. The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early
nineteenth century endeavored again to equate the ideals of a
free and complete development of cultured personality with social
discipline and political subordination. It made the national
state an intermediary between the realization of private
personality on one side and of humanity on the other.
Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating
principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of
"harmonious development of all the powers of personality" or in
the more recent terminology of "social efficiency." All this
reinforces the statement which opens this chapter: The conception
of education as a social process and function has no definite
meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.
These considerations pave the way for our second conclusion. One
of the fundamental problems of education in and for a democratic
society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider
social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian"
conception suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite
organs of execution and agencies of administration. In Europe,
in the Continental states particularly, the new idea of the
importance of education for human welfare and progress was
captured by national interests and harnessed to do a work whose
social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. The social aim
of education and its national aim were identified, and the result
was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.

This confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human
intercourse. On the one hand, science, commerce, and art
transcend national boundaries. They are largely international in
quality and method. They involve interdependencies and
cooperation among the peoples inhabiting different countries. At
the same time, the idea of national sovereignty has never been as
accentuated in politics as it is at the present time. Each
nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient war
with its neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme judge of
its own interests, and it is assumed as matter of course that
each has interests which are exclusively its own. To question
this is to question the very idea of national sovereignty which
is assumed to be basic to political practice and political
science. This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the
wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social life and
the narrower sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile
pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer
conception of the meaning of "social" as a function and test of
education than has yet been attained. Is it possible for an
educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet
the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted,
constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to face
the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split
society into classes some of which are made merely tools for the
higher culture of others. Externally, the question is concerned
with the reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with
superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends,
irrespective of national political boundaries. Neither phase of
the problem can be worked out by merely negative means. It is
not enough to see to it that education is not actively used as an
instrument to make easier the exploitation of one class by
another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and
efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the
effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of
the nation equality of equipment for their future careers.
Accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate
administrative provision of school facilities, and such
supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take
advantage of them, but also such modification of traditional
ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and traditional
methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth
under educational influences until they are equipped to be
masters of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may
seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education
is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and
more dominates our public system of education. The same
principle has application on the side of the considerations which
concern the relations of one nation to another. It is not enough
to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything which would
stimulate international jealousy and animosity. The emphasis
must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative
human pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations.
The secondary and provisional character of national sovereignty
in respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association
and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be
instilled as a working disposition of mind. If these
applications seem to be remote from a consideration of the
philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning of
the idea of education previously developed has not been
adequately grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very
idea of education as a freeing of individual capacity in a
progressive growth directed to social aims. Otherwise a
democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently
applied.

Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many
kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and
construction implies a particular social ideal. The two points
selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life
are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by
all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it
interacts with other groups. An undesirable society, in other
words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to
free intercourse and communication of experience. A society
which makes provision for participation in its good of all its
members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of
its institutions through interaction of the different forms of
associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must
have a type of education which gives individuals a personal
interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of
mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.
Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered
from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal
formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised
in its working out by making a class rather than an individual
the social unit. The so-called individualism of the eighteenth-
century enlightenment was found to involve the notion of a
society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual
was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the
development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back
upon Nature. The institutional idealistic philosophies of the
nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the national
state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the
social aim to those who were members of the same political unit,
and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual
to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain in
Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed
the existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed
neither the citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he
preferred to try for the latter rather than for the former. But
there are many sayings of his which point to the formation of the
citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate that his own
endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was simply the best makeshift
the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch.

Chapter Eight: Aims in Education

1. The Nature of an Aim.

The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
education in a democratic community. For it assumed that the aim
of education is to enable individuals to continue their education
-- or that the object and reward of learning is continued
capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the
members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is
mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the
reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide
stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And
this means a democratic society. In our search for aims in
education, we are not concerned, therefore, with finding an end
outside of the educative process to which education is
subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are rather
concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within
the process in which they operate and when they are set up from
without. And the latter state of affairs must obtain when social
relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that case, some
portions of the whole social group will find their aims
determined by an external dictation; their aims will not arise
from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal
aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than
truly their own.

Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it
falls within an activity, instead of being furnished from
without. We approach the definition by a contrast of mere
results with ends. Any exhibition of energy has results. The
wind blows about the sands of the desert; the position of the
grains is changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not an end.
For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills
what went before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One
state of affairs is just as good as any other. Consequently
there is no basis upon which to select an earlier state of
affairs as a beginning, a later as an end, and to consider what
intervenes as a process of transformation and realization.

Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the
changes in the sands when the wind blows them about. The results
of the bees' actions may be called ends not because they are
designed or consciously intended, but because they are true
terminations or completions of what has preceded. When the bees
gather pollen and make wax and build cells, each step prepares
the way for the next. When cells are built, the queen lays eggs
in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees brood them
and keep them at a temperature required to hatch them. When they
are hatched, bees feed the young till they can take care of
themselves. Now we are so familiar with such facts, that we are
apt to dismiss them on the ground that life and instinct are a
kind of miraculous thing anyway. Thus we fail to note what the
essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the
significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the
way each prior event leads into its successor while the successor
takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage,
until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and
finishes off the process. Since aims relate always to results,
the first thing to look to when it is a question of aims, is
whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity. Or is
it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and
then another? To talk about an educational aim when approximately
each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the only
order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the
assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is
to talk nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to permit
capricious or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous
self- expression. An aim implies an orderly and ordered
activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive
completing of a process. Given an activity having a time span
and cumulative growth within the time succession, an aim means
foresight in advance of the end or possible termination. If bees
anticipated the consequences of their activity, if they perceived
their end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary
element in an aim. Hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of
education--or any other undertaking--where conditions do not
permit of foresight of results, and do not stimulate a person to
look ahead to see what the outcome of a given activity is to be.
In the next place the aim as a foreseen end gives direction to
the activity; it is not an idle view of a mere spectator, but
influences the steps taken to reach the end. The foresight
functions in three ways. In the first place, it involves careful
observation of the given conditions to see what are the means
available for reaching the end, and to discover the hindrances in
the way. In the second place, it suggests the proper order or
sequence in the use of means. It facilitates an economical
selection and arrangement. In the third place, it makes choice
of alternatives possible. If we can predict the outcome of
acting this way or that, we can then compare the value of the two
courses of action; we can pass judgment upon their relative
desirability. If we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes
and that they are likely to carry disease, we can, disliking that
anticipated result, take steps to avert it. Since we do not
anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons
concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which
produces the result. We intervene to bring about this result or
that.

Of course these three points are closely connected with one
another. We can definitely foresee results only as we make
careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance of the
outcome supplies the motive for observations. The more adequate
our observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and
obstructions that presents itself, and the more numerous are the
alternatives between which choice may be made. In turn, the more
numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or
alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity
possess, and the more flexibly controllable is it. Where only a
single outcome has been thought of, the mind has nothing else to
think of; the meaning attaching to the act is limited. One only
steams ahead toward the mark. Sometimes such a narrow course may
be effective. But if unexpected difficulties offer themselves,
one has not as many resources at command as if he had chosen the
same line of action after a broader survey of the possibilities
of the field. He cannot make needed readjustments readily.

The net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with
acting intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have
a basis upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects
and our own capacities. To do these things means to have a mind
-- for mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity
controlled by perception of facts and their relationships to one
another. To have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future
possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment; it is
to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and
the obstructions in the way, -- or, if it is really a mind to do
the thing and not a vague aspiration -- it is to have a plan
which takes account of resources and difficulties. Mind is
capacity to refer present conditions to future results, and
future consequences to present conditions. And these traits are
just what is meant by having an aim or a purpose. A man is
stupid or blind or unintelligent -- lacking in mind -- just in
the degree in which in any activity he does not know what he is
about, namely, the probable consequences of his acts. A man is
imperfectly intelligent when he contents himself with looser
guesses about the outcome than is needful, just taking a chance
with his luck, or when he forms plans apart from study of the
actual conditions, including his own capacities. Such relative
absence of mind means to make our feelings the measure of what is
to happen. To be intelligent we must "stop, look, listen" in
making the plan of an activity.

To identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough
to show its value -- its function in experience. We are only too
given to making an entity out of the abstract noun
"consciousness. " We forget that it comes from the adjective
"conscious." To be conscious is to be aware of what we are about;
conscious signifies the deliberate, observant, planning traits of
activity. Consciousness is nothing which we have which gazes
idly on the scene around one or which has impressions made upon
it by physical things; it is a name for the purposeful quality of
an activity, for the fact that it is directed by an aim. Put the
other way about, to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like
an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to
perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent.

2. The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our
discussion to a consideration of the criteria involved in a
correct establishing of aims. (1) The aim set up must be an
outgrowth of existing conditions. It must be based upon a
consideration of what is already going on; upon the resources and
difficulties of the situation. Theories about the proper end of
our activities -- educational and moral theories -- often violate
this principle. They assume ends lying outside our activities;
ends foreign to the concrete makeup of the situation; ends which
issue from some outside source. Then the problem is to bring our
activities to bear upon the realization of these externally
supplied ends. They are something for which we ought to act. In
any case such "aims" limit intelligence; they are not the
expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice of the
better among alternative possibilities. They limit intelligence
because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority
external to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a
mechanical choice of means.

(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to
the attempt to realize them. This impression must now be
qualified. The aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative
sketch. The act of striving to realize it tests its worth. If
it suffices to direct activity successfully, nothing more is
required, since its whole function is to set a mark in advance;
and at times a mere hint may suffice. But usually -- at least in
complicated situations -- acting upon it brings to light
conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision of
the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. An
aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to
meet circumstances. An end established externally to the process
of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from
without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the
concrete conditions of the situation. What happens in the course
of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it. Such an end
can only be insisted upon. The failure that results from its
lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of
conditions, not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under
the circumstances. The value of a legitimate aim, on the
contrary, lies in the fact that we can use it to change
conditions. It is a method for dealing with conditions so as to
effect desirable alterations in them. A farmer who should
passively accept things just as he finds them would make as great
a mistake as he who framed his plans in complete disregard of
what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the evils of an
abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very
inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard
snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the
present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative
plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet
modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is
experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in
action.

(3) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The
term end in view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the
termination or conclusion of some process. The only way in which
we can define an activity is by putting before ourselves the
objects in which it terminates -- as one's aim in shooting is the
target. But we must remember that the object is only a mark or
sign by which the mind specifies the activity one desires to
carry out. Strictly speaking, not the target but hitting the
target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the target,
but also by the sight on the gun. The different objects which
are thought of are means of directing the activity. Thus one
aims at, say, a rabbit; what he wants is to shoot straight: a
certain kind of activity. Or, if it is the rabbit he wants, it
is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor in
activity; he wants to eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence
of his marksmanship -- he wants to do something with it. The
doing with the thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end.
The object is but a phase of the active end, -- continuing the
activity successfully. This is what is meant by the phrase, used
above, "freeing activity."

In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity
may go on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed
from without the activity. It is always conceived of as fixed;
it is something to be attained and possessed. When one has such
a notion, activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else;
it is not significant or important on its own account. As
compared with the end it is but a necessary evil; something which
must be gone through before one can reach the object which is
alone worth while. In other words, the external idea of the aim
leads to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows
up within an activity as plan for its direction is always both
ends and means, the distinction being only one of convenience.
Every means is a temporary end until we have attained it. Every
end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is
achieved. We call it end when it marks off the future direction
of the activity in which we are engaged; means when it marks off
the present direction. Every divorce of end from means
diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and
tends to reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if
he could. A farmer has to use plants and animals to carry on his
farming activities. It certainly makes a great difference to his
life whether he is fond of them, or whether he regards them
merely as means which he has to employ to get something else in
which alone he is interested. In the former case, his entire
course of activity is significant; each phase of it has its own
value. He has the experience of realizing his end at every
stage; the postponed aim, or end in view, being merely a sight
ahead by which to keep his activity going fully and freely. For
if he does not look ahead, he is more likely to find himself
blocked. The aim is as definitely a means of action as is any
other portion of an activity.

3. Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about
educational aims. They are just like aims in any directed
occupation. The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to
do, certain resources with which to do, and certain obstacles
with which to contend. The conditions with which the farmer
deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own
structure and operation independently of any purpose of his.
Seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight
comes, the seasons change. His aim is simply to utilize these
various conditions; to make his activities and their energies
work together, instead of against one another. It would be
absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any
reference to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristic of
plant growth, etc. His purpose is simply a foresight of the
consequences of his energies connected with those of the things
about him, a foresight used to direct his movements from day to
day. Foresight of possible consequences leads to more careful
and extensive observation of the nature and performances of the
things he had to do with, and to laying out a plan -- that is, of
a certain order in the acts to be performed.

It is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It
is as absurd for the latter to set up his "own" aims as the
proper objects of the growth of the children as it would be for
the farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of
conditions. Aims mean acceptance of responsibility for the
observations, anticipations, and arrangements required in
carrying on a function -- whether farming or educating. Any aim
is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and
planning in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour
to hour; if it gets in the way of the individual's own common
sense (as it will surely do if imposed from without or accepted
on authority) it does harm.

And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no
aims. Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not
an abstract idea like education. And consequently their purposes
are indefinitely varied, differing with different children,
changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on
the part of the one who teaches. Even the most valid aims which
can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than good unless
one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to
educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to
choose in liberating and directing the energies of the concrete
situations in which they find themselves. As a recent writer has
said: "To lead this boy to read Scott's novels instead of old
Sleuth's stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root out the
habit of bullying from John's make-up; to prepare this class to
study medicine, -- these are samples of the millions of aims we
have actually before us in the concrete work of education."
Bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state
some of the characteristics found in all good educational aims.
(1) An educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic
activities and needs (including original instincts and acquired
habits) of the given individual to be educated. The tendency of
such an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing
powers, and find the aim in some remote accomplishment or
responsibility. In general, there is a disposition to take
considerations which are dear to the hearts of adults and set
them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of those educated.
There is also an inclination to propound aims which are so
uniform as to neglect the specific powers and requirements of an
individual, forgetting that all learning is something which
happens to an individual at a given time and place. The larger
range of perception of the adult is of great value in observing
the abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they
may amount to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit
what certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did
not have the adult achievements we should be without assurance as
to the significance of the drawing, reproducing, modeling,
coloring activities of childhood. So if it were not for adult
language, we should not be able to see the import of the babbling
impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use adult
accomplishments as a context in which to place and survey the
doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another to set them up
as a fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those
educated.

(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of
cooperating with the activities of those undergoing instruction.
It must suggest the kind of environment needed to liberate and to
organize their capacities. Unless it lends itself to the
construction of specific procedures, and unless these procedures
test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter is worthless.
Instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it prevents the
use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing up the
situation. It operates to exclude recognition of everything
except what squares up with the fixed end in view. Every rigid
aim just because it is rigidly given seems to render it
unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete conditions.
Since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting details
which do not count?

The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers
receive them from superior authorities; these authorities accept
them from what is current in the community. The teachers impose
them upon children. As a first consequence, the intelligence of
the teacher is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims
laid down from above. Too rarely is the individual teacher so
free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on
methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his
mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject
matter. This distrust of the teacher's experience is then
reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The
latter receive their aims through a double or treble external
imposition, and are constantly confused by the conflict between
the aims which are natural to their own experience at the time
and those in which they are taught to acquiesce. Until the
democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every
growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually
confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims.

(3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are
alleged to be general and ultimate. Every activity, however
specific, is, of course, general in its ramified connections, for
it leads out indefinitely into other things. So far as a general
idea makes us more alive to these connections, it cannot be too
general. But "general" also means "abstract," or detached from
all specific context. And such abstractness means remoteness,
and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as mere
means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the means.
That education is literally and all the time its own reward means
that no alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is
worth while in its own immediate having. A truly general aim
broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to take more consequences
(connections) into account. This means a wider and more flexible
observation of means. The more interacting forces, for example,
the farmer takes into account, the more varied will be his
immediate resources. He will see a greater number of possible
starting places, and a greater number of ways of getting at what
he wants to do. The fuller one's conception of possible future
achievements, the less his present activity is tied down to a
small number of alternatives. If one knew enough, one could
start almost anywhere and sustain his activities continuously and
fruitfully.

Understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply
in the sense of a broad survey of the field of present
activities, we shall take up some of the larger ends which have
currency in the educational theories of the day, and consider
what light they throw upon the immediate concrete and diversified
aims which are always the educator's real concern. We premise
(as indeed immediately follows from what has been said) that
there is no need of making a choice among them or regarding them
as competitors. When we come to act in a tangible way we have to
select or choose a particular act at a particular time, but any
number of comprehensive ends may exist without competition, since
they mean simply different ways of looking at the same scene.
One cannot climb a number of different mountains simultaneously,
but the views had when different mountains are ascended
supplement one another: they do not set up incompatible,
competing worlds. Or, putting the matter in a slightly different
way, one statement of an end may suggest certain questions and
observations, and another statement another set of questions,
calling for other observations. Then the more general ends we
have, the better. One statement will emphasize what another
slurs over. What a plurality of hypotheses does for the
scientific investigator, a plurality of stated aims may do for
the instructor.

Summary. An aim denotes the result of any natural process
brought to consciousness and made a factor in determining present
observation and choice of ways of acting. It signifies that an
activity has become intelligent. Specifically it means foresight
of the alternative consequences attendant upon acting in a given
situation in different ways, and the use of what is anticipated
to direct observation and experiment. A true aim is thus opposed
at every point to an aim which is imposed upon a process of
action from without. The latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a
stimulus to intelligence in the given situation, but is an
externally dictated order to do such and such things. Instead of
connecting directly with present activities, it is remote,
divorced from the means by which it is to be reached. Instead of
suggesting a freer and better balanced activity, it is a limit
set to activity. In education, the currency of these externally
imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put upon the notion
of preparation for a remote future and for rendering the work of
both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.

Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims  

1. Nature as Supplying the Aim. We have just pointed out the
futility of trying to establish the aim of education--some one
final aim which subordinates all others to itself. We have
indicated that since general aims are but prospective points of
view from which to survey the existing conditions and estimate
their possibilities, we might have any number of them, all
consistent with one another. As matter of fact, a large number
have been stated at different times, all having great local
value. For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a
given time. And we do not emphasize things which do not require
emphasis--that is, such things as are taking care of themselves
fairly well. We tend rather to frame our statement on the basis
of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation; we take
for granted, without explicit statement which would be of no use,
whatever is right or approximately so. We frame our explicit
aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about. It is,
then, DO paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or
generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just
the things which it has least of in actual fact. A time of
domination by authority will call out as response the
desirability of great individual freedom; one of disorganized
individual activities the need of social control as an
educational aim.

The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim
thus balance each other. At different times such aims as
complete living, better methods of language study, substitution
of things for words, social efficiency, personal culture, social
service, complete development of personality, encyclopedic
knowledge, discipline, a esthetic contemplation, utility, etc.,
have served. The following discussion takes up three statements
of recent influence; certain others have been incidentally
discussed in the previous chapters, and others will be considered
later in a discussion of knowledge and of the values of studies.
We begin with a consideration that education is a process of
development in accordance with nature, taking Rousseau's
statement, which opposed natural to social (See ante, p. 91);
and then pass over to the antithetical conception of social
efficiency, which often opposes social to natural.

(1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and
artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are
prone to resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to
furnish the law and the end of development; ours it is to follow
and conform to her ways. The positive value of this conception
lies in the forcible way in which it calls attention to the
wrongness of aims which do not have regard to the natural
endowment of those educated. Its weakness is the ease with which
natural in the sense of normal is confused with the physical.
The constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and
contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out of the way
and allow nature to do the work. Since no one has stated in the
doctrine both its truth and falsity better than Rousseau, we
shall turn to him.

"Education," he says, "we receive from three sources--Nature,
men, and things. The spontaneous development of our organs and
capacities constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which
we are taught to put this development constitutes that education
given us by Men. The acquirement of personal experience from
surrounding objects constitutes that of things. Only when these
three kinds of education are consonant and make for the same end,
does a man tend towards his true goal. If we are asked what is
this end, the answer is that of Nature. For since the
concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their
completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our
control must necessarily regulate us in determining the other
two." Then he defines Nature to mean the capacities and
dispositions which are inborn, "as they exist prior to the
modification due to constraining habits and the influence of the
opinion of others."

The wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as
fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in
conjunction with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say
better what is said in the first sentences. The three factors of
educative development are (a) the native structure of our bodily
organs and their functional activities; (b) the uses to which the
activities of these organs are put under the influence of other
persons; (c) their direct interaction with the environment. This
statement certainly covers the ground. His other two
propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the
three factors of education are consonant and cooperative does
adequate development of the individual occur, and (b) that the
native activities of the organs, being original, are basic in
conceiving consonance. But it requires but little reading
between the lines, supplemented by other statements of Rousseau,
to perceive that instead of regarding these three things as
factors which must work together to some extent in order that any
one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as separate
and independent operations. Especially does he believe that
there is an independent and, as he says, "spontaneous"
development of the native organs and faculties. He thinks that
this development can go on irrespective of the use to which they
are put. And it is to this separate development that education
coming from social contact is to be subordinated. Now there is
an immense difference between a use of native activities in
accord with those activities themselves -- as distinct from
forcing them and perverting them -- and supposing that they have
a normal development apart from any use, which development
furnishes the standard and norm of all learning by use. To recur
to our previous illustration, the process of acquiring language
is a practically perfect model of proper educative growth. The
start is from native activities of the vocal apparatus, organs of
hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose that these have an
independent growth of their own, which left to itself would
evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle
would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and
noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the
development of articulate speech -- which they are -- but as
furnishing language itself -- the standard for all teaching of
language.

The point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right,
introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that
the structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions
of all teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in
intimating that they supply not only the conditions but also the
ends of their development. As matter of fact, the native
activities develop, in contrast with random and capricious
exercise, through the uses to which they are put. And the office
of the social medium is, as we have seen, to direct growth
through putting powers to the best possible use. The instinctive
activities may be called, metaphorically, spontaneous, in the
sense that the organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of
operation, -- a bias so strong that we cannot go contrary to it,
though by trying to go contrary we may pervert, stunt, and
corrupt them. But the notion of a spontaneous normal development
of these activities is pure mythology. The natural, or native,
powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces in all
education; they do not furnish its ends or aims. There is no
learning except from a beginning in unlearned powers, but
learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the
unlearned powers. Rousseau's contrary opinion is doubtless due
to the fact that he identified God with Nature; to him the
original powers are wholly good, coming directly from a wise and
good creator. To paraphrase the old saying about the country and
the town, God made the original human organs and faculties, man
makes the uses to which they are put. Consequently the
development of the former furnishes the standard to which the
latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to determine the
uses to which the original activities shall be put, they
interfere with a divine plan. The interference by social
arrangements with Nature, God's work, is the primary source of
corruption in individuals.

Rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all
natural tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of
the total depravity of innate human nature, and has had a
powerful influence in modifying the attitude towards children's
interests. But it is hardly necessary to say that primitive
impulses are of themselves neither good nor evil, but become one
or the other according to the objects for which they are
employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing of
some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many
avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not to
leave them alone to follow their own "spontaneous development,"
but to provide an environment which shall organize them.

Returning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's
statements, we find that natural development, as an aim, enables
him to point the means of correcting many evils in current
practices, and to indicate a number of desirable specific aims.
(1) Natural development as an aim fixes attention upon the bodily
organs and the need of health and vigor. The aim of natural
development says to parents and teachers: Make health an aim;
normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of
the body--an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due
recognition in practice would almost automatically revolutionize
many of our educational practices. "Nature" is indeed a vague
and metaphorical term, but one thing that "Nature" may be said to
utter is that there are conditions of educational efficiency, and
that till we have learned what these conditions are and have
learned to make our practices accord with them, the noblest and
most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer -- are verbal and
sentimental rather than efficacious.

(2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of
respect for physical mobility. In Rousseau's words: "Children
are always in motion; a sedentary life is injurious." When he
says that "Nature's intention is to strengthen the body before
exercising the mind" he hardly states the fact fairly. But if he
had said that nature's "intention" (to adopt his poetical form of
speech) is to develop the mind especially by exercise of the
muscles of the body he would have stated a positive fact. In
other words, the aim of following nature means, in the concrete,
regard for the actual part played by use of the bodily organs in
explorations, in handling of materials, in plays and games.
(3) The general aim translates into the aim of regard for
individual differences among children. Nobody can take the
principle of consideration of native powers into account without
being struck by the fact that these powers differ in different
individuals. The difference applies not merely to their
intensity, but even more to their quality and arrangement. As
Rouseau said: "Each individual is born with a distinctive
temperament. We indiscriminately employ children of different
bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the special
bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we have
wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see
the short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die
away, while the natural abilities we have crushed do not
revive."

Lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the
waxing, and waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud
and bloom irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development.
We must strike while the iron is hot. Especially precious are
the first dawnings of power. More than we imagine, the ways in
which the tendencies of early childhood are treated fix
fundamental dispositions and condition the turn taken by powers
that show themselves later. Educational concern with the early
years of life -- as distinct from inculcation of useful arts --
dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi
and Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth.
The irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in
the following passage of a student of the growth of the nervous
system. "While growth continues, things bodily and mental are
lopsided, for growth is never general, but is accentuated now at
one spot, now at another. The methods which shall recognize in
the presence of these enormous differences of endowment the
dynamic values of natural inequalities of growth, and utilize
them, preferring irregularity to the rounding out gained by
pruning will most closely follow that which takes place in the
body and thus prove most effective. " 1  Observation of natural
tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint. They show
themselves most readily in a child's spontaneous sayings and
doings, -- that is, in those he engages in when not put at set
tasks and when not aware of being under observation. It does not
follow that these tendencies are all desirable because they are
natural; but it does follow that since they are there, they are
operative and must be taken account of. We must see to it that
the desirable ones have an environment which keeps them active,
and that their activity shall control the direction the others
take and thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they
lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble parents when they
appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much direct
attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them. At
all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes
as standards, and regard all deviations of children's impulses as
evils to be eliminated. That artificiality against which the
conception of following nature is so largely a protest, is the
outcome of attempts to force children directly into the mold of
grown-up standards.

In conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of
following nature combined two factors which had no inherent
connection with one another. Before the time of Rousseau
educational reformers had been inclined to urge the importance of
education by ascribing practically unlimited power to it. All
the differences between peoples and between classes and persons
among the same people were said to be due to differences of
training, of exercise, and practice. Originally, mind, reason,
understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all.
This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of
all and the possibility of bringing them all to the same level.
As a protest against this view, the doctrine of accord with
nature meant a much less formal and abstract view of mind and its
powers. It substituted specific instincts and impulses and
physiological capacities, differing from individual to individual
(just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out, even in dogs of
the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment, memory,
and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative
accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of
modern biology, physiology, and psychology. It means, in effect,
that great as is the significance of nurture, of modification,
and transformation through direct educational effort, nature, or
unlearned capacities, affords the foundation and ultimate
resources for such nurture. On the other hand, the doctrine of
following nature was a political dogma. It meant a rebellion
against existing social institutions, customs, and ideals (See
ante, p. 91). Rousseau's statement that everything is good as
it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification only
in its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence:
"Everything degenerates in the hands of man." And again he says:
"Natural man has an absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a
complete integer and has no relation save to himself and to his
fellow man. Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator
of a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its
relation to the integral body of society. Good political
institutions are those which make a man unnatural." It is upon
this conception of the artificial and harmful character of
organized social life as it now exists 2 that he rested the
notion that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which
initiate growth but also its plan and goal. That evil
institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a
wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is
true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart from
the environment, but to provide an environment in which native
powers will be put to better uses.

2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature
supply the end of a true education and society the end of an evil
one, could hardly fail to call out a protest. The opposing
emphasis took the form of a doctrine that the business of
education is to supply precisely what nature fails to secure;
namely, habituation of an individual to social control;
subordination of natural powers to social rules. It is not
surprising to find that the value in the idea of social
efficiency resides largely in its protest against the points at
which the doctrine of natural development went astray; while its
misuse comes when it is employed to slur over the truth in that
conception. It is a fact that we must look to the activities and
achievements of associated life to find what the development of
power -- that is to say, efficiency -- means. The error is in
implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather than
of utilization to secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered
adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not
by negative constraint but by positive use of native
individual capacities in occupations having a social meaning.
(1) Translated into specific aims, social efficiency indicates
the importance of industrial competency. Persons cannot live
without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are
employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the
relationships of persons to one another. If an individual is not
able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent
upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others.
He misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of
life. If he is not trained in the right use of the products of
industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave himself and
injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme of
education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet
in the name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements
for higher education have often not only neglected them, but
looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of educative
concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic
society, it is natural that the significance of an education
which should have as a result ability to make one's way
economically in the world, and to manage economic resources
usefully instead of for mere display and luxury, should receive
emphasis.

There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end,
existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as
final. A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to
the point of competency to choose and make its own career. This
principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals
in advance for definite industrial callings, selected not on the
basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth
or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry at
the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes through the
evolution of new inventions. New industries spring up, and old
ones are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train for
too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. When
the occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left
behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they
had a less definite training. But, most of all, the present
industrial constitution of society is, like every society which
has ever existed, full of inequities. It is the aim of
progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege
and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. Wherever social
control means subordination of individual activities to class
authority, there is danger that industrial education will be
dominated by acceptance of the status quo. Differences of
economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of
individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the
defects of the Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its
enlightened method of selection.

(2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course,
arbitrary to separate industrial competency from capacity in good
citizenship. But the latter term may be used to indicate a
number of qualifications which are vaguer than vocational
ability. These traits run from whatever make an individual a
more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political sense:
it denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take a
determining part in making as well as obeying laws. The aim of
civic efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the
notion of a training of mental power at large. It calls
attention to the fact that power must be relative to doing
something, and to the fact that the things which most need to be
done are things which involve one's relationships with others.

Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim
too narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain
periods have excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the
fact that in the last analysis security of social progress
depends upon them. For scientific men would have been thought to
be mere theoretical dreamers, totally lacking in social
efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately social
efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share in
a give and take of experience. It covers all that makes one's
own experience more worth while to others, and all that enables
one to participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of
others. Ability to produce and to enjoy art, capacity for
recreation, the significant utilization of leisure, are more
important elements in it than elements conventionally associated
oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest sense, social
efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind which
is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable; in
breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make
individuals impervious to the interests of others. When social
efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its
chief constituent (because its only guarantee) is omitted, --
intelligent sympathy or good will. For sympathy as a desirable
quality is something more than mere feeling; it is a cultivated
imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at
whatever unnecessarily divides them. What is sometimes called a
benevolent interest in others may be but an unwitting mask for an
attempt to dictate to them what their good shall be, instead of
an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find the good
of their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service, are
hard and metallic things when severed from an active
acknowledgment of the diversity of goods which life may afford to
different persons, and from faith in the social utility of
encouraging every individual to make his own choice intelligent.

3. Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim
which is consistent with culture turns upon these considerations.
Culture means at least something cultivated, something ripened;
it is opposed to the raw and crude. When the "natural" is
identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is
called natural development. Culture is also something personal;
it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art
and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with a
narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of
activity, culture is opposed to efficiency. Whether called
culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is
identical with the true meaning of social efficiency whenever
attention is given to what is unique in an individual--and he
would not be an individual if there were not something
incommensurable about him. Its opposite is the mediocre, the
average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed, distinction
of personality results, and with it greater promise for a social
service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material
commodities. For how can there be a society really worth serving
unless it is constituted of individuals of significant personal
qualities?

The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to
social efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society
with its rigid division of inferior and superior. The latter are
supposed to have time and opportunity to develop themselves as
human beings; the former are confined to providing external
products. When social efficiency as measured by product or
output is urged as an ideal in a would-be democratic society, it
means that the depreciatory estimate of the masses characteristic
of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried over. But
if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social
return be demanded from all and that opportunity for development
of distinctive capacities be afforded all. The separation of the
two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of the
narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential
justification.

The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included
within the process of experience. When it is measured by
tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a
distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic.
Results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth of
an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-products
of education: by-products which are inevitable and important, but
nevertheless by-products. To set up an external aim strengthens
by reaction the false conception of culture which identifies it
with something purely "inner." And the idea of perfecting an
"inner" personality is a sure sign of social divisions. What is
called inner is simply that which does not connect with
others -- which is not capable of free and full communication.
What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with
something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as
a thing which a man might have internally -- and therefore
exclusively. What one is as a person is what one is as
associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse.
This transcends both the efficiency which consists in supplying
products to others and the culture which is an exclusive
refinement and polish.

Any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician,
teacher, student, who does not find that the accomplishments of
results of value to others is an accompaniment of a process of
experience inherently worth while. Why then should it be thought
that one must take his choice between sacrificing himself to
doing useful things for others, or sacrificing them to pursuit of
his own exclusive ends, whether the saving of his own soul or the
building of an inner spiritual life and personality? What happens
is that since neither of these things is persistently possible,
we get a compromise and an alternation. One tries each course by
turns. There is no greater tragedy than that so much of the
professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world has
emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual
self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this
dualism of life. The dualism is too deeply established to be
easily overthrown; for that reason, it is the particular task of
education at the present time to struggle in behalf of an aim in
which social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead
of antagonists.

Summary. General or comprehensive aims are points of view for
surveying the specific problems of education. Consequently it is
a test of the value of the manner in which any large end is
stated to see if it will translate readily and consistently into
the procedures which are suggested by another. We have applied
this test to three general aims: Development according to nature,
social efficiency, and culture or personal mental enrichment. In
each case we have seen that the aims when partially stated come
into conflict with each other. The partial statement of natural
development takes the primitive powers in an alleged spontaneous
development as the end-all. From this point of view training
which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint;
one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is
corrupting. But when we recognize that natural activities mean
native activities which develop only through the uses in which
they are nurtured, the conflict disappears. Similarly a social
efficiency which is defined in terms of rendering external
service to others is of necessity opposed to the aim of enriching
the meaning of experience, while a culture which is taken to
consist in an internal refinement of a mind is opposed to a
socialized disposition. But social efficiency as an educational
purpose should mean cultivation of power to join freely and fully
in shared or common activities. This is impossible without
culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because one cannot
share in intercourse with others without learning -- without
getting a broader point of view and perceiving things of which
one would otherwise be ignorant. And there is perhaps no better
definition of culture than that it is the capacity for constantly
expanding the range and accuracy of one's perception of
meanings.

1 Donaldson, Growth of Brain, p. 356.

2 We must not forget that Rousseau had the idea of a radically
different sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should
be identical with the good of all its members, which he thought
to be as much better than existing states as these are worse than
the state of nature.

Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline

1. The Meaning of the Terms. We have already noticed the
difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or
participant. The former is indifferent to what is going on; one
result is just as good as another, since each is just something
to look at. The latter is bound up with what is going on; its
outcome makes a difference to him. His fortunes are more or less
at stake in the issue of events. Consequently he does whatever
he can to influence the direction present occurrences take. One
is like a man in a prison cell watching the rain out of the
window; it is all the same to him. The other is like a man who
has planned an outing for the next day which continuing rain will
frustrate. He cannot, to be sure, by his present reactions
affect to-morrow's weather, but he may take some steps which will
influence future happenings, if only to postpone the proposed
picnic. If a man sees a carriage coming which may run over him,
if he cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the
way if he foresees the consequence in time. In many instances,
he can intervene even more directly. The attitude of a
participant in the course of affairs is thus a double one: there
is solicitude, anxiety concerning future consequences, and a
tendency to act to assure better, and avert worse, consequences.
There are words which denote this attitude: concern, interest.
These words suggest that a person is bound up with the
possibilities inhering in objects; that he is accordingly on the
lookout for what they are likely to do to him; and that, on the
basis of his expectation or foresight, he is eager to act so as
to give things one turn rather than another. Interest and aims,
concern and purpose, are necessarily connected. Such words as
aim, intent, end, emphasize the results which are wanted and
striven for; they take for granted the personal attitude of
solicitude and attentive eagerness. Such words as interest,
affection, concern, motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is
foreseen upon the individual's fortunes, and his active desire to
act to secure a possible result. They take for granted the
objective changes. But the difference is but one of emphasis;
the meaning that is shaded in one set of words is illuminated in
the other. What is anticipated is objective and impersonal;
to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being run over. But for an
active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of
standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal
response. The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present
difference, which finds expression in solicitude and effort.
While such words as affection, concern, and motive indicate an
attitude of personal preference, they are always attitudes toward
objects -- toward what is foreseen. We may call the phase of
objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal
concern emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in
the facts of the situation.

Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran
their course in a world by themselves. But they are always
responses to what is going on in the situation of which they are
a part, and their successful or unsuccessful expression depends
upon their interaction with other changes. Life activities
flourish and fail only in connection with changes of the
environment. They are literally bound up with these changes; our
desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in which
our doings are tied up with the doings of things and persons
about us. Instead of marking a purely personal or subjective
realm, separated from the objective and impersonal, they indicate
the non-existence of such a separate world. They afford
convincing evidence that changes in things are not alien to the
activities of a self, and that the career and welfare of the self
are bound up with the movement of persons and things. Interest,
concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in
a developing situation.

The word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole
state of active development, (ii) the objective results that are
foreseen and wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional
inclination.

(I) An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often
referred to as an interest. Thus we say that a man's interest is
politics, or journalism, or philanthropy, or
archaeology, or collecting Japanese prints, or banking.

(ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object
touches or engages a man; the point where it influences him. In
some legal transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to
have a standing at court. He has to show that some proposed step
concerns his affairs. A silent partner has an interest in a
business, although he takes no active part in its conduct because
its prosperity or decline affects his profits and liabilities.

(iii) When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the
emphasis falls directly upon his personal attitude. To be
interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by,
some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care
about, to be attentive. We say of an interested person both that
he has lost himself in some affair and that he has found himself
in it. Both terms express the engrossment of the self in an
object.

When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a
depreciatory way, it will be found that the second of the
meanings mentioned is first exaggerated and then isolated.
Interest is taken to mean merely the effect of an object upon
personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure.
Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are
reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain.
Educationally, it then follows that to attach importance to
interest means to attach some feature of seductiveness to
material otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and effort by
offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is properly
stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of
education.

But the objection is based upon the fact -- or assumption -- that
the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be
appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other
words, they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal
activities of the pupils. The remedy is not in finding fault
with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to search for
some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material. It
is to discover objects and modes of action, which are connected
with present powers. The function of this material in engaging
activity and carrying it on consistently and continuously is its
interest. If the material operates in this way, there is no call
either to hunt for devices which will make it interesting or to
appeal to arbitrary, semi-coerced effort.

The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between, --
that which connects two things otherwise distant. In education,
the distance covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that
a process takes time to mature is so obvious a fact that we
rarely make it explicit. We overlook the fact that in growth
there is ground to be covered between an initial stage of process
and the completing period; that there is something intervening.
In learning, the present powers of the pupil are the initial
stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
Between the two lie means -- that is middle conditions: -- acts
to be performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be
used. Only through them, in the literal time sense, will the
initial activities reach a satisfactory consummation.

These intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because
the development of existing activities into the foreseen and
desired end depends upon them. To be means for the achieving of
present tendencies, to be "between" the agent and his end, to be
of interest, are different names for the same thing. When
material has to be made interesting, it signifies that as
presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present power:
or that if the connection be there, it is not perceived. To make
it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that
exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous
and artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which have
been applied to the doctrine of interest in education.

So much for the meaning of the term interest. Now for that of
discipline. Where an activity takes time, where many means and
obstacles lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation
and persistence are required. It is obvious that a very large
part of the everyday meaning of will is precisely the deliberate
or conscious disposition to persist and endure in a planned
course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary
solicitations. A man of strong will, in the popular usage of the
words, is a man who is neither fickle nor half-hearted in
achieving chosen ends. His ability is executive; that is, he
persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out
his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.

Clearly there are two factors in will. One has to do with the
foresight of results, the other with the depth of hold the
foreseen outcome has upon the person.

(I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition.
Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man
keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not
because of any clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the
obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite
aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed
end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to get a
clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while.
Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize
ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and
energy in use of means to achieve the end. The really executive
man is a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the
results of his actions as clear and full as possible. The people
we called weak-willed or self-indulgent always deceive themselves
as to the consequences of their acts. They pick out some feature
which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances. When
they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to
show themselves. They are discouraged, or complain of being
thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some
other line of action. That the primary difference between strong
and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of
persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are
thought out, cannot be over-emphasized.

(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing
out of results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep
hold of a person. They are something to look at and for
curiosity to play with rather than something to achieve. There
is no such thing as over-intellectuality, but there is such a
thing as a one-sided intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as
we say in considering the consequences of proposed lines of
action. A certain flabbiness of fiber prevents the contemplated
object from gripping him and engaging him in action. And most
persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course of action
by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of
inducements to an action that is directly more agreeable.

A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake
them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this
ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in
face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the
essence of discipline. Discipline means power at command;
mastery of the resources available for carrying through the
action undertaken. To know what one is to do and to move to do
it promptly and by use of the requisite means is to be
disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind.
Discipline is positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue
inclination, to compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a
subordinate perform an uncongenial task -- these things are or
are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to the
development of power to recognize what one is about and to
persistence in accomplishment.

It is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and
discipline are connected, not opposed.

(i) Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained power --
apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in consequences --
is not possible without interest. Deliberation will be
perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. Parents
and teachers often complain -- and correctly -- that children "do
not want to hear, or want to understand." Their minds are not
upon the subject precisely because it does not touch them; it
does not enter into their concerns. This is a state of things
that needs to be remedied, but the remedy is not in the use of
methods which increase indifference and aversion. Even punishing
a child for inattention is one way of trying to make him realize
that the matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one
way of arousing "interest," or bringing about a sense of
connection. In the long run, its value is measured by whether it
supplies a mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by
the adult or whether it leads the child "to think"--that is, to
reflect upon his acts and impregnate them with aims.

(ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even
more obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who are not
interested in what they are doing. If one were engaging a lawyer
or a doctor, it would never occur to one to reason that the
person engaged would stick to his work more conscientiously if it
was so uncongenial to him that he did it merely from a sense of
obligation. Interest measures -- or rather is -- the depth of
the grip which the foreseen end has upon one m moving one to act
for its realization.

2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education.
Interest represents the moving force of objects -- whether
perceived or presented in imagination -- in any experience having
a purpose. In the concrete, the value of recognizing the dynamic
place of interest in an educative development is that it leads to
considering individual children in their specific capabilities,
needs, and preferences. One who recognizes the importance of
interest will not assume that all minds work in the same way
because they happen to have the same teacher and textbook.
Attitudes and methods of approach and response vary with the
specific appeal the same material makes, this appeal itself
varying with difference of natural aptitude, of past experience,
of plan of life, and so on. But the facts of interest also
supply considerations of general value to the philosophy of
education. Rightly understood, they put us on our guard against
certain conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have had
great vogue in philosophic thought in the past, and which
exercise a serious hampering influence upon the conduct of
instruction and discipline. Too frequently mind is set over the
world of things and facts to be known; it is regarded as
something existing in isolation, with mental states and
operations that exist independently. Knowledge is then regarded
as an external application of purely mental existences to the
things to be known, or else as a result of the impressions which
this outside subject matter makes on mind, or as a combination of
the two. Subject matter is then regarded as something complete
in itself; it is just something to be learned or known, either by
the voluntary application of mind to it or through the
impressions it makes on mind.

The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical.
Mind appears in experience as ability to respond to present
stimuli on the basis of anticipation of future possible
consequences, and with a view to controlling the kind of
consequences that are to take place. The things, the subject
matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a
bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether assisting
or retarding it. These statements are too formal to be very
intelligible. An illustration may clear up their significance.
You are engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a
typewriter. If you are an expert, your formed habits take care
of the physical movements and leave your thoughts free to
consider your topic. Suppose, however, you are not skilled, or
that, even if you are, the machine does not work well. You then
have to use intelligence. You do not wish to strike the keys at
random and let the consequences be what they may; you wish to
record certain words in a given order so as to make sense. You
attend to the keys, to what you have written, to your movements,
to the ribbon or the mechanism of the machine. Your attention is
not distributed indifferently and miscellaneously to any and
every detail. It is centered upon whatever has a bearing upon
the effective pursuit of your occupation. Your look is ahead,
and you are concerned to note the existing facts because and in
so far as they are factors in the achievement of the result
intended. You have to find out what your resources are, what
conditions are at command, and what the difficulties and
obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with reference to
what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not involve
such a forecast of results and such an examination of means and
hindrances is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In
neither case is it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to
what is intended and careless in observation of conditions of its
realization is to be, in that degree, stupid or partially
intelligent.

If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the
physical manipulation of the instruments but with what one
intends to write, the case is the same. There is an activity in
process; one is taken up with the development of a theme. Unless
one writes as a phonograph talks, this means intelligence;
namely, alertness in foreseeing the various conclusions to which
present data and considerations are tending, together with
continually renewed observation and recollection to get hold of
the subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be
reached. The whole attitude is one of concern with what is to
be, and with what is so far as the latter enters into the
movement toward the end. Leave out the direction which depends
upon foresight of possible future results, and there is no
intelligence in present behavior. Let there be imaginative
forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its
attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle
dreaming -- abortive intelligence.

If this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something
complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far
as that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as
aims, ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the
attainment of aims. Intelligence is not a peculiar possession
which a person owns; but a person is intelligent in so far as the
activities in which he plays a part have the qualities mentioned.
Nor are the activities in which a person engages, whether
intelligently or not, exclusive properties of himself; they are
something in which he engages and partakes. Other things, the
independent changes of other things and persons, cooperate and
hinder. The individual's act may be initial in a course of
events, but the outcome depends upon the interaction of his
response with energies supplied by other agencies. Conceive mind
as anything but one factor partaking along with others in the
production of consequences, and it becomes meaningless.

The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which
will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or
purpose of moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not
as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for the attainment of
ends. The remedy for the evils attending the doctrine of formal
discipline previously spoken of, is not to be found by
substituting a doctrine of specialized disciplines, but by
reforming the notion of mind and its training. Discovery of
typical modes of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in
which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they recognize
they have something at stake, and which cannot be carried through
without reflection and use of judgment to select material of
observation and recollection, is the remedy. In short, the root
of the error long prevalent in the conception of training of mind
consists in leaving out of account movements of things to future
results in which an individual shares, and in the direction of
which observation, imagination, and memory are enlisted. It
consists in regarding mind as complete in itself, ready to be
directly applied to a present material.

In historic practice the error has cut two ways. On one hand, it
has screened and protected traditional studies and methods of
teaching from intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say
that they are "disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all
inquiry. It has not been enough to show that they were of no use
in life or that they did not really contribute to the cultivation
of the self. That they were "disciplinary" stifled every
question, subdued every doubt, and removed the subject from the
realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the allegation
could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue as
matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application
and lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with
him, not with the study or the methods of teaching. His failure
was but proof that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a
reason for retaining the old methods. The responsibility was
transferred from the educator to the pupil because the material
did not have to meet specific tests; it did not have to be shown
that it fulfilled any particular need or served any specific end.
It was designed to discipline in general, and if it failed, it
was because the individual was unwilling to be disciplined.
In the other direction, the tendency was towards a negative
conception of discipline, instead of an identification of it with
growth in constructive power of achievement. As we have already
seen, will means an attitude toward the future, toward the
production of possible consequences, an attitude involving effort
to foresee clearly and comprehensively the probable results of
ways of acting, and an active identification with some
anticipated consequences. Identification of will, or effort,
with mere strain, results when a mind is set up, endowed with
powers that are only to be applied to existing material. A
person just either will or will not apply himself to the matter
in hand. The more indifferent the subject matter, the less
concern it has for the habits and preferences of the individual,
the more demand there is for an effort to bring the mind to bear
upon it--and hence the more discipline of will. To attend to
material because there is something to be done in which the
person is concerned is not disciplinary in this view; not even if
it results in a desirable increase of constructive power.
Application just for the sake of application, for the sake of
training, is alone disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if
the subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no
motive (so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or
the value of discipline. The logical result is expressed with
literal truth in the words of an American humorist: "It makes no
difference what you teach a boy so long as he doesn't like it."

The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing
with objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject
matter to be learned. In the traditional schemes of education,
subject matter means so much material to be studied. Various
branches of study represent so many independent branches, each
having its principles of arrangement complete within itself.
History is one such group of facts; algebra another; geography
another, and so on till we have run through the entire
curriculum. Having a ready- made existence on their own account,
their relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to
acquire. This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in
which the program of school work, for the day, month, and
successive years, consists of "studies" all marked off from one
another, and each supposed to be complete by itself -- for
educational purposes at least.

Later on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the
meaning of the subject matter of instruction. At this point, we
need only to say that, in contrast with the traditional theory,
anything which intelligence studies represents things in the part
which they play in the carrying forward of active lines of
interest. Just as one "studies" his typewriter as part of the
operation of putting it to use to effect results, so with any
fact or truth. It becomes an object of study -- that is, of
inquiry and reflection -- when it figures as a factor to be
reckoned with in the completion of a course of events in which
one is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected. Numbers are
not objects of study just because they are numbers already
constituting a branch of learning called mathematics, but because
they represent qualities and relations of the world in which our
action goes on, because they are factors upon which the
accomplishment of our purposes depends. Stated thus broadly, the
formula may appear abstract. Translated into details, it means
that the act of learning or studying is artificial and
ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented
with a lesson to be learned. Study is effectual in the degree in
which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is
dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in which he is
concerned. This connection of an object and a topic with the
promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and the
last word of a genuine theory of interest in education.

3. Some Social Aspects of the Question. While the theoretical
errors of which we have been speaking have their expressions in
the conduct of schools, they are themselves the outcome of
conditions of social life. A change confined to the theoretical
conviction of educators will not remove the difficulties, though
it should render more effective efforts to modify social
conditions. Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are
fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they
partake. The ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic
attitude. Art is neither merely internal nor merely external;
merely mental nor merely physical. Like every mode of action, it
brings about changes in the world. The changes made by some
actions (those which by contrast may be called mechanical) are
external; they are shifting things about. No ideal reward, no
enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them. Others
contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external
adornment and display. Many of our existing social activities,
industrial and political, fall in these two classes. Neither the
people who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by
them, are capable of full and free interest in their work.
Because of the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing
it, or because of the restricted character of its aim,
intelligence is not adequately engaged. The same conditions
force many people back upon themselves. They take refuge in an
inner play of sentiment and fancies. They are aesthetic but not
artistic, since their feelings and ideas are turned upon
themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify
conditions. Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an
inner landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become an
asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life -- not a
temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification
in future dealings with the world. The very word art may become
associated not with specific transformation of things, making
them more significant for mind, but with stimulations of
eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The separation
and mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of theory
or culture, the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are
indications of this situation. Thus interest and mind are either
narrowed, or else made perverse. Compare what was said in an
earlier chapter about the one-sided meanings which have come to
attach to the ideas of efficiency and of culture.

This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized
on a basis of division between laboring classes and leisure
classes. The intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in
the unremitting struggle with things; that of those freed from
the discipline of occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate.
Moreover, the majority of human beings still lack economic
freedom. Their pursuits are fixed by accident and necessity of
circumstance; they are not the normal expression of their own
powers interacting with the needs and resources of the
environment. Our economic conditions still relegate many men to
a servile status. As a consequence, the intelligence of those in
control of the practical situation is not liberal. Instead of
playing freely upon the subjugation of the world for human ends,
it is devoted to the manipulation of other men for ends that are
non-human in so far as they are exclusive.

This state of affairs explains many things in our historic
educational traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims
manifested in different portions of the school system; the
narrowly utilitarian character of most elementary education, and
the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character of most higher
education. It accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual
matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and
professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that
liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an education
which shall count in the vocations of life. But it also helps
define the peculiar problem of present education. The school
cannot immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social
conditions. But it should contribute through the type of
intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the
improvement of those conditions. And just here the true
conceptions of interest and discipline are full of significance.
Persons whose interests have been enlarged and intelligence
trained by dealing with things and facts in active occupations
having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those most
likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof
knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice.
To organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be
fully enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the
doing requires observation, the acquisition of information, and
the use of a constructive imagination, is what most needs to be
done to improve social conditions. To oscillate between drill
exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing
without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge
that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that
education accepts the present social conditions as final, and
thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating
them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place
in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful
activities is a slow work. It can only be accomplished
piecemeal, a step at a time. But this is not a reason for
nominally accepting one educational philosophy and accommodating
ourselves in practice to another. It is a challenge to undertake
the task of reorganization courageously and to keep at it
persistently.

Summary. Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of
activity having an aim. Interest means that one is identified
with the objects which define the activity and which furnish the
means and obstacles to its realization. Any activity with an aim
implies a distinction between an earlier incomplete phase and
later completing phase; it implies also intermediate steps. To
have an interest is to take things as entering into such a
continuously developing situation, instead of taking them in
isolation. The time difference between the given incomplete
state of affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort in
transformation, it demands continuity of attention and endurance.
This attitude is what is practically meant by will. Discipline
or development of power of continuous attention is its fruit.
The significance of this doctrine for the theory of education is
twofold. On the one hand it protects us from the notion that
mind and mental states are something complete in themselves,
which then happen to be applied to some ready-made objects and
topics so that knowledge results. It shows that mind and
intelligent or purposeful engagement in a course of action into
which things enter are identical. Hence to develop and train
mind is to provide an environment which induces such activity.
On the other side, it protects us from the notion that subject
matter on its side is something isolated and independent. It
shows that subject matter of learning is identical with all the
objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or
obstacles into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of
action. The developing course of action, whose end and
conditions are perceived, is the unity which holds together what
are often divided into an independent mind on one side and an
independent world of objects and facts on the other.

Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking

1. The Nature of Experience. The nature of experience can be
understood only by noting that it includes an active and a
passive element peculiarly combined. On the active hand,
experience is trying -- a meaning which is made explicit in the
connected term experiment. On the passive, it is undergoing.
When we experience something we act upon it, we do something with
it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. We do something
to the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is
the peculiar combination. The connection of these two phases of
experience measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience.
Mere activity does not constitute experience. It is dispersive,
centrifugal, dissipating. Experience as trying involves change,
but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously
connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from
it. When an activity is continued into the undergoing of
consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back
into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with
significance. We learn something. It is not experience when a
child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience
when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes
in consequence. Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame
means a burn. Being burned is a mere physical change, like the
burning of a stick of wood, if it is not perceived as a
consequence of some other action. Blind and capricious impulses
hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. So far as this
happens, everything is writ in water. There is none of that
cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of
that term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the
way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior
activity of our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are
concerned. There is no before or after to such experience; no
retrospect nor outlook, and consequently no meaning. We get
nothing which may be carried over to foresee what is likely to
happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves to what
is coming--no added control. Only by courtesy can such an
experience be called experience. To 'learn from experience" is
to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to
things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.
Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with
the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes
instruction--discovery of the connection of things.

Two conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience
is primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily
cognitive. But (2) the measure of the value of an experience
lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which
it leads up. It includes cognition in the degree in which it is
cumulative or amounts to something, or has meaning. In schools,
those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as
acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which
appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect. The very
word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in
having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly.
Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from
the physical organs of activity. The former is then thought to
be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an
irrelevant and intruding physical factor. The intimate union of
activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to
recognition of meaning is broken; instead we have two fragments:
mere bodily action on one side, and meaning directly grasped by
"spiritual" activity on the other.

It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which
have flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to
exaggerate them. Some of the more striking effects, may,
however, be enumerated. (a) In part bodily activity becomes an
intruder. Having nothing, so it is thought, to do with mental
activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil to be contended with.
For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along with his
mind. And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it
has to do something. But its activities, not being utilized in
occupation with things which yield significant results, have to
be frowned upon. They lead the pupil away from the lesson with
which his "mind" ought to be occupied; they are sources of
mischief. The chief source of the "problem of discipline" in
schools is that the teacher has often to spend the larger part of
the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take the mind
away from its material. A premium is put on physical quietude;
on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a
machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest.
The teachers' business is to hold the pupils up to these
requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.

The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and
pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the
situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the
perception of meaning. Callous indifference and explosions from
strain alternate. The neglected body, having no organized
fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why
or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into equally
meaningless fooling -- both very different from the normal play
of children. Physically active children become restless and
unruly; the more quiescent, socalled conscientious ones spend
what energy they have in the negative task of keeping their
instincts and active tendencies suppressed, instead of in a
positive one of constructive planning and execution; they are
thus educated not into responsibility for the significant and
graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty not to
give them free play. It may be seriously asserted that a chief
cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that
it was never misled by false notions into an attempted separation
of mind and body.

(b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be
learned by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have
to be used. The senses -- especially the eye and ear -- have to
be employed to take in what the book, the map, the blackboard,
and the teacher say. The lips and vocal organs, and the hands,
have to be used to reproduce in speech and writing what has been
stowed away. The senses are then regarded as a kind of
mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from
the external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways
and avenues of knowledge. To keep the eyes on the book and the
ears open to the teacher's words is a mysterious source of
intellectual grace. Moreover, reading, writing, and
figuring -- important school arts -- demand muscular or motor
training. The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs accordingly
have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back
out of the mind into external action. For it happens that using
the muscles repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an
automatic tendency to repeat.

The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities
which (in spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering
character of the body in mental action) have to be employed more
or less. For the senses and muscles are used not as organic
participants in having an instructive experience, but as external
inlets and outlets of mind. Before the child goes to school, he
learns with his hand, eye, and ear, because they are organs of
the process of doing something from which meaning results. The
boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite, and has to
note the various pressures of the string on his hand. His senses
are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow
"conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing
something with a purpose. The qualities of seen and touched
things have a bearing on what is done, and are alertly perceived;
they have a meaning. But when pupils are expected to use their
eyes to note the form of words, irrespective of their meaning, in
order to reproduce them in spelling or reading, the resulting
training is simply of isolated sense organs and muscles. It is
such isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it
mechanical. It is customary for teachers to urge children to
read with expression, so as to bring out the meaning. But if
they originally learned the sensory- motor technique of reading
-- the ability to identify forms and to reproduce the sounds they
stand for -- by methods which did not call for attention to
meaning, a mechanical habit was established which makes it
difficult to read subsequently with intelligence. The vocal
organs have been trained to go their own way automatically in
isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will. Drawing,
singing, and writing may be taught in the same mechanical way;
for, we repeat, any way is mechanical which narrows down the
bodily activity so that a separation of body from mind -- that
is, from recognition of meaning -- is set up. Mathematics, even
in its higher branches, when undue emphasis is put upon the
technique of calculation, and science, when laboratory exercises
are given for their own sake, suffer from the same evil.

(c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from
direct occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the
expense of relations or connections. It is altogether too common
to separate perceptions and even ideas from judgments. The
latter are thought to come after the former in order to compare
them. It is alleged that the mind perceives things apart from
relations; that it forms ideas of them in isolation from their
connections -- with what goes before and comes after. Then
judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated items
of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection
shall be brought out. As matter of fact, every perception and
every idea is a sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a
thing. We do not really know a chair or have an idea of it by
inventorying and enumerating its various isolated qualities, but
only by bringing these qualities into connection with something
else -- the purpose which makes it a chair and not a table; or
its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or
the "period" which it represents, and so on. A wagon is not
perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the
characteristic connection of the parts which makes it a wagon.
And these connections are not those of mere physical
juxtaposition; they involve connection with the animals that draw
it, the things that are carried on it, and so on. Judgment is
employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is mere
sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior
judgment, as in the case of familiar objects.

Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for
ideas. And in just the degree in which mental activity is
separated from active concern with the world, from doing
something and connecting the doing with what is undergone, words,
symbols, come to take the place of ideas. The substitution is
the more subtle because some meaning is recognized. But we are
very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning, and
to fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations
which confer significance. We get so thoroughly used to a kind
of pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not aware how
half-dead our mental action is, and how much keener and more
extensive our observations and ideas would be if we formed them
under conditions of a vital experience which required us to use
judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with.
There is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter.
All authorities agree that that discernment of relationships is
the genuinely intellectual matter; hence, the educative matter.
The failure arises in supposing that relationships can become
perceptible without experience -- without that conjoint trying
and undergoing of which we have spoken. It is assumed that
"mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that
this attention may be given at will irrespective of the
situation. Hence the deluge of half-observations, of verbal
ideas, and unassimilated "knowledge" which afflicts the world.
An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply
because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and
verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble
experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of
theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an
experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. It tends
to become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to
render thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary and
impossible. Because of our education we use words, thinking they
are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality
simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us from seeing
any longer the difficulty.

2. Reflection in Experience. Thought or reflection, as we have
already seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of
the relation between what we try to do and what happens in
consequence. No experience having a meaning is possible without
some element of thought. But we may contrast two types of
experience according to the proportion of reflection found in
them. All our experiences have a phase of "cut and try" in them
-- what psychologists call the method of trial and error. We
simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and
keep on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then
we adopt that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent
procedure. Some experiences have very little else in them than
this hit and miss or succeed process. We see that a certain way
of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not