Complete text of Democracy and Education
Highlights are my own for use in further posts.
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Democracy
and Education
by
John Dewey
One:
Education as a Necessity of Life
Two:
Education as a Social Function
Three:
Education as Direction
Four:
Education as Growth
Five:
Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
Six:
Education as Conservative and Progressive
Seven:
The Democratic Conception in Education
Eight:
Aims in Education
Nine:
Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
Ten:
Interest and Discipline
Eleven:
Experience and Thinking
Twelve:
Thinking in Education
Thirteen:
The Nature of Method
Fourteen:
The Nature of Subject Matter
Fifteen:
Play and Work in the Curriculum
Sixteen:
The Significance of Geography and History
Seventeen:
Science in the Course of Study
Eighteen:
Educational Values
Nineteen:
Labor and Leisure
Twenty:
Intellectual and Practical Studies
Twenty-one:
Physical and Social Studies: Naturalism and Humanism
Twenty-two:
The Individual and the World
Twenty-Three:
Vocational Aspects of Education
Twenty-four:
Philosophy of Education
Twenty-five:
Theories of Knowledge
Twenty-six:
Theories of Morals
Chapter
One
:
Education as a Necessity of Life
1.
Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between
living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by
renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater
than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged.
Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone
attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against
the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to
its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be
crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the
energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence.
If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at
least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a
living thing.
As
long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its
own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil.
To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of
its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends
in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated
for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control"
in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that
subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies
that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process
through action upon the environment.
In
all the higher forms this process cannot be kept up indefinitely.
After a while they succumb; they die. The creature is not equal to
the task of indefinite self-renewal. But continuity of the life
process is not dependent upon the prolongation of the existence of
any one individual. Reproduction of other forms of life goes on in
continuous sequence. And though, as the geological record shows, not
merely individuals but also species die out, the life process
continues in increasingly complex forms. As some species die out,
forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they
struggled in vain come into being. Continuity of life means continual
readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.
We
have been speaking of life in its lowest terms -- as a physical
thing. But we use the word "Life" to denote the whole range
of experience, individual and racial. When we see a book called the
Life of Lincoln we do not expect to find within its covers a treatise
on physiology. We look for an account of social antecedents; a
description of early surroundings, of the conditions and occupation
of the family; of the chief episodes in the development of character;
of signal struggles and achievements; of the individual's hopes,
tastes, joys and sufferings. In precisely similar fashion we speak of
the life of a savage tribe, of the Athenian people, of the American
nation. "Life" covers customs, institutions, beliefs,
victories and defeats, recreations and occupations.
We
employ the word "experience" in the same pregnant sense.
And to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the
principle of continuity through renewal applies. With
the renewal of physical existence goes, in the case of human beings,
the recreation of beliefs, ideals, hopes, happiness, misery, and
practices. The continuity of any experience, through renewing
of the social group, is a literal fact. Education, in its broadest
sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. Every one of
the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a
savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs,
ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the
carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet
the life of the group goes on.
The
primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the
constituent members in a social group determine the necessity of
education. On one hand, there is
the contrast between the immaturity of the new-born members of the
group -- its future sole representatives -- and the maturity of the
adult members who possess the knowledge and customs of the group.
On the other hand, there is the
necessity that these immature members be not merely physically
preserved in adequate numbers, but that they be
initiated into the interests, purposes, information, skill, and
practices of the mature members: otherwise the group will cease its
characteristic life. Even in a savage tribe, the achievements
of adults are far beyond what the immature members would be capable
of if left to themselves. With the
growth of civilization, the gap between the original capacities of
the immature and the standards and customs of the elders increases.
Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of
subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group.
Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.
Beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to,
the aims and habits of the social group have to be rendered cognizant
of them and actively interested. Education, and education alone,
spans the gap.
Society
exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological
life. This transmission occurs by
means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from
the older to the younger. Without this communication of
ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members
of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are
coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members who
compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the
new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal
interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.
If
a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is
obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death
of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an epidemic
took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact
that some are born as some die, makes possible through transmission
of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the social fabric.
Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that
genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized
group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact,
the human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves
without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire the
rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. The young of
human beings compare so poorly in original efficiency with the young
of many of the lower animals, that even the powers needed for
physical sustentation have to be acquired under tuition. How much
more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological,
artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity!
2.
Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of
teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that
we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. But justification is
found in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away
from an unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools
are, indeed, one important method of the transmission which forms the
dispositions of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared
with other agencies, a relatively superficial means. Only as
we have grasped the necessity of more fundamental and persistent
modes of tuition can we make sure of placing the scholastic methods
in their true context.
Society
not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it
may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There
is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and
communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which
they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come
to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order
to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations,
knowledge--a common understanding -- like-mindedness as the
sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from one to
another, like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a
pie by dividing it into physical pieces. The communication which
insures participation in a common understanding is one which secures
similar emotional and intellectual dispositions -- like ways of
responding to expectations and requirements.
Persons
do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any more
than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or
miles removed from others. A book or a letter may institute a more
intimate association between human beings separated thousands of
miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same
roof. Individuals do not even compose a social group because they all
work for a common end. The parts of a machine work with a maximum of
cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a
community. If, however, they were all cognizant of the common end and
all interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity
in view of it, then they would form a community. But this would
involve communication. Each would have to know what the other was
about and would have to have some way of keeping the other informed
as to his own purpose and progress. Consensus demands communication.
We
are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most social
group there are many relations which are not as yet social. A large
number of human relationships in any social group are still upon the
machine-like plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired
results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual
disposition and consent of those used. Such uses express physical
superiority, or superiority of position, skill, technical ability,
and command of tools, mechanical or fiscal. So far as the relations
of parent and child, teacher and pupil, employer and employee,
governor and governed, remain upon this level, they form no true
social group, no matter how closely their respective activities touch
one another. Giving and taking of orders modifies action and results,
but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication
of interests.
Not
only is social life identical with communication, but all
communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be
a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed
experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt
and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor
is the one who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of
communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to
another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find
your own attitude toward your experience changing; otherwise you
resort to expletives and ejaculations. The experience has to be
formulated in order to be communicated. To formulate requires getting
outside of it, seeing it as another would see it, considering what
points of contact it has with the life of another so that it may be
got into such form that he can appreciate its meaning. Except in
dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate,
imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him
intelligently of one's own experience. All communication is like art.
It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that
remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who
participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a
routine way does it lose its educative power.
In
final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and
learning for its own permanence, but the
very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens
experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates
responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.
A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically)
would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience
to extract its net meaning. The inequality of achievement between the
mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the young, but
the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus to reducing
experience to that order and form which will render it most easily
communicable and hence most usable.
3.
The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a marked
difference between the education which every one gets from living
with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to
subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young. In the former
case the education is incidental; it is natural and important, but it
is not the express reason of the association. While it may be said,
without exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social
institution, economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its
effect in enlarging and improving experience; yet this effect is not
a part of its original motive, which is limited and more immediately
practical. Religious associations began, for example, in the desire
to secure the favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil
influences; family life in the desire to gratify appetites and secure
family perpetuity; systematic labor, for the most part, because of
enslavement to others, etc. Only gradually was the by-product of the
institution, its effect upon the quality and extent of conscious
life, noted, and only more gradually still was this effect considered
as a directive factor in the conduct of the institution. Even today,
in our industrial life, apart from certain values of industriousness
and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of
human association under which the world's work is carried on receives
little attention as compared with physical output.
But
in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as an
immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy to ignore
in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their
disposition, or to subordinate that educative effect to some external
and tangible result, it is not so easy as in dealing with adults. The
need of training is too evident; the pressure to accomplish a change
in their attitude and habits is too urgent to leave these
consequences wholly out of account. Since our chief business with
them is to enable them to share in a common life we cannot help
considering whether or no we are forming the powers which will secure
this ability. If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the
ultimate value of every institution is its distinctively human effect
-- its effect upon conscious experience -- we may well believe that
this lesson has been learned largely through dealings with the young.
We
are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process
which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of
education -- that of direct tuition or schooling. In undeveloped
social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training.
Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the
young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to
their group. They have no special devices, material, or institutions
for teaching save in connection with initiation ceremonies by which
the youth are inducted into full social membership. For the most
part, they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults,
acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what
the elders are doing. In part, this sharing is direct, taking part in
the occupations of adults and thus serving an apprenticeship; in
part, it is indirect, through the dramatic plays in which children
reproduce the actions of grown-ups and thus learn to know what they
are like. To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place
where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might
learn.
But
as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the young
and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in the
pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the
case of the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so
remote in space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and
less adequate to reproduce its spirit. Ability to share effectively
in adult activities thus depends upon a prior training given with
this end in view. Intentional agencies -- schools--and explicit
material -- studies -- are devised. The task of teaching certain
things is delegated to a special group of persons.
Without
such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the
resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way
to a kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young,
if they were left to pick up their training in informal association
with others, since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered.
But
there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from
indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether
directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital.
These qualities compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of
available opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily
becomes remote and dead -- abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary
words of depreciation. What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade
societies is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into
character; it exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its
coming within urgent daily interests.
But
in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in
symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects.
Such material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the
ordinary standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this
measure is connection with practical concerns. Such material exists
in a world by itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought
and expression. There is the standing danger that the material of
formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools,
isolated from the subject matter of life- experience. The permanent
social interests are likely to be lost from view. Those which have
not been carried over into the structure of social life, but which
remain largely matters of technical information expressed in symbols,
are made conspicuous in schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of
education: the notion which ignores its social necessity and its
identity with all human association that affects conscious life, and
which identifies it with imparting information about remote matters
and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition
of literacy.
Hence
one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of education
has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between the
informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional, modes of
education. When the acquiring of information and of technical
intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social
disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning,
while schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in
learning -- that is, egoistic specialists. To avoid a split between
what men consciously know because they are aware of having learned it
by a specific job of learning, and what they unconsciously know
because they have absorbed it in the formation of their characters by
intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate task with
every development of special schooling.
Summary.
It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being. Since
this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life is a
self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to
physiological life, education is to social life. This education
consists primarily in transmission through communication.
Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a
common possession. It modifies the disposition of both the parties
who partake in it. That the ulterior significance of every mode of
human association lies in the contribution which it makes to the
improvement of the quality of experience is a fact most easily
recognized in dealing with the immature. That is to say, while every
social arrangement is educative in effect, the educative effect first
becomes an important part of the purpose of the association in
connection with the association of the older with the younger. As
societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of
formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. As formal
teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating
an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct
associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never
greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in
the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.
Chapter
Two
:
Education as a Social Function
1.
The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a community
or social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and
that this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of
the immature members of the group. By various agencies, unintentional
and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien
beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals.
Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.
All of these words mean that it implies attention to the conditions
of growth. We also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up -- words
which express the difference of level which education aims to cover.
Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or
bringing up. When we have the outcome of the process in mind, we
speak of education as shaping, forming, molding activity -- that is,
a shaping into the standard form of social activity. In this chapter
we are concerned with the general features of the way in which a
social group brings up its immature members into its own social form.
Since
what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience
till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the
social group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical
forming. Things can be physically transported in space; they may be
bodily conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically
extracted and inserted. How then are they communicated? Given the
impossibility of direct contagion or literal inculcation, our problem
is to discover the method by which the young assimilate the point of
view of the old, or the older bring the young into like-mindedness
with themselves. The answer, in general formulation, is: By means of
the action of the environment in calling out certain responses. The
required beliefs cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot
be plastered on. But the particular
medium in which an individual exists leads him to see and feel one
thing rather than another; it leads him to have certain plans in
order that he may act successfully with others; it strengthens some
beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval of
others. Thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of
behavior, a certain disposition of action. The words
"environment," "medium" denote something more
than surroundings which encompass an individual. They denote the
specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active
tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course, continuous with its
surroundings; but the environing circumstances do not, save
metaphorically, constitute an environment. For the inorganic being is
not concerned in the influences which affect it. On the other hand,
some things which are remote in space and time from a living
creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even
more truly than some of the things close to him. The things with
which a man varies are his genuine environment. Thus the activities
of the astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about
which he calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is
most intimately his environment. The environment of an antiquarian,
as an antiquarian, consists of the remote epoch of human life with
which he is concerned, and the relics, inscriptions, etc., by which
he establishes connections with that period.
In
brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or
hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a
living being. Water is the environment of a fish because it is
necessary to the fish's activities -- to its life. The north pole is
a significant element in the environment of an arctic explorer,
whether he succeeds in reaching it or not, because it defines his
activities, makes them what they distinctively are. Just because life
signifies not bare passive existence (supposing there is such a
thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what
enters into this activity as a sustaining or frustrating condition.
2.
The Social Environment. A being whose activities are associated with
others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do
depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations
of others. A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own
activities without taking the activities of others into account. For
they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his
tendencies. When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as
well try to imagine a business man doing business, buying and
selling, all by himself, as to conceive it possible to define the
activities of an individual in terms of his isolated actions. The
manufacturer moreover is as truly socially guided in his activities
when he is laying plans in the privacy of his own counting house as
when he is buying his raw material or selling his finished goods.
Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with
others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt
cooperative or hostile act.
What
we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium nurtures
its immature members. There is no great difficulty in seeing how it
shapes the external habits of action. Even dogs and horses have their
actions modified by association with human beings; they form
different habits because human beings are concerned with what they
do. Human beings control animals by controlling the natural stimuli
which influence them; by creating a certain environment in other
words. Food, bits and bridles, noises, vehicles, are used to direct
the ways in which the natural or instinctive responses of horses
occur. By operating steadily to call out certain acts, habits are
formed which function with the same uniformity as the original
stimuli. If a rat is put in a maze and finds food only by making a
given number of turns in a given sequence, his activity is gradually
modified till he habitually takes that course rather than another
when he is hungry.
Human
actions are modified in a like fashion. A burnt child dreads the
fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every time a child
touched a certain toy he got burned, the child would learn to avoid
that toy as automatically as he avoids touching fire. So far,
however, we are dealing with what may be called training in
distinction from educative teaching. The changes considered are in
outer action rather than in mental and emotional dispositions of
behavior. The distinction is not, however, a sharp one. The child
might conceivably generate in time a violent antipathy, not only to
that particular toy, but to the class of toys resembling it. The
aversion might even persist after he had forgotten about the original
burns; later on he might even invent some reason to account for his
seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases, altering the external
habit of action by changing the environment to affect the stimuli to
action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in the
action. Yet this does not always happen; a person trained to dodge a
threatening blow, dodges automatically with no corresponding thought
or emotion. We have to find, then, some differentia of training from
education.
A
clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really share in
the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the
horse to secure a result which is advantageous by making it
advantageous to the horse to perform the act -- he gets food, etc.
But the horse, presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains
interested in food, not in the service he is rendering. He is not a
partner in a shared activity. Were he to become a copartner, he
would, in engaging in the conjoint activity, have the same interest
in its accomplishment which others have. He would share their ideas
and emotions.
Now
in many cases -- too many cases -- the activity of the immature human
being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is
trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His
instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or
pleasure. But to get happiness or
to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a way agreeable to
others. In other cases, he really shares or participates in the
common activity. In this case, his original impulse is modified. He
not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of others, but, in
so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused in him that
animate the others. A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The
successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets
store, are connected with fighting and victory. The presence of this
medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then
in fact when he is strong enough. As he fights he wins approval and
advancement; as he refrains, he is disliked, ridiculed, shut out from
favorable recognition. It is not surprising that his original
belligerent tendencies and emotions are strengthened at the expense
of others, and that his ideas turn to things connected with war. Only
in this way can he become fully a recognized member of his group.
Thus his mental habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his
group.
If
we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we shall
perceive that the social medium neither implants certain desires and
ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular
habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a
blow. Setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and
tangible ways of acting is the first step. Making the individual a
sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he feels its
success as his success, its failure as his failure, is the completing
step. As soon as he is possessed by
the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to recognize
the special ends at which it aims and the means employed to secure
success. His beliefs and ideas, in other words, will take a form
similar to those of others in the group. He will also achieve pretty
much the same stock of knowledge since that knowledge is an
ingredient of his habitual pursuits.
The
importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief
cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from
one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an
idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus
imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process.
But learning from language will be found, when analyzed, to confirm
the principle just laid down. It would probably be admitted with
little hesitation that a child gets the idea of, say, a hat by using
it as other persons do; by covering the head with it, giving it to
others to wear, having it put on by others when going out, etc. But
it may be asked how this principle of shared activity applies to
getting through speech or reading the idea of, say, a Greek helmet,
where no direct use of any kind enters in. What shared activity is
there in learning from books about the discovery of America?
Since
language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about many
things, let us see how it works. The baby begins of course with mere
sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning, expressing, that is, no
idea. Sounds are just one kind of stimulus to direct response, some
having a soothing effect, others tending to make one jump, and so on.
The sound h-a-t would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a
seemingly inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection
with an action which is participated in by a number of people. When
the mother is taking the infant out of doors, she says "hat"
as she puts something on the baby's head. Being taken out becomes an
interest to the child; mother and child not only go out with each
other physically, but both are concerned in the going out; they enjoy
it in common. By conjunction with the other factors in activity the
sound "hat" soon gets the same meaning for the child that
it has for the parent; it becomes a sign of the activity into which
it enters. The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are
mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning
depends upon connection with a shared experience.
In
short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way that
the thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. And
they acquire the same meaning with the child which they have with the
adult because they are used in a common experience by both. The
guarantee for the same manner of use is found in the fact that the
thing and the sound are first employed in a joint activity, as a
means of setting up an active connection between the child and a
grownup. Similar ideas or meanings spring up because both persons are
engaged as partners in an action where what each does depends upon
and influences what the other does. If two savages were engaged in a
joint hunt for game, and a certain signal meant "move to the
right" to the one who uttered it, and "move to the left"
to the one who heard it, they obviously could not successfully carry
on their hunt together. Understanding one another means that objects,
including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to
carrying on a common pursuit.
After
sounds have got meaning through connection with other things employed
in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with other
like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for
which they stand are combined. Thus the words in which a child learns
about, say, the Greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were
understood) by use in an action having a common interest and end.
They now arouse a new meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads
to rehearse imaginatively the activities in which the helmet has its
use. For the time being, the one who understands the words "Greek
helmet" becomes mentally a partner with those who used the
helmet. He engages, through his imagination, in a shared activity. It
is not easy to get the full meaning of words. Most persons probably
stop with the idea that "helmet" denotes a queer kind of
headgear a people called the Greeks once wore. We conclude,
accordingly, that the use of language to convey and acquire ideas is
an extension and refinement of the principle that things gain meaning
by being used in a shared experience or joint action; in no sense
does it contravene that principle. When words do not enter as factors
into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they
operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or
intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but
there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning. Thus, for
example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act of
writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the
person performing the act will operate much as an automaton would
unless he realizes the meaning of what he does.
3.
The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that
social environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of
behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse
and strengthen certain impulses, that have certain purposes and
entail certain consequences. A
child growing up in a family of musicians will inevitably have
whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and, relatively,
stimulated more than other impulses which might have been awakened in
another environment. Save as he takes an interest in music and
gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he is
unable to share in the life of the group to which he belongs. Some
kinds of participation in the life of those with whom the individual
is connected are inevitable; with respect to them, the social
environment exercises an educative or formative influence
unconsciously and apart from any set purpose.
In
savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
(constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we have
spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the young
into the practices and beliefs of the group. Even in present-day
societies, it furnishes the basic nurture of even the most
insistently schooled youth. In accord with the interests and
occupations of the group, certain things become objects of high
esteem; others of aversion. Association does not create impulses or
affection and dislike, but it furnishes the objects to which they
attach themselves. The way our group or class does things tends to
determine the proper objects of attention, and thus to prescribe the
directions and limits of observation and memory. What
is strange or foreign (that is to say outside the activities of the
groups) tends to be morally forbidden and intellectually suspect.
It seems almost incredible to us, for example, that things which we
know very well could have escaped recognition in past ages. We
incline to account for it by attributing congenital stupidity to our
forerunners and by assuming superior native intelligence on our own
part. But the explanation is that their modes of life did not call
for attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other
things. Just as the senses require sensible objects to stimulate
them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and imagination do
not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the demands set up
by current social occupations. The main texture of disposition is
formed, independently of schooling, by such influences. What
conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the
capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of
their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity
more productive of meaning.
While
this "unconscious influence of
the environment" is so subtle and pervasive that it affects
every fiber of character and mind, it may be worth while to
specify a few directions in which its effect is most marked. First,
the habits of language. Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the
vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried
on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity. The
babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech habits
thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious
teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes
of speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into their really
native tongue. Secondly, manners. Example
is notoriously more potent than precept. Good manners come, as we
say, from good breeding or rather are good breeding; and breeding is
acquired by habitual action, in response to habitual stimuli, not by
conveying information. Despite the never ending play of
conscious correction and instruction, the
surrounding atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in
forming manners. And manners are but minor morals. Moreover,
in major morals, conscious instruction is likely to be efficacious
only in the degree in which it falls in with the general "walk
and conversation" of those who constitute the child's social
environment. Thirdly, good taste and esthetic appreciation. If the
eye is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of
form and color, a standard of taste naturally grows up. The effect of
a tawdry, unarranged, and over-decorated environment works for the
deterioration of taste, just as meager and barren surroundings starve
out the desire for beauty. Against such odds, conscious teaching can
hardly do more than convey second-hand information as to what others
think. Such taste never becomes spontaneous and personally engrained,
but remains a labored reminder of what those think to whom one has
been taught to look up. To say that the deeper standards of judgments
of value are framed by the situations into which a person habitually
enters is not so much to mention a fourth point, as it is to point
out a fusion of those already mentioned. We rarely recognize the
extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and
what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at
all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for
granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which
determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And
these habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just
those which have been formed in the constant give and take of
relationship with others.
4.
The School as a Special Environment. The chief importance of this
foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on
willy-nilly is to lead us to note that the only way in which adults
consciously control the kind of education which the immature get is
by controlling the environment in which they act, and hence think and
feel. We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the
environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or
whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great
difference. And any environment is a chance environment so far as its
educative influence is concerned unless it has been deliberately
regulated with reference to its educative effect. An intelligent home
differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life
and intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the
thought of their bearing upon the development of children. But
schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments
framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral
disposition of their members.
Roughly
speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are so
complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to
writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are
even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be
picked up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the
written form tends to select and record matters which are
comparatively foreign to everyday life. The achievements accumulated
from generation to generation are deposited in it even though some of
them have fallen temporarily out of use. Consequently as soon as a
community depends to any considerable extent upon what lies beyond
its own territory and its own immediate generation, it must rely upon
the set agency of schools to insure adequate transmission of all its
resources. To take an obvious illustration: The life of the ancient
Greeks and Romans has profoundly influenced our own, and yet the ways
in which they affect us do not present themselves on the surface of
our ordinary experiences. In similar fashion, peoples still existing,
but remote in space, British, Germans, Italians, directly concern our
own social affairs, but the nature of the interaction cannot be
understood without explicit statement and attention. In precisely
similar fashion, our daily associations cannot be trusted to make
clear to the young the part played in our activities by remote
physical energies, and by invisible structures. Hence a special mode
of social intercourse is instituted, the school, to care for such
matters.
This
mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific, as
compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. First, a
complex civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. It has
to be broken up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal,
in a gradual and graded way. The relationships of our present social
life are so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the
most favorable position could not readily share in many of the most
important of them. Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be
communicated to him, would not become a part of his own mental
disposition. There would be no seeing the trees because of the
forest. Business, politics, art, science, religion, would make all at
once a clamor for attention; confusion would be the outcome. The
first office of the social organ we call the school is to provide a
simplified environment. It selects the features which are fairly
fundamental and capable of being responded to by the young. Then it
establishes a progressive order, using the factors first acquired as
means of gaining insight into what is more complicated.
In
the second place, it is the business of the school environment to
eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing
environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a
purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but
at weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered
with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is
positively perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things
from the environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can
to counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. By
selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the
power of this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it
realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the
whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a
better future society. The school is its chief agency for the
accomplishment of this end.
In
the third place, it is the office of the school environment to
balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to
it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the
limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come
into living contact with a broader environment. Such words as
"society" and "community" are likely to be
misleading, for they have a tendency to make us think there is a
single thing corresponding to the single word. As a matter of fact, a
modern society is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each
household with its immediate extension of friends makes a society;
the village or street group of playmates is a community; each
business group, each club, is another. Passing beyond these more
intimate groups, there is in a country like our own a variety of
races, religious affiliations, economic divisions. Inside the modern
city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably
more communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations,
and forms of government or control, than existed in an entire
continent at an earlier epoch.
Each
such group exercises a formative influence on the active dispositions
of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's household of
thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative environments for
those who enter into their collective or conjoint activities, as
truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership, or a
political party. Each of them is a mode of associated or community
life, quite as much as is a family, a town, or a state. There are
also communities whose members have little or no direct contact with
one another, like the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the
members of the professional learned class scattered over the face of
the earth. For they have aims in common, and the activity of each
member is directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing.
In
the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical
matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own
territory, was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of
commerce, transportation, intercommunication, and emigration,
countries like the United States are composed of a combination of
different groups with different traditional customs. It is this
situation which has, perhaps more than any other one cause, forced
the demand for an educational institution which shall provide
something like a homogeneous and balanced environment for the young.
Only in this way can the centrifugal forces set up by juxtaposition
of different groups within one and the same political unit be
counteracted. The intermingling in the school of youth of different
races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new
and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a
unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the
members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of
the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of
the common and balanced appeal.
The
school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition
of each individual the diverse influences of the various social
environments into which he enters. One code prevails in the family;
another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth,
in the religious association. As a person passes from one of the
environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and
is in danger of being split into a being having different standards
of judgment and emotion for different occasions. This danger imposes
upon the school a steadying and integrating office.
Summary.
The development within the young of the attitudes and dispositions
necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society cannot
take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and knowledge.
It takes place through the intermediary of the environment. The
environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are
concerned in the execution of the activity characteristic of a living
being. The social environment consists of all the activities of
fellow beings that are bound up in the carrying on of the activities
of any one of its members. It is truly educative in its effect in the
degree in which an individual shares or participates in some conjoint
activity. By doing his share in the associated activity, the
individual appropriates the purpose which actuates it, becomes
familiar with its methods and subject matters, acquires needed skill,
and is saturated with its emotional spirit.
The
deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition comes,
without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the
activities of the various groups to which they may belong. As a
society becomes more complex, however, it is found necessary to
provide a special social environment which shall especially look
after nurturing the capacities of the immature. Three of the more
important functions of this special environment are: simplifying and
ordering the factors of the disposition it is wished to develop;
purifying and idealizing the existing social customs; creating a
wider and better balanced environment than that by which the young
would be likely, if left to themselves, to be influenced.
Chapter
Three
:
Education as Direction
1.
The Environment as Directive.
We
now pass to one of the special forms which the general function of
education assumes: namely, that of direction, control, or guidance.
Of these three words, direction, control, and guidance, the last best
conveys the idea of assisting through cooperation the natural
capacities of the individuals guided; control conveys rather the
notion of an energy brought to bear from without and meeting some
resistance from the one controlled; direction is a more neutral term
and suggests the fact that the active tendencies of those directed
are led in a certain continuous course, instead of dispersing
aimlessly. Direction expresses the basic function, which tends at one
extreme to become a guiding assistance and at another, a regulation
or ruling. But in any case, we must carefully avoid a meaning
sometimes read into the term "control." It is sometimes
assumed, explicitly or unconsciously, that an individual's tendencies
are naturally purely individualistic or egoistic, and thus
antisocial. Control then denotes the process by which he is brought
to subordinate his natural impulses to public or common ends. Since,
by conception, his own nature is quite alien to this process and
opposes it rather than helps it, control has in this view a flavor of
coercion or compulsion about it. Systems of government and theories
of the state have been built upon this notion, and it has seriously
affected educational ideas and practices. But there is no ground for
any such view. Individuals are certainly interested, at times, in
having their own way, and their own way may go contrary to the ways
of others. But they are also interested, and chiefly interested upon
the whole, in entering into the activities of others and taking part
in conjoint and cooperative doings. Otherwise, no such thing as a
community would be possible. And there would not even be any one
interested in furnishing the policeman to keep a semblance of harmony
unless he thought that thereby he could gain some personal advantage.
Control, in truth, means only an emphatic form of direction of
powers, and covers the regulation gained by an individual through his
own efforts quite as much as that brought about when others take the
lead.
In
general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite
it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object. Put the other way
around, a response is not just a re-action, a protest, as it were,
against being disturbed; it is, as the word indicates, an answer. It
meets the stimulus, and corresponds with it. There is an adaptation
of the stimulus and response to each other. A light is the stimulus
to the eye to see something, and the business of the eye is to see.
If the eyes are open and there is light, seeing occurs; the stimulus
is but a condition of the fulfillment of the proper function of the
organ, not an outside interruption. To some extent, then, all
direction or control is a guiding of activity to its own end; it is
an assistance in doing fully what some organ is already tending to
do.
This
general statement needs, however, to be qualified in two respects. In
the first place, except in the case of a small number of instincts,
the stimuli to which an immature human being is subject are not
sufficiently definite to call out, in the beginning, specific
responses. There is always a great deal of superfluous energy
aroused. This energy may be wasted, going aside from the point; it
may also go against the successful performance of an act. It does
harm by getting in the way. Compare the behavior of a beginner in
riding a bicycle with that of the expert. There is little axis of
direction in the energies put forth; they are largely dispersive and
centrifugal. Direction involves a focusing and fixating of action in
order that it may be truly a response, and this requires an
elimination of unnecessary and confusing movements. In the second
place, although no activity can be produced in which the person does
not cooperate to some extent, yet a response may be of a kind which
does not fit into the sequence and continuity of action. A person
boxing may dodge a particular blow successfully, but in such a way as
to expose himself the next instant to a still harder blow. Adequate
control means that the successive acts are brought into a continuous
order; each act not only meets its immediate stimulus but helps the
acts which follow.
In
short, direction is both simultaneous and successive. At a given
time, it requires that, from all the tendencies that are partially
called out, those be selected which center energy upon the point of
need. Successively, it requires that each act be balanced with those
which precede and come after, so that order of activity is achieved.
Focusing and ordering are thus the two aspects of direction, one
spatial, the other temporal. The first insures hitting the mark; the
second keeps the balance required for further action. Obviously, it
is not possible to separate them in practice as we have distinguished
them in idea. Activity must be centered at a given time in such a way
as to prepare for what comes next. The problem of the immediate
response is complicated by one's having to be on the lookout for
future occurrences.
Two
conclusions emerge from these general statements. On the one hand,
purely external direction is impossible. The environment can at most
only supply stimuli to call out responses. These responses proceed
from tendencies already possessed by the individual. Even when a
person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats
work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not,
or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has
no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see
who has no eyes. While the customs and rules of adults furnish
stimuli which direct as well as evoke the activities of the young,
the young, after all, participate in the direction which their
actions finally take. In the strict sense, nothing can be forced upon
them or into them. To overlook this fact means to distort and pervert
human nature. To take into account the contribution made by the
existing instincts and habits of those directed is to direct them
economically and wisely. Speaking accurately, all direction is but
re-direction; it shifts the activities already going on into another
channel. Unless one is cognizant of the energies which are already in
operation, one's attempts at direction will almost surely go amiss.
On
the other hand, the control afforded by the customs and regulations
of others may be short-sighted. It may accomplish its immediate
effect, but at the expense of throwing the subsequent action of the
person out of balance. A threat may, for example, prevent a person
from doing something to which he is naturally inclined by arousing
fear of disagreeable consequences if he persists. But he may be left
in the position which exposes him later on to influences which will
lead him to do even worse things. His instincts of cunning and
slyness may be aroused, so that things henceforth appeal to him on
the side of evasion and trickery more than would otherwise have been
the case. Those engaged in directing the actions of others are always
in danger of overlooking the importance of the sequential development
of those they direct.
2.
Modes of Social Direction. Adults are naturally most conscious of
directing the conduct of others when they are immediately aiming so
to do. As a rule, they have such an aim consciously when they find
themselves resisted; when others are doing things they do not wish
them to do. But the more permanent and influential modes of control
are those which operate from moment to moment continuously without
such deliberate intention on our part.
1.
When others are not doing what we would like them to or are
threatening disobedience, we are most conscious of the need of
controlling them and of the influences by which they are controlled.
In such cases, our control becomes most direct, and at this point we
are most likely to make the mistakes just spoken of. We are even
likely to take the influence of superior force for control,
forgetting that while we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him
drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we
cannot make him penitent. In all such cases of immediate action upon
others, we need to discriminate between physical results and moral
results. A person may be in such a condition that forcible feeding or
enforced confinement is necessary for his own good. A child may have
to be snatched with roughness away from a fire so that he shall not
be burnt. But no improvement of disposition, no educative effect,
need follow. A harsh and commanding tone may be effectual in keeping
a child away from the fire, and the same desirable physical effect
will follow as if he had been snatched away. But there may be no more
obedience of a moral sort in one case than in the other. A man can be
prevented from breaking into other persons' houses by shutting him
up, but shutting him up may not alter his disposition to commit
burglary. When we confuse a physical with an educative result, we
always lose the chance of enlisting the person's own participating
disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing
within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way.
In
general, the occasion for the more conscious acts of control should
be limited to acts which are so instinctive or impulsive that the one
performing them has no means of foreseeing their outcome. If a person
cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of
understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more
experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently.
In such a state, every act is alike to him. Whatever moves him does
move him, and that is all there is to it. In some cases, it is well
to permit him to experiment, and to discover the consequences for
himself in order that he may act intelligently next time under
similar circumstances. But some courses of action are too
discommoding and obnoxious to others to allow of this course being
pursued. Direct disapproval is now resorted to. Shaming, ridicule,
disfavor, rebuke, and punishment are used. Or contrary tendencies in
the child are appealed to to divert him from his troublesome line of
behavior. His sensitiveness to approbation, his hope of winning favor
by an agreeable act, are made use of to induce action in another
direction.
2.
These methods of control are so obvious (because so intentionally
employed) that it would hardly be worth while to mention them if it
were not that notice may now be taken, by way of contrast, of the
other more important and permanent mode of control. This other method
resides in the ways in which persons, with whom the immature being is
associated, use things; the instrumentalities with which they
accomplish their own ends. The very existence of the social medium in
which an individual lives, moves, and has his being is the standing
effective agency of directing his activity.
This
fact makes it necessary for us to examine in greater detail what is
meant by the social environment. We are given to separating from each
other the physical and social environments in which we live. The
separation is responsible on one hand for an exaggeration of the
moral importance of the more direct or personal modes of control of
which we have been speaking; and on the other hand for an
exaggeration, in current psychology and philosophy, of the
intellectual possibilities of contact with a purely physical
environment. There is not, in fact, any such thing as the direct
influence of one human being on another apart from use of the
physical environment as an intermediary. A smile, a frown, a rebuke,
a word of warning or encouragement, all involve some physical change.
Otherwise, the attitude of one would not get over to alter the
attitude of another. Comparatively speaking, such modes of influence
may be regarded as personal. The physical medium is reduced to a mere
means of personal contact. In contrast with such direct modes of
mutual influence, stand associations in common pursuits involving the
use of things as means and as measures of results. Even if the mother
never told her daughter to help her, or never rebuked her for not
helping, the child would be subjected to direction in her activities
by the mere fact that she was engaged, along with the parent, in the
household life. Imitation, emulation, the need of working together,
enforce control.
If
the mother hands the child something needed, the latter must reach
the thing in order to get it. Where there is giving there must be
taking. The way the child handles the thing after it is got, the use
to which it is put, is surely influenced by the fact that the child
has watched the mother. When the child sees the parent looking for
something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to
give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances,
to receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of
daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and
enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young.
In
saying this, we are only repeating what was said previously about
participating in a joint activity as the chief way of forming
disposition. We have explicitly added, however, the recognition of
the part played in the joint activity by the use of things. The
philosophy of learning has been unduly dominated by a false
psychology. It is frequently stated that a person learns by merely
having the qualities of things impressed upon his mind through the
gateway of the senses. Having received a store of sensory
impressions, association or some power of mental synthesis is
supposed to combine them into ideas--into things with a meaning. An
object, stone, orange, tree, chair, is supposed to convey different
impressions of color, shape, size, hardness, smell, taste, etc.,
which aggregated together constitute the characteristic meaning of
each thing. But as matter of fact, it is the characteristic use to
which the thing is put, because of its specific qualities, which
supplies the meaning with which it is identified. A chair is a thing
which is put to one use; a table, a thing which is employed for
another purpose; an orange is a thing which costs so much, which is
grown in warm climes, which is eaten, and when eaten has an agreeable
odor and refreshing taste, etc.
The
difference between an adjustment to a physical stimulus and a mental
act is that the latter involves response to a thing in its meaning;
the former does not. A noise may make me jump without my mind being
implicated. When I hear a noise and run and get water and put out a
blaze, I respond intelligently; the sound meant fire, and fire meant
need of being extinguished. I bump into a stone, and kick it to one
side purely physically. I put it to one side for fear some one will
stumble upon it, intelligently; I respond to a meaning which the
thing has. I am startled by a thunderclap whether I recognize it or
not -- more likely, if I do not recognize it. But if I say, either
out loud or to myself, that is thunder, I respond to the disturbance
as a meaning. My behavior has a mental quality. When things have a
meaning for us, we mean (intend, propose) what we do: when they do
not, we act blindly, unconsciously, unintelligently.
In
both kinds of responsive adjustment, our activities are directed or
controlled. But in the merely blind response, direction is also
blind. There may be training, but there is no education. Repeated
responses to recurrent stimuli may fix a habit of acting in a certain
way. All of us have many habits of whose import we are quite unaware,
since they were formed without our knowing what we were about.
Consequently they possess us, rather than we them. They move us; they
control us. Unless we become aware of what they accomplish, and pass
judgment upon the worth of the result, we do not control them. A
child might be made to bow every time he met a certain person by
pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would finally become
automatic. It would not, however, be an act of recognition or
deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view --
as having a certain meaning. And not till he knew what he was about
and performed the act for the sake of its meaning could he be said to
be "brought up" or educated to act in a certain way. To
have an idea of a thing is thus not just to get certain sensations
from it. It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its
place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift
and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us and of
our action upon it. To have the same ideas about things which others
have, to be like-minded with them, and thus to be really members of a
social group, is therefore to attach the same meanings to things and
to acts which others attach. Otherwise, there is no common
understanding, and no community life. But in a shared activity, each
person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and
vice-versa. That is, the activity of each is placed in the same
inclusive situation. To pull at a rope at which others happen to be
pulling is not a shared or conjoint activity, unless the pulling is
done with knowledge that others are pulling and for the sake of
either helping or hindering what they are doing. A pin may pass in
the course of its manufacture through the hands of many persons. But
each may do his part without knowledge of what others do or without
any reference to what they do; each may operate simply for the sake
of a separate result--his own pay. There is, in this case, no common
consequence to which the several acts are referred, and hence no
genuine intercourse or association, in spite of juxtaposition, and in
spite of the fact that their respective doings contribute to a single
outcome. But if each views the consequences of his own acts as having
a bearing upon what others are doing and takes into account the
consequences of their behavior upon himself, then there is a common
mind; a common intent in behavior. There is an understanding set up
between the different contributors; and this common understanding
controls the action of each. Suppose that conditions were so arranged
that one person automatically caught a ball and then threw it to
another person who caught and automatically returned it; and that
each so acted without knowing where the ball came from or went to.
Clearly, such action would be without point or meaning. It might be
physically controlled, but it would not be socially directed. But
suppose that each becomes aware of what the other is doing, and
becomes interested in the other's action and thereby interested in
what he is doing himself as connected with the action of the other.
The behavior of each would then be intelligent; and socially
intelligent and guided. Take one more example of a less imaginary
kind. An infant is hungry, and cries while food is prepared in his
presence. If he does not connect his own state with what others are
doing, nor what they are doing with his own satisfaction, he simply
reacts with increasing impatience to his own increasing discomfort.
He is physically controlled by his own organic state. But when he
makes a back and forth reference, his whole attitude changes. He
takes an interest, as we say; he takes note and watches what others
are doing. He no longer reacts just to his own hunger, but behaves in
the light of what others are doing for its prospective satisfaction.
In that way, he also no longer just gives way to hunger without
knowing it, but he notes, or recognizes, or identifies his own state.
It becomes an object for him. His attitude toward it becomes in some
degree intelligent. And in such noting of the meaning of the actions
of others and of his own state, he is socially directed.
It
will be recalled that our main proposition had two sides. One of them
has now been dealt with: namely, that physical things do not
influence mind (or form ideas and beliefs) except as they are
implicated in action for prospective consequences. The other point is
persons modify one another's dispositions only through the special
use they make of physical conditions. Consider first the case of
so-called expressive movements to which others are sensitive;
blushing, smiling, frowning, clinching of fists, natural gestures of
all kinds. In themselves, these are not expressive. They are organic
parts of a person's attitude. One does not blush to show modesty or
embarrassment to others, but because the capillary circulation alters
in response to stimuli. But others use the blush, or a slightly
perceptible tightening of the muscles of a person with whom they are
associated, as a sign of the state in which that person finds
himself, and as an indication of what course to pursue. The frown
signifies an imminent rebuke for which one must prepare, or an
uncertainty and hesitation which one must, if possible, remove by
saying or doing something to restore confidence. A man at some
distance is waving his arms wildly. One has only to preserve an
attitude of detached indifference, and the motions of the other
person will be on the level of any remote physical change which we
happen to note. If we have no concern or interest, the waving of the
arms is as meaningless to us as the gyrations of the arms of a
windmill. But if interest is aroused, we begin to participate. We
refer his action to something we are doing ourselves or that we
should do. We have to judge the meaning of his act in order to decide
what to do. Is he beckoning for help? Is he warning us of an
explosion to be set off, against which we should guard ourselves? In
one case, his action means to run toward him; in the other case, to
run away. In any case, it is the change he effects in the physical
environment which is a sign to us of how we should conduct ourselves.
Our action is socially controlled because we endeavor to refer what
we are to do to the same situation in which he is acting.
Language
is, as we have already seen (ante, p. 15) a case of this joint
reference of our own action and that of another to a common
situation. Hence its unrivaled significance as a means of social
direction. But language would not be this efficacious instrument were
it not that it takes place upon a background of coarser and more
tangible use of physical means to accomplish results. A child sees
persons with whom he lives using chairs, hats, tables, spades, saws,
plows, horses, money in certain ways. If he has any share at all in
what they are doing, he is led thereby to use things in the same way,
or to use other things in a way which will fit in. If a chair is
drawn up to a table, it is a sign that he is to sit in it; if a
person extends his right hand, he is to extend his; and so on in a
never ending stream of detail. The prevailing habits of using the
products of human art and the raw materials of nature constitute by
all odds the deepest and most pervasive mode of social control. When
children go to school, they already have "minds" -- they
have knowledge and dispositions of judgment which may be appealed to
through the use of language. But these "minds" are the
organized habits of intelligent response which they have previously
required by putting things to use in connection with the way other
persons use things. The control is inescapable; it saturates
disposition. The net outcome of the discussion is that the
fundamental means of control is not personal but intellectual. It is
not "moral" in the sense that a person is moved by direct
personal appeal from others, important as is this method at critical
junctures. It consists in the habits of understanding, which are set
up in using objects in correspondence with others, whether by way of
cooperation and assistance or rivalry and competition. Mind as a
concrete thing is precisely the power to understand things in terms
of the use made of them; a socialized mind is the power to understand
them in terms of the use to which they are turned in joint or shared
situations. And mind in this sense is the method of social control.
3.
Imitation and Social Psychology. We have already noted the defects of
a psychology of learning which places the individual mind naked, as
it were, in contact with physical objects, and which believes that
knowledge, ideas, and beliefs accrue from their interaction. Only
comparatively recently has the predominating influence of association
with fellow beings in the formation of mental and moral disposition
been perceived. Even now it is usually treated as a kind of adjunct
to an alleged method of learning by direct contact with things, and
as merely supplementing knowledge of the physical world with
knowledge of persons. The purport of our discussion is that such a
view makes an absurd and impossible separation between persons and
things. Interaction with things may form habits of external
adjustment. But it leads to activity having a meaning and conscious
intent only when things are used to produce a result. And the only
way one person can modify the mind of another is by using physical
conditions, crude or artificial, so as to evoke some answering
activity from him. Such are our two main conclusions. It is desirable
to amplify and enforce them by placing them in contrast with the
theory which uses a psychology of supposed direct relationships of
human beings to one another as an adjunct to the psychology of the
supposed direct relation of an individual to physical objects. In
substance, this so-called social psychology has been built upon the
notion of imitation. Consequently, we shall discuss the nature and
role of imitation in the formation of mental disposition.
According
to this theory, social control of individuals rests upon the
instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of
others. The latter serve as models. The imitative instinct is so
strong that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns
set by others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behavior.
According to our theory, what is here called imitation is a
misleading name for partaking with others in a use of things which
leads to consequences of common interest. The basic error in the
current notion of imitation is that it puts the cart before the
horse. It takes an effect for the cause of the effect. There can be
no doubt that individuals in forming a social group are like-minded;
they understand one another. They tend to act with the same
controlling ideas, beliefs, and intentions, given similar
circumstances. Looked at from without, they might be said to be
engaged in "imitating" one another. In the sense that they
are doing much the same sort of thing in much the same sort of way,
this would be true enough. But "imitation" throws no light
upon why they so act; it repeats the fact as an explanation of
itself. It is an explanation of the same order as the famous saying
that opium puts men to sleep because of its dormitive power.
Objective
likeness of acts and the mental satisfaction found in being in
conformity with others are baptized by the name imitation. This
social fact is then taken for a psychological force, which produced
the likeness. A considerable portion of what is called imitation is
simply the fact that persons being alike in structure respond in the
same way to like stimuli. Quite independently of imitation, men on
being insulted get angry and attack the insulter. This statement may
be met by citing the undoubted fact that response to an insult takes
place in different ways in groups having different customs. In one
group, it may be met by recourse to fisticuffs, in another by a
challenge to a duel, in a third by an exhibition of contemptuous
disregard. This happens, so it is said, because the model set for
imitation is different. But there is no need to appeal to imitation.
The mere fact that customs are different means that the actual
stimuli to behavior are different. Conscious instruction plays a
part; prior approvals and disapprovals have a large influence. Still
more effective is the fact that unless an individual acts in the way
current in his group, he is literally out of it. He can associate
with others on intimate and equal terms only by behaving in the way
in which they behave. The pressure that comes from the fact that one
is let into the group action by acting in one way and shut out by
acting in another way is unremitting. What is called the effect of
imitation is mainly the product of conscious instruction and of the
selective influence exercised by the unconscious confirmations and
ratifications of those with whom one associates.
Suppose
that some one rolls a ball to a child; he catches it and rolls it
back, and the game goes on. Here the stimulus is not just the sight
of the ball, or the sight of the other rolling it. It is the
situation -- the game which is playing. The response is not merely
rolling the ball back; it is rolling it back so that the other one
may catch and return it, -- that the game may continue. The "pattern"
or model is not the action of the other person. The whole situation
requires that each should adapt his action in view of what the other
person has done and is to do. Imitation may come in but its role is
subordinate. The child has an interest on his own account; he wants
to keep it going. He may then note how the other person catches and
holds the ball in order to improve his own acts. He imitates the
means of doing, not the end or thing to be done. And he imitates the
means because he wishes, on his own behalf, as part of his own
initiative, to take an effective part in the game. One has only to
consider how completely the child is dependent from his earliest days
for successful execution of his purposes upon fitting his acts into
those of others to see what a premium is put upon behaving as others
behave, and of developing an understanding of them in order that he
may so behave. The pressure for likemindedness in action from this
source is so great that it is quite superfluous to appeal to
imitation. As matter of fact, imitation of ends, as distinct from
imitation of means which help to reach ends, is a superficial and
transitory affair which leaves little effect upon disposition. Idiots
are especially apt at this kind of imitation; it affects outward acts
but not the meaning of their performance. When we find children
engaging in this sort of mimicry, instead of encouraging them (as we
would do if it were an important means of social control) we are more
likely to rebuke them as apes, monkeys, parrots, or copy cats.
Imitation of means of accomplishment is, on the other hand, an
intelligent act. It involves close observation, and judicious
selection of what will enable one to do better something which he
already is trying to do. Used for a purpose, the imitative instinct
may, like any other instinct, become a factor in the development of
effective action.
This
excursus should, accordingly, have the effect of reinforcing the
conclusion that genuine social control means the formation of a
certain mental disposition; a way of understanding objects, events,
and acts which enables one to participate effectively in associated
activities. Only the friction engendered by meeting resistance from
others leads to the view that it takes place by forcing a line of
action contrary to natural inclinations. Only failure to take account
of the situations in which persons are mutually concerned (or
interested in acting responsively to one another) leads to treating
imitation as the chief agent in promoting social control.
4.
Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group perpetuate
savagery, and a civilized group civilization? Doubtless the first
answer to occur to mind is because savages are savages; being of
low-grade intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. But careful
study has made it doubtful whether their native capacities are
appreciably inferior to those of civilized man. It has made it
certain that native differences are not sufficient to account for the
difference in culture. In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an
effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. Their
social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention
and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development.
Even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention,
primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and imagination
upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. Lack of control of
natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter
into associated behavior. Only a small number of natural resources
are utilized and they are not worked for what they are worth. The
advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural forces
and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of action,
into means for securing ends. We start not so much with superior
capacities as with superior stimuli for evocation and direction of
our capacities. The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have
weighted stimuli. Prior human efforts have made over natural
conditions. As they originally existed they were indifferent to human
endeavors. Every domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every
utensil, every appliance, every manufactured article, every esthetic
decoration, every work of art means a transformation of conditions
once hostile or indifferent to characteristic human activities into
friendly and favoring conditions. Because the activities of children
today are controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children
are able to traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed
slow, tortured ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the
successes which have preceded.
Stimuli
conducive to economical and effective response, such as our system of
roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat, light,
and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every
purpose, do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a
civilization. But the uses to which they are put are civilization,
and without the things the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise
necessarily devoted to wresting a livelihood from a grudging
environment and securing a precarious protection against its
inclemencies is freed. A body of knowledge is transmitted, the
legitimacy of which is guaranteed by the fact that the physical
equipment in which it is incarnated leads to results that square with
the other facts of nature. Thus these appliances of art supply a
protection, perhaps our chief protection, against a recrudescence of
these superstitious beliefs, those fanciful myths and infertile
imaginings about nature in which so much of the best intellectual
power of the past has been spent. If we add one other factor, namely,
that such appliances be not only used, but used in the interests of a
truly shared or associated life, then the appliances become the
positive resources of civilization. If Greece, with a scant tithe of
our material resources, achieved a worthy and noble intellectual and
artistic career, it is because Greece operated for social ends such
resources as it had. But whatever the situation, whether one of
barbarism or civilization, whether one of stinted control of physical
forces, or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet made
tributary to a shared experience, things as they enter into action
furnish the educative conditions of daily life and direct the
formation of mental and moral disposition.
Intentional
education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially selected
environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials and
method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. Since
language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected
to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life --
physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming
social tools -- it is appropriate that language should play a large
part compared with other appliances. By it we are led to share
vicariously in past human experience, thus widening and enriching the
experience of the present. We are enabled, symbolically and
imaginatively, to anticipate situations. In countless ways, language
condenses meanings that record social outcomes and presage social
outlooks. So significant is it of a liberal share in what is worth
while in life that unlettered and uneducated have become almost
synonymous.
The
emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its
dangers -- dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in
practice. Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring
in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that
they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an
affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and
constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in
practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due
to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached;
it is lectured; it is written about. But its enactment into practice
requires that the school environment be equipped with agencies for
doing, with tools and physical materials, to an extent rarely
attained. It requires that methods of instruction and administration
be modified to allow and to secure direct and continuous occupations
with things. Not that the use of language as an educational resource
should lessen; but that its use should be more vital and fruitful by
having its normal connection with shared activities. "These
things ought ye to have done, and not to have left the others
undone." And for the school "these things" mean
equipment with the instrumentalities of cooperative or joint
activity.
For
when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in
the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish,
a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless
go to school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning
occurs most adequately when it is made a separate conscious business.
When treating it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the
social sense which comes from sharing in an activity of common
concern and value, the effort at isolated intellectual learning
contradicts its own aim. We may secure motor activity and sensory
excitation by keeping an individual by himself, but we cannot thereby
get him to understand the meaning which things have in the life of
which he is a part. We may secure technical specialized ability in
algebra, Latin, or botany, but not the kind of intelligence which
directs ability to useful ends. Only by engaging in a joint activity,
where one person's use of material and tools is consciously referred
to the use other persons are making of their capacities and
appliances, is a social direction of disposition attained.
Summary.
The natural or native impulses of the young do not agree with the
life-customs of the group into which they are born. Consequently they
have to be directed or guided. This control is not the same thing as
physical compulsion; it consists in centering the impulses acting at
any one time upon some specific end and in introducing an order of
continuity into the sequence of acts. The action of others is always
influenced by deciding what stimuli shall call out their actions. But
in some cases as in commands, prohibitions, approvals, and
disapprovals, the stimuli proceed from persons with a direct view to
influencing action. Since in such cases we are most conscious of
controlling the action of others, we are likely to exaggerate the
importance of this sort of control at the expense of a more permanent
and effective method. The basic control resides in the nature of the
situations in which the young take part. In social situations the
young have to refer their way of acting to what others are doing and
make it fit in. This directs their action to a common result, and
gives an understanding common to the participants. For all mean the
same thing, even when performing different acts. This common
understanding of the means and ends of action is the essence of
social control. It is indirect, or emotional and intellectual, not
direct or personal. Moreover it is intrinsic to the disposition of
the person, not external and coercive. To achieve this internal
control through identity of interest and understanding is the
business of education. While books and conversation can do much,
these agencies are usually relied upon too exclusively. Schools
require for their full efficiency more opportunity for conjoint
activities in which those instructed take part, so that they may
acquire a social sense of their own powers and of the materials and
appliances used.
Chapter
Four
:
Education as Growth
1.
The Conditions of Growth.
In
directing the activities of the young, society determines its own
future in determining that of the young. Since the young at a given
time will at some later date compose the society of that period, the
latter's nature will largely turn upon the direction children's
activities were given at an earlier period. This cumulative movement
of action toward a later result is what is meant by growth.
The
primary condition of growth is immaturity. This may seem to be a mere
truism -- saying that a being can develop only in some point in which
he is undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the word
immaturity means something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is
noteworthy that the terms "capacity" and "potentiality"
have a double meaning, one sense being negative, the other positive.
Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like the capacity of a quart
measure. We may mean by potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent
state -- a capacity to become something different under external
influences. But we also mean by capacity an ability, a power; and by
potentiality potency, force. Now when we say that immaturity means
the possibility of growth, we are not referring to absence of powers
which may exist at a later time; we express a force positively
present -- the ability to develop.
Our
tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something
which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to
regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat
it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as
a fixed standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not,
and will not have till he becomes a man. This comparative standpoint
is legitimate enough for some purposes, but if we make it final, the
question arises whether we are not guilty of an overweening
presumption. Children, if they could express themselves articulately
and sincerely, would tell a different tale; and there is excellent
adult authority for the conviction that for certain moral and
intellectual purposes adults must become as little children. The
seriousness of the assumption of the negative quality of the
possibilities of immaturity is apparent when we reflect that it sets
up as an ideal and standard a static end. The fulfillment of growing
is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is to say, an Ungrowth,
something which is no longer growing. The futility of the assumption
is seen in the fact that every adult resents the imputation of having
no further possibilities of growth; and so far as he finds that they
are closed to him mourns the fact as evidence of loss, instead of
falling back on the achieved as adequate manifestation of power. Why
an unequal measure for child and man?
Taken
absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a
positive force or ability, -- the pouter to grow. We do not have to
draw out or educe positive activities from a child, as some
educational doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are
already eager and impassioned activities. Growth is not something
done to them; it is something they do. The positive and constructive
aspect of possibility gives the key to understanding the two chief
traits of immaturity, dependence and plasticity.
(1)
It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive,
still more absurd as a power. Yet if helplessness were all there were
in dependence, no development could ever take place. A merely
impotent being has to be carried, forever, by others. The fact that
dependence is accompanied by growth in ability, not by an ever
increasing lapse into parasitism, suggests that it is already
something constructive. Being merely sheltered by others would not
promote growth. For
(2)
it would only build a wall around impotence. With reference to the
physical world, the child is helpless. He lacks at birth and for a
long time thereafter power to make his way physically, to make his
own living. If he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive
an hour. On this side his helplessness is almost complete. The young
of the brutes are immeasurably his superiors. He is physically weak
and not able to turn the strength which he possesses to coping with
the physical environment.
1.
The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however,
some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from
an early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately
bound up with the life of those about them. They are compelled, so to
speak, to have physical gifts because they are lacking in social
gifts. Human infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical
incapacity just because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk
and think as if they simply happened to be physically in a social
environment; as if social forces exclusively existed in the adults
who take care of them, they being passive recipients. If it were said
that children are themselves marvelously endowed with power to enlist
the cooperative attention of others, this would be thought to be a
backhanded way of saying that others are marvelously attentive to the
needs of children. But observation shows that children are gifted
with an equipment of the first order for social intercourse. Few
grown-up persons retain all of the flexible and sensitive ability of
children to vibrate sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of
those about them. Inattention to physical things (going with
incapacity to control them) is accompanied by a corresponding
intensification of interest and attention as to the doings of people.
The native mechanism of the child and his impulses all tend to facile
social responsiveness. The statement that children, before
adolescence, are egotistically self-centered, even if it were true,
would not contradict the truth of this statement. It would simply
indicate that their social responsiveness is employed on their own
behalf, not that it does not exist. But the statement is not true as
matter of fact. The facts which are cited in support of the alleged
pure egoism of children really show the intensity and directness with
which they go to their mark. If the ends which form the mark seem
narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because adults (by means of
a similar engrossment in their day) have mastered these ends, which
have consequently ceased to interest them. Most of the remainder of
children's alleged native egoism is simply an egoism which runs
counter to an adult's egoism. To a grown-up person who is too
absorbed in his own affairs to take an interest in children's
affairs, children doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own
affairs.
From
a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a
weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that
increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of
an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more
self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often
makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to
develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone -- an
unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the
remediable suffering of the world.
2.
The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different from
the plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a capacity to take on
change of form in accord with external pressure. It lies near the
pliable elasticity by which some persons take on the color of their
surroundings while retaining their own bent. But it is something
deeper than this. It is essentially the ability to learn from
experience; the power to retain from one experience something which
is of avail in coping with the difficulties of a later situation.
This means power to modify actions on the basis of the results of
prior experiences, the power to develop dispositions. Without it, the
acquisition of habits is impossible.
It
is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and
especially the human young, have to learn to utilize their
instinctive reactions. The human being is born with a greater number
of instinctive tendencies than other animals. But the instincts of
the lower animals perfect themselves for appropriate action at an
early period after birth, while most of those of the human infant are
of little account just as they stand. An original specialized power
of adjustment secures immediate efficiency, but, like a railway
ticket, it is good for one route only. A being who, in order to use
his eyes, ears, hands, and legs, has to experiment in making varied
combinations of their reactions, achieves a control that is flexible
and varied. A chick, for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food
in a few hours after hatching. This means that definite coordinations
of activities of the eyes in seeing and of the body and head in
striking are perfected in a few trials. An infant requires about six
months to be able to gauge with approximate accuracy the action in
reaching which will coordinate with his visual activities; to be
able, that is, to tell whether he can reach a seen object and just
how to execute the reaching. As a result, the chick is limited by the
relative perfection of its original endowment. The infant has the
advantage of the multitude of instinctive tentative reactions and of
the experiences that accompany them, even though he is at a temporary
disadvantage because they cross one another. In learning an action,
instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity learns to
vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them, according to
change of circumstances. A possibility of continuing progress is
opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed
good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact
that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to
learn.
The
importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and variable
control has been summed up in the doctrine of the significance of
prolonged infancy. 1 This prolongation is significant from the
standpoint of the adult members of the group as well as from that of
the young. The presence of dependent and learning beings is a
stimulus to nurture and affection. The need for constant continued
care was probably a chief means in transforming temporary
cohabitations into permanent unions. It certainly was a chief
influence in forming habits of affectionate and sympathetic
watchfulness; that constructive interest in the well-being of others
which is essential to associated life. Intellectually, this moral
development meant the introduction of many new objects of attention;
it stimulated foresight and planning for the future. Thus there is a
reciprocal influence. Increasing complexity of social life requires a
longer period of infancy in which to acquire the needed powers; this
prolongation of dependence means prolongation of plasticity, or power
of acquiring variable and novel modes of control. Hence it provides a
further push to social progress.
2.
Habits as Expressions of Growth. We have already noted that
plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior
experience factors which modify subsequent activities. This signifies
the capacity to acquire habits, or develop definite dispositions. We
have now to consider the salient features of habits. In the first
place, a habit is a form of executive skill, of efficiency in doing.
A habit means an ability to use natural conditions as means to ends.
It is an active control of the environment through control of the
organs of action. We are perhaps apt to emphasize the control of the
body at the expense of control of the environment. We think of
walking, talking, playing the piano, the specialized skills
characteristic of the etcher, the surgeon, the bridge-builder, as if
they were simply ease, deftness, and accuracy on the part of the
organism. They are that, of course; but the measure of the value of
these qualities lies in the economical and effective control of the
environment which they secure. To be able to walk is to have certain
properties of nature at our disposal--and so with all other habits.
Education
is not infrequently defined as consisting in the acquisition of those
habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his
environment. The definition expresses an essential phase of growth.
But it is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense
of control of means for achieving ends. If we think of a habit simply
as a change wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this
change consists in ability to effect subsequent changes in the
environment, we shall be led to think of "adjustment" as a
conformity to environment as wax conforms to the seal which impresses
it. The environment is thought of as something fixed, providing in
its fixity the end and standard of changes taking place in the
organism; adjustment is just fitting ourselves to this fixity of
external conditions. 2 Habit as habituation is indeed something
relatively passive; we get used to our surroundings -- to our
clothing, our shoes, and gloves; to the atmosphere as long as it is
fairly equable; to our daily associates, etc. Conformity to the
environment, a change wrought in the organism without reference to
ability to modify surroundings, is a marked trait of such
habituations. Aside from the fact that we are not entitled to carry
over the traits of such adjustments (which might well be called
accommodations, to mark them off from active adjustments) into habits
of active use of our surroundings, two features of habituations are
worth notice. In the first place, we get used to things by first
using them.
Consider
getting used to a strange city. At first, there is excessive
stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response. Gradually certain
stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are
degraded. We can say either that we do not respond to them any
longer, or more truly that we have effected a persistent response to
them -- an equilibrium of adjustment. This means, in the second
place, that this enduring adjustment supplies the background upon
which are made specific adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never
interested in changing the whole environment; there is much that we
take for granted and accept just as it already is. Upon this
background our activities focus at certain points in an endeavor to
introduce needed changes. Habituation is thus our adjustment to an
environment which at the time we are not concerned with modifying,
and which supplies a leverage to our active habits. Adaptation, in
fine, is quite as much adaptation of the environment to our own
activities as of our activities to the environment. A savage tribe
manages to live on a desert plain. It adapts itself. But its
adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up
with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a
minimum of active control, of subjection to use. A civilized people
enters upon the scene. It also adapts itself. It introduces
irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will
flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection,
those which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness
blossoms as a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized
man has habits which transform the environment.
The
significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its executive and
motor phase. It means formation of intellectual and emotional
disposition as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency
of action. Any habit marks an inclination -- an active preference and
choice for the conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not
wait, Micawber-like, for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get
busy; it actively seeks for occasions to pass into full operation. If
its expression is unduly blocked, inclination shows itself in
uneasiness and intense craving. A habit also marks an intellectual
disposition. Where there is a habit, there is acquaintance with the
materials and equipment to which action is applied. There is a
definite way of understanding the situations in which the habit
operates. Modes of thought, of observation and reflection, enter as
forms of skill and of desire into the habits that make a man an
engineer, an architect, a physician, or a merchant. In unskilled
forms of labor, the intellectual factors are at minimum precisely
because the habits involved are not of a high grade. But there are
habits of judging and reasoning as truly as of handling a tool,
painting a picture, or conducting an experiment. Such statements are,
however, understatements. The habits of mind involved in habits of
the eye and hand supply the latter with their significance. Above
all, the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of the
habit to varied and elastic use, and hence to continued growth. We
speak of fixed habits. Well, the phrase may mean powers so well
established that their possessor always has them as resources when
needed. But the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with
loss of freshness, open- mindedness, and originality. Fixity of habit
may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our
having a free hold upon things. This fact explains two points in a
common notion about habits: their identification with mechanical and
external modes of action to the neglect of mental and moral
attitudes, and the tendency to give them a bad meaning, an
identification with "bad habits." Many a person would feel
surprised to have his aptitude in his chosen profession called a
habit, and would naturally think of his use of tobacco, liquor, or
profane language as typical of the meaning of habit. A habit is to
him something which has a hold on him, something not easily thrown
off even though judgment condemn it.
Habits
reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into ways
of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which
intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking
habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that
they are opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation and
decision. As we have seen, the acquiring of habits is due to an
original plasticity of our natures: to our ability to vary responses
till we find an appropriate and efficient way of acting. Routine
habits, and habits that possess us instead of our possessing them,
are habits which put an end to plasticity. They mark the close of
power to vary. There can be no doubt of the tendency of organic
plasticity, of the physiological basis, to lessen with growing years.
The instinctively mobile and eagerly varying action of childhood, the
love of new stimuli and new developments, too easily passes into a
"settling down," which means aversion to change and a
resting on past achievements. Only an environment which secures the
full use of intelligence in the process of forming habits can
counteract this tendency. Of course, the same hardening of the
organic conditions affects the physiological structures which are
involved in thinking. But this fact only indicates the need of
persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is
invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted method which
falls back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure external
efficiency of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought, marks
a deliberate closing in of surroundings upon growth.
3.
The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development. We have
had so far but little to say in this chapter about education. We have
been occupied with the conditions and implications of growth. If our
conclusions are justified, they carry with them, however, definite
educational consequences. When it is said that education is
development, everything depends upon how development is conceived.
Our net conclusion is that life is development, and that developing,
growing, is life. Translated into its educational equivalents, that
means (i) that the educational process has no end beyond itself; it
is its own end; and that (ii) the educational process is one of
continual reorganizing, reconstructing, transforming.
1.
Development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that is,
with respect to the special traits of child and adult life, means the
direction of power into special channels: the formation of habits
involving executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific
objects of observation and thought. But the comparative view is not
final. The child has specific powers; to ignore that fact is to stunt
or distort the organs upon which his growth depends. The adult uses
his powers to transform his environment, thereby occasioning new
stimuli which redirect his powers and keep them developing. Ignoring
this fact means arrested development, a passive accommodation. Normal
child and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing.
The difference between them is not the difference between growth and
no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different
conditions. With respect to the development of powers devoted to
coping with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the
child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic
curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say
that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. One statement is
as true as the other.
Three
ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely privative nature
of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and rigidity
of habit, are all connected with a false idea of growth or
development, -- that it is a movement toward a fixed goal. Growth is
regarded as having an end, instead of being an end. The educational
counterparts of the three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take
account of the instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly,
failure to develop initiative in coping with novel situations;
thirdly, an undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure
automatic skill at the expense of personal perception. In all cases,
the adult environment is accepted as a standard for the child. He is
to be brought up to it.
Natural
instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances -- as
obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be brought
into conformity with external standards. Since conformity is the aim,
what is distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside,
or regarded as a source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made
equivalent to uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of
interest in the novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the
uncertain and the unknown. Since the end of growth is outside of and
beyond the process of growing, external agents have to be resorted to
to induce movement toward it. Whenever a method of education is
stigmatized as mechanical, we may be sure that external pressure is
brought to bear to reach an external end.
2.
Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save
more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save
more education. It is a commonplace to say that education should not
cease when one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that
the purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of
education by organizing the powers that insure growth. The
inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of
life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest
product of schooling.
When
we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed
comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up
thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. Abandoning this
notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of
instruction as a method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge
into a mental and moral hole which awaits filling. Since life means
growth, a living creature lives as truly and positively at one stage
as at another, with the same intrinsic fullness and the same absolute
claims. Hence education means the enterprise of supplying the
conditions which insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of
age. We first look with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as
something to be got over as rapidly as possible. Then the adult
formed by such educative methods looks back with impatient regret
upon childhood and youth as a scene of lost opportunities and wasted
powers. This ironical situation will endure till it is recognized
that living has its own intrinsic quality and that the business of
education is with that quality. Realization that life is growth
protects us from that so-called idealizing of childhood which in
effect is nothing but lazy indulgence. Life is not to be identified
with every superficial act and interest. Even though it is not always
easy to tell whether what appears to be mere surface fooling is a
sign of some nascent as yet untrained power, we must remember that
manifestations are not to be accepted as ends in themselves. They are
signs of possible growth. They are to be turned into means of
development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or cultivated
for their own sake. Excessive attention to surface phenomena (even in
the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to their
fixation and thus to arrested development. What impulses are moving
toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for parent
and teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity cannot be
better put than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the child. Be
not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the
outcry which replies to this suggestion: Would you verily throw up
the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young
child to the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call
this anarchy a respect for the child's nature? I answer, -- Respect
the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself.... The
two points in a boy's training are, to keep his naturel and train off
all but that; to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling,
and horseplay; keep his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very
direction in which it points." And as Emerson goes on to show
this reverence for childhood and youth instead of opening up an easy
and easy-going path to the instructors, "involves at once,
immense claims on the time, the thought, on the life of the teacher.
It requires time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and
assistances of God; and only to think of using it implies character
and profoundness."
Summary.
Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity. Both of
these conditions are at their height in childhood and youth.
Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation
of habits. Habits give control over the environment, power to utilize
it for human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or a
general and persistent balance of organic activities with the
surroundings, and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet
new conditions. The former furnishes the background of growth; the
latter constitute growing. Active habits involve thought, invention,
and initiative in applying capacities to new aims. They are opposed
to routine which marks an arrest of growth. Since growth is the
characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no
end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is
the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and
supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.
1
Intimations of its significance are found in a number of writers, but
John Fiske, in his Excursions of an Evolutionist, is accredited with
its first systematic exposition.
2
This conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the conceptions
of the external relation of stimulus and response, considered in the
last chapter, and of the negative conceptions of immaturity and
plasticity noted in this chapter.
Chapter
Five
:
Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline
1.
Education as Preparation. We have laid it down that the educative
process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every
stage an added capacity of growth. This conception contrasts sharply
with other ideas which have influenced practice. By making the
contrast explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more
clearly to light. The first contrast is with the idea that education
is a process of preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared
for is, of course, the responsibilities and privileges of adult life.
Children are not regarded as social members in full and regular
standing. They are looked upon as candidates; they are placed on the
waiting list. The conception is only carried a little farther when
the life of adults is considered as not having meaning on its own
account, but as a preparatory probation for "another life."
The idea is but another form of the notion of the negative and
privative character of growth already criticized; hence we shall not
repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the evil consequences which
flow from putting education on this basis. In the first place, it
involves loss of impetus. Motive power is not utilized. Children
proverbially live in the present; that is not only a fact not to be
evaded, but it is an excellence. The future just as future lacks
urgency and body. To get ready for something, one knows not what nor
why, is to throw away the leverage that exists, and to seek for
motive power in a vague chance. Under such circumstances, there is,
in the second place, a premium put on shilly-shallying and
procrastination. The future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of
time will intervene before it becomes a present. Why be in a hurry
about getting ready for it? The temptation to postpone is much
increased because the present offers so many wonderful opportunities
and proffers such invitations to adventure. Naturally attention and
energy go to them; education accrues naturally as an outcome, but a
lesser education than if the full stress of effort had been put upon
making conditions as educative as possible. A third undesirable
result is the substitution of a conventional average standard of
expectation and requirement for a standard which concerns the
specific powers of the individual under instruction. For a severe and
definite judgment based upon the strong and weak points of the
individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion concerning
what youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some more
or less remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions
are to take place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or
to enter upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is
regarded as the serious business of life. It is impossible to
overestimate the loss which results from the deflection of attention
from the strategic point to a comparatively unproductive point. It
fails most just where it thinks it is succeeding -- in getting a
preparation for the future.
Finally,
the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a large
scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The
future having no stimulating and directing power when severed from
the possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it
to make it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed.
Healthy work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is
largely unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which
one is actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored,
pupils have to be told that if they do not follow the prescribed
course penalties will accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some
time in the future, rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody
knows how largely systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by
educational systems which neglect present possibilities in behalf of
preparation for a future. Then, in disgust with the harshness and
impotency of this method, the pendulum swings to the opposite
extreme, and the dose of information required against some later day
is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be fooled into taking something
which they do not care for.
It
is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the
future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present
possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with
later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in
odd moments; it is a continuous leading into the future. If the
environment, in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize
adequately the present capacities of the immature, the future which
grows out of the present is surely taken care of. The mistake is not
in attaching importance to preparation for future need, but in making
it the mainspring of present effort. Because the need of preparation
for a continually developing life is great, it is imperative that
every energy should be bent to making the present experience as rich
and significant as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly
into the future, the future is taken care of.
2.
Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education which
professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it takes back
with one hand what it proffers with the other. Development is
conceived not as continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent
powers toward a definite goal. The goal is conceived of as
completion, -perfection. Life at any stage short of attainment of
this goal is merely an unfolding toward it. Logically the doctrine is
only a variant of the preparation theory. Practically the two differ
in that the adherents of the latter make much of the practical and
professional duties for which one is preparing, while the
developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal and spiritual qualities of
the principle which is unfolding.
The
conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a
final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its
transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life. It
simulates the style of the latter. It pays the tribute of speaking
much of development, process, progress. But all of these operations
are conceived to be merely transitional; they lack meaning on their
own account. They possess significance only as movements toward
something away from what is now going on. Since growth is just a
movement toward a completed being, the final ideal is immobile. An
abstract and indefinite future is in control with all which that
connotes in depreciation of present power and opportunity.
Since
the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is very far
away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is unattainable.
Consequently, in order to be available for present guidance it must
be translated into something which stands for it. Otherwise we should
be compelled to regard any and every manifestation of the child as an
unfolding from within, and hence sacred. Unless we set up some
definite criterion representing the ideal end by which to judge
whether a given attitude or act is approximating or moving away, our
sole alternative is to withdraw all influences of the environment
lest they interfere with proper development. Since that is not
practicable, a working substitute is set up. Usually, of course, this
is some idea which an adult would like to have a child acquire.
Consequently, by "suggestive questioning" or some other
pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out" from
the pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that is
evidence that the child is unfolding properly. But as the pupil
generally has no initiative of his own in this direction, the result
is a random groping after what is wanted, and the formation of habits
of dependence upon the cues furnished by others. Just because such
methods simulate a true principle and claim to have its sanction they
may do more harm than would outright "telling," where, at
least, it remains with the child how much will stick.
Within
the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two typical
attempts to provide a working representative of the absolute goal.
Both start from the conception of a whole -- an absolute -- which is
"immanent" in human life. The perfect or complete ideal is
not a mere ideal; it is operative here and now. But it is present
only implicitly, "potentially," or in an enfolded
condition. What is termed development is the gradual making explicit
and outward of what is thus wrapped up. Froebel and Hegel, the
authors of the two philosophic schemes referred to, have different
ideas of the path by which the progressive realization of
manifestation of the complete principle is effected. According to
Hegel, it is worked out through a series of historical institutions
which embody the different factors in the Absolute. According to
Froebel, the actuating force is the presentation of symbols, largely
mathematical, corresponding to the essential traits of the Absolute.
When these are presented to the child, the Whole, or perfection,
sleeping within him, is awakened. A single example may indicate the
method. Every one familiar with the kindergarten is acquainted with
the circle in which the children gather. It is not enough that the
circle is a convenient way of grouping the children. It must be used
"because it is a symbol of the collective life of mankind in
general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the
native capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his
influence in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the
most effective single force in modern educational theory in effecting
widespread acknowledgment of the idea of growth. But his formulation
of the notion of development and his organization of devices for
promoting it were badly hampered by the fact that he conceived
development to be the unfolding of a ready-made latent principle. He
failed to see that growing is growth, developing is development, and
consequently placed the emphasis upon the completed product. Thus he
set up a goal which meant the arrest of growth, and a criterion which
is not applicable to immediate guidance of powers, save through
translation into abstract and symbolic formulae.
A
remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical philosophic
language, transcendental. That is, it is something apart from direct
experience and perception. So far as experience is concerned, it is
empty; it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than
anything which can be intelligently grasped and stated. This
vagueness must be compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel
made the connection between the concrete facts of experience and the
transcendental ideal of development by regarding the former as
symbols of the latter. To regard known things as symbols, according
to some arbitrary a priori formula -- and every a priori conception
must be arbitrary -- is an invitation to romantic fancy to seize upon
any analogies which appeal to it and treat them as laws. After the
scheme of symbolism has been settled upon, some definite technique
must be invented by which the inner meaning of the sensible symbols
used may be brought home to children. Adults being the formulators of
the symbolism are naturally the authors and controllers of the
technique. The result was that Froebel's love of abstract symbolism
often got the better of his sympathetic insight; and there was
substituted for development as arbitrary and externally imposed a
scheme of dictation as the history of instruction has ever seen.
With
Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of
the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional, rather than
symbolic, form. His philosophy, like Froebel's, marks in one
direction an indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the
process of life. The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic
philosophy were evident to him; he saw the impossibility of making a
clean sweep of historical institutions, of treating them as
despotisms begot in artifice and nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy
of history and society culminated the efforts of a whole series of
German writers -- Lessing, Herder, Kant, Schiller, Goethe -- to
appreciate the nurturing influence of the great collective
institutional products of humanity. For those who learned the lesson
of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive of
institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely --
in idea, not in fact -- the psychology that regarded "mind"
as a ready-made possession of a naked individual by showing the
significance of "objective mind" -- language, government,
art, religion -- in the formation of individual minds. But since
Hegel was haunted by the conception of an absolute goal, he was
obliged to arrange institutions as they concretely exist, on a
stepladder of ascending approximations. Each in its time and place is
absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing process
of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its existence is
proof of its complete rationality, for it is an integral element in
the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as they are,
individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and
nurture, consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing
institutions. Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of
education. Institutions change as history shows; but their change,
the rise and fall of states, is the work of the "world-spirit."
Individuals, save the great "heroes" who are the chosen
organs of the world-spirit, have no share or lot in it. In the later
nineteenth century, this type of idealism was amalgamated with the
doctrine of biological evolution.
"Evolution"
was a force working itself out to its own end. As against it, or as
compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of individuals
are impotent. Or, rather, they are but the means by which it works
itself out. Social progress is an "organic growth," not an
experimental selection. Reason is all powerful, but only Absolute
Reason has any power.
The
recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the Greeks)
that great historic institutions are active factors in the
intellectual nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational
philosophy. It indicated a genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had
marred his assertion that education must be a natural development and
not something forced or grafted upon individuals from without, by the
notion that social conditions are not natural. But in its notion of a
complete and all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory
swallowed up concrete individualities, though magnifying The
Individual in the abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to
reconcile the claims of the Whole and of individuality by the
conception of society as an organic whole, or organism. That social
organization is presupposed in the adequate exercise of individual
capacity is not to be doubted. But the social organism, interpreted
after the relation of the organs of the body to each other and to the
whole body, means that each individual has a certain limited place
and function, requiring to be supplemented by the place and functions
of the other organs. As one portion of the bodily tissue is
differentiated so that it can be the hand and the hand only, another,
the eye, and so on, all taken together making the organism, so one
individual is supposed to be differentiated for the exercise of the
mechanical operations of society, another for those of a statesman,
another for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion of "organism"
is thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class distinctions in
social organization--a notion which in its educational application
again means external dictation instead of growth.
3.
Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had great
vogue and which came into existence before the notion of growth had
much influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline."
It has in view a correct ideal; one outcome of education should be
the creation of specific powers of accomplishment. A trained person
is one who can do the chief things which it is important for him to
do better than he could without training: "better"
signifying greater ease, efficiency, economy, promptness, etc. That
this is an outcome of education was indicated in what was said about
habits as the product of educative development. But the theory in
question takes, as it were, a short cut; it regards some powers (to
be presently named) as the direct and conscious aims of instruction,
and not simply as the results of growth. There is a definite number
of powers to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of strokes
which a golfer has to master. Consequently education should get
directly at the business of training them. But this implies that they
are already there in some untrained form; otherwise their creation
would have to be an indirect product of other activities and
agencies. Being there already in some crude form, all that remains is
to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions, and they will
inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase "formal
discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline"
refers both to the outcome of trained power and to the method of
training through repeated exercise.
The
forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of
perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing,
feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise
upon material presented. In its classic form, this theory was
expressed by Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the
material or content of knowledge through passively received
sensations. On the other hand, the mind has certain ready powers,
attention, observation, retention, comparison, abstraction,
compounding, etc. Knowledge results if the mind discriminates and
combines things as they are united and divided in nature itself. But
the important thing for education is the exercise or practice of the
faculties of the mind till they become thoroughly established
habitudes. The analogy constantly employed is that of a billiard
player or gymnast, who by repeated use of certain muscles in a
uniform way at last secures automatic skill. Even the faculty of
thinking was to be formed into a trained habit by repeated exercises
in making and combining simple distinctions, for which, Locke
thought, mathematics affords unrivaled opportunity.
Locke's
statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to do
justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of
the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which
mind should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which
were few in number and which might be trained by specific exercises.
The scheme appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of
knowledge, and yet it insisted that the end of education is not the
bare reception and storage of information, but the formation of
personal powers of attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and
generalization. It was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all
material whatever is received from without; it was idealistic in that
final stress fell upon the formation of intellectual powers. It was
objective and impersonal in its assertion that the individual cannot
possess or generate any true ideas on his own account; it was
individualistic in placing the end of education in the perfecting of
certain faculties possessed at the outset by the individual. This
kind of distribution of values expressed with nicety the state of
opinion in the generations following upon Locke. It became, without
explicit reference to Locke, a common-place of educational theory and
of psychology. Practically, it seemed to provide the educator with
definite, instead of vague, tasks. It made the elaboration of a
technique of instruction relatively easy. All that was necessary was
to provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers. This
practice consists in repeated acts of attending, observing,
memorizing, etc. By grading the difficulty of the acts, making each
set of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set which
preceded it, a complete scheme of instruction is evolved. There are
various ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing this conception, in
both its alleged foundations and in its educational application. (1)
Perhaps the most direct mode of attack consists in pointing out that
the supposed original faculties of observation, recollection,
willing, thinking, etc., are purely mythological. There are no such
ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. There
are, indeed, a great number of original native tendencies,
instinctive modes of action, based on the original connections of
neurones in the central nervous system. There are impulsive
tendencies of the eyes to follow and fixate light; of the neck
muscles to turn toward light and sound; of the hands to reach and
grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to make
sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant substances; to gag and to
curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number. But these
tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off
from one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with one
another in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent
intellectual powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting,
they are tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the
environment so as to bring about other changes. Something in the
throat makes one cough; the tendency is to eject the obnoxious
particle and thus modify the subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a
hot thing; it is impulsively, wholly unintellectually, snatched away.
But the withdrawal alters the stimuli operating, and tends to make
them more consonant with the needs of the organism. It is by such
specific changes of organic activities in response to specific
changes in the medium that that control of the environment of which
we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is effected. Now all of our first
seeings and hearings and touchings and smellings and tastings are of
this kind. In any legitimate sense of the words mental or
intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these qualities, and
no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any intellectual
properties of observation, judgment, or intentional action (volition)
upon them.
(2)
Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is not
a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one
might strengthen a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in
selecting from the diffused responses which are evoked at a given
time those which are especially adapted to the utilization of the
stimulus. That is to say, among the reactions of the body in general
occur upon stimulation of the eye by light, all except those which
are specifically adapted to reaching, grasping, and manipulating the
object effectively are gradually eliminated--or else no training
occurs. As we have already noted, the primary reactions, with a very
few exceptions are too diffused and general to be practically of much
use in the case of the human infant. Hence the identity of training
with selective response. (Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important is
the specific coordination of different factors of response which
takes place. There is not merely a selection of the hand reactions
which effect grasping, but of the particular visual stimuli which
call out just these reactions and no others, and an establishment of
connection between the two. But the coordinating does not stop here.
Characteristic temperature reactions may take place when the object
is grasped. These will also be brought in; later, the temperature
reaction may be connected directly with the optical stimulus, the
hand reaction being suppressed--as a bright flame, independent of
close contact, may steer one away. Or the child in handling the
object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues. The ear
response is then brought into the system of response. If a certain
sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies the
activity, response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected with
auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the
complex response. 2
(3)
The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each
other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the
stimuli are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the
more rigid and the less generally available is the training secured.
In equivalent language, less intellectual or educative quality
attaches to the training. The usual way of stating this fact is that
the more specialized the reaction, the less is the skill acquired in
practicing and perfecting it transferable to other modes of behavior.
According to the orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in
studying his spelling lesson acquires, besides ability to spell those
particular words, an increase of power of observation, attention, and
recollection which may be employed whenever these powers are needed.
As matter of fact, the more he confines himself to noticing and
fixating the forms of words, irrespective of connection with other
things (such as the meaning of the words, the context in which they
are habitually used, the derivation and classification of the verbal
form, etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be
used for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. He
may not even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions
among geometrical forms, to say nothing of ability to observe in
general. He is merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of
the letters and the motor reactions of oral or written reproduction.
The scope of coordination (to use our prior terminology) is extremely
limited. The connections which are employed in other observations and
recollections (or reproductions) are deliberately eliminated when the
pupil is exercised merely upon forms of letters and words. Having
been excluded, they cannot be restored when needed. The ability
secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is not available for
perceiving and recalling other things. In the ordinary phraseology,
it is not transferable. But the wider the context--that is to say,
the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated--the more the
ability acquired is available for the effective performance of other
acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any "transfer,"
but because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is
equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to
a narrow and rigid, coordination. (4) Going to the root of the
matter, the fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is
to say, its separation of activities and capacities from subject
matter. There is no such thing as an ability to see or hear or
remember in general; there is only the ability to see or hear or
remember something. To talk about training a power, mental or
physical, in general, apart from the subject matter involved in its
exercise, is nonsense. Exercise may react upon circulation,
breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigor or strength, but this
reservoir is available for specific ends only by use in connection
with the material means which accomplish them. Vigor will enable a
man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he would if
he were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and club,
sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one of
them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far
as it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordinations or
as the same kind of coordination is involved in all of them.
Moreover, the difference between the training of ability to spell
which comes from taking visual forms in a narrow context and one
which takes them in connection with the activities required to grasp
meaning, such as context, affiliations of descent, etc., may be
compared to the difference between exercises in the gymnasium with
pulley weights to "develop" certain muscles, and a game or
sport. The former is uniform and mechanical; it is rigidly
specialized. The latter is varied from moment to moment; no two acts
are quite alike; novel emergencies have to be met; the coordinations
forming have to be kept flexible and elastic. Consequently, the
training is much more "general"; that is to say, it covers
a wider territory and includes more factors. Exactly the same thing
holds of special and general education of the mind.
A
monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one
special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping
or calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. One may
be an authority in a particular field and yet of more than usually
poor judgment in matters not closely allied, unless the training in
the special field has been of a kind to ramify into the subject
matter of the other fields. (5) Consequently, such powers as
observation, recollection, judgment, esthetic taste, represent
organized results of the occupation of native active tendencies with
certain subject matters. A man does not observe closely and fully by
pressing a button for the observing faculty to get to work (in other
words by "willing" to observe); but if he has something to
do which can be accomplished successfully only through intensive and
extensive use of eye and hand, he naturally observes. Observation is
an outcome, a consequence, of the interaction of sense organ and
subject matter. It will vary, accordingly, with the subject matter
employed.
It
is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of
faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first
determined what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become
expert in observing and recalling and for what purpose. And it is
only repeating in another form what has already been said, to declare
that the criterion here must be social. We want the person to note
and recall and judge those things which make him an effective
competent member of the group in which he is associated with others.
Otherwise we might as well set the pupil to observing carefully
cracks on the wall and set him to memorizing meaningless lists of
words in an unknown tongue--which is about what we do in fact when we
give way to the doctrine of formal discipline. If the observing
habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer are better habits than
those which are thus formed, it is because they deal with subject
matter which is more significant in life. In concluding this portion
of the discussion, we note that the distinction between special and
general education has nothing to do with the transferability of
function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer is miraculous
and impossible. But some activities are broad; they involve a
coordination of many factors. Their development demands continuous
alternation and readjustment. As conditions change, certain factors
are subordinated, and others which had been of minor importance come
to the front. There is constant redistribution of the focus of the
action, as is seen in the illustration of a game as over against
pulling a fixed weight by a series of uniform motions. Thus there is
practice in prompt making of new combinations with the focus of
activity shifted to meet change in subject matter. Wherever an
activity is broad in scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a
large variety of sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly
obliged to change direction in its progressive development, general
education is bound to result. For this is what "general"
means; broad and flexible. In practice, education meets these
conditions, and hence is general, in the degree in which it takes
account of social relationships. A person may become expert in
technical philosophy, or philology, or mathematics or engineering or
financiering, and be inept and ill-advised in his action and judgment
outside of his specialty. If however his concern with these technical
subject matters has been connected with human activities having
social breadth, the range of active responses called into play and
flexibly integrated is much wider. Isolation of subject matter from a
social context is the chief obstruction in current practice to
securing a general training of mind. Literature, art, religion, when
thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the technical things which
the professional upholders of general education strenuously oppose.
Summary.
The conception that the result of the educative process is capacity
for further education stands in contrast with some other ideas which
have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting conception
considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some future duty
or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which result
from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher and
taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully directed --
namely, taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the
immediate present. Consequently it defeats its own professed purpose.
The notion that education is an unfolding from within appears to have
more likeness to the conception of growth which has been set forth.
But as worked out in the theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves
ignoring the interaction of present organic tendencies with the
present environment, just as much as the notion of preparation. Some
implicit whole is regarded as given ready-made and the significance
of growth is merely transitory; it is not an end in itself, but
simply a means of making explicit what is already implicit. Since
that which is not explicit cannot be made definite use of, something
has to be found to represent it. According to Froebel, the mystic
symbolic value of certain objects and acts (largely mathematical)
stand for the Absolute Whole which is in process of unfolding.
According to Hegel, existing institutions are its effective actual
representatives. Emphasis upon symbols and institutions tends to
divert perception from the direct growth of experience in richness of
meaning. Another influential but defective theory is that which
conceives that mind has, at birth, certain mental faculties or
powers, such as perceiving, remembering, willing, judging,
generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is the training of
these faculties through repeated exercise. This theory treats subject
matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its value residing
simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of the general
powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of the alleged
powers from one another and from the material upon which they act.
The outcome of the theory in practice was shown to be an undue
emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized modes of skill at
the expense of initiative, inventiveness, and readaptability --
qualities which depend upon the broad and consecutive interaction of
specific activities with one another. 1 As matter of fact, the
interconnection is so great, there are so many paths of construction,
that every stimulus brings about some change in all of the organs of
response. We are accustomed however to ignore most of these
modifications of the total organic activity, concentrating upon that
one which is most specifically adapted to the most urgent stimulus of
the moment. 2 This statement should be compared with what was said
earlier about the sequential ordering of responses (p. 25). It is
merely a more explicit statement of the way in which that consecutive
arrangement occurs.
Chapter
Six
:
Education as Conservative and Progressive
1.
Education as Formation. We now come to a type of theory which denies
the existence of faculties and emphasizes the unique role of subject
matter in the development of mental and moral disposition. According
to it, education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is
it a training of faculties resident in mind itself. It is rather the
formation of mind by setting up certain associations or connections
of content by means of a subject matter presented from without.
Education proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal sense,
a building into the mind from without. That education is formative of
mind is not questioned; it is the conception already propounded. But
formation here has a technical meaning dependent upon the idea of
something operating from without. Herbart is the best historical
representative of this type of theory. He denies absolutely the
existence of innate faculties. The mind is simply endowed with the
power of producing various qualities in reaction to the various
realities which act upon it. These qualitatively different reactions
are called presentations (Vorstellungen). Every presentation once
called into being persists; it may be driven below the "threshold"
of consciousness by new and stronger presentations, produced by the
reaction of the soul to new material, but its activity continues by
its own inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness. What
are termed faculties -- attention, memory, thinking, perception, even
the sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and complications,
formed by the interaction of these submerged presentations with one
another and with new presentations. Perception, for example, is the
complication of presentations which result from the rise of old
presentations to greet and combine with new ones; memory is the
evoking of an old presentation above the threshold of consciousness
by getting entangled with another presentation, etc. Pleasure is the
result of reinforcement among the independent activities of
presentations; pain of their pulling different ways, etc.
The
concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the various
arrangements formed by the various presentations in their different
qualities. The "furniture" of the mind is the mind. Mind is
wholly a matter of "contents." The educational implications
of this doctrine are threefold.
(1)
This or that kind of mind is formed by the use of objects which evoke
this or that kind of reaction and which produce this or that
arrangement among the reactions called out. The formation of mind is
wholly a matter of the presentation of the proper educational
materials.
(2)
Since the earlier presentations constitute the "apperceiving
organs" which control the assimilation of new presentations,
their character is all important. The effect of new presentations is
to reinforce groupings previously formed. The business of the
educator is, first, to select the proper material in order to fix the
nature of the original reactions, and, secondly, to arrange the
sequence of subsequent presentations on the basis of the store of
ideas secured by prior transactions. The control is from behind, from
the past, instead of, as in the unfolding conception, in the ultimate
goal.
(3)
Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down.
Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the central thing,
but since knowing consists in the way in which this interacts with
the contents already submerged below consciousness, the first thing
is the step of "preparation," -- that is, calling into
special activity and getting above the floor of consciousness those
older presentations which are to assimilate the new one. Then after
the presentation, follow the processes of interaction of new and old;
then comes the application of the newly formed content to the
performance of some task. Everything must go through this course;
consequently there is a perfectly uniform method in instruction in
all subjects for all pupils of all ages.
Herbart's
great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the region of
routine and accident. He brought it into the sphere of conscious
method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim and
procedure, instead of being a compound of casual inspiration and
subservience to tradition. Moreover, everything in teaching and
discipline could be specified, instead of our having to be content
with vague and more or less mystic generalities about ultimate ideals
and speculative spiritual symbols. He abolished the notion of
ready-made faculties, which might be trained by exercise upon any
sort of material, and made attention to concrete subject matter, to
the content, all-important. Herbart undoubtedly has had a greater
influence in bringing to the front questions connected with the
material of study than any other educational philosopher. He stated
problems of method from the standpoint of their connection with
subject matter: method having to do with the manner and sequence of
presenting new subject matter to insure its proper interaction with
old.
The
fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring the
existence in a living being of active and specific functions which
are developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they
are occupied with their environment. The theory represents the
Schoolmaster come to his own. This fact expresses at once its
strength and its weakness. The conception that the mind consists of
what has been taught, and that the importance of what has been taught
consists in its availability for further teaching, reflects the
pedagogue's view of life. The philosophy is eloquent about the duty
of the teacher in instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding
his privilege of learning. It emphasizes the influence of
intellectual environment upon the mind; it slurs over the fact that
the environment involves a personal sharing in common experiences. It
exaggerates beyond reason the possibilities of consciously formulated
and used methods, and underestimates the role of vital, unconscious,
attitudes. It insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over
the operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It takes, in
brief, everything educational into account save its essence, -- vital
energy seeking opportunity for effective exercise. All education
forms character, mental and moral, but formation consists in the
selection and coordination of native activities so that they may
utilize the subject matter of the social environment. Moreover, the
formation is not only a formation of native activities, but it takes
place through them. It is a process of reconstruction,
reorganization.
2.
Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar combination
of the ideas of development and formation from without has given rise
to the recapitulation theory of education, biological and cultural.
The individual develops, but his proper development consists in
repeating in orderly stages the past evolution of animal life and
human history. The former recapitulation occurs physiologically; the
latter should be made to occur by means of education. The alleged
biological truth that the individual in his growth from the simple
embryo to maturity repeats the history of the evolution of animal
life in the progress of forms from the simplest to the most complex
(or expressed technically, that ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis)
does not concern us, save as it is supposed to afford scientific
foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past. Cultural
recapitulation says, first, that children at a certain age are in the
mental and moral condition of savagery; their instincts are vagrant
and predatory because their ancestors at one time lived such a life.
Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper subject matter of their
education at this time is the material -- especially the literary
material of myths, folk-tale, and song -- produced by humanity in the
analogous stage. Then the child passes on to something corresponding,
say, to the pastoral stage, and so on till at the time when he is
ready to take part in contemporary life, he arrives at the present
epoch of culture.
In
this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a small
school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part), has had
little currency. But the idea which underlies it is that education is
essentially retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past and
especially to the literary products of the past, and that mind is
adequately formed in the degree in which it is patterned upon the
spiritual heritage of the past. This idea has had such immense
influence upon higher instruction especially, that it is worth
examination in its extreme formulation.
In
the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embyronic growth
of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits of
lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of
past stages. If there were any strict "law" of repetition,
evolutionary development would clearly not have taken place. Each new
generation would simply have repeated its predecessors' existence.
Development, in short, has taken place by the entrance of shortcuts
and alterations in the prior scheme of growth. And this suggests that
the aim of education is to facilitate such short-circuited growth.
The great advantage of immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it
enables us to emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an
outgrown past. The business of education is rather to liberate the
young from reviving and retraversing the past than to lead them to a
recapitulation of it. The social environment of the young is
constituted by the presence and action of the habits of thinking and
feeling of civilized men. To ignore the directive influence of this
present environment upon the young is simply to abdicate the
educational function. A biologist has said: "The history of
development in different animals . . . offers to us . . . a series of
ingenious, determined, varied but more or less unsuccessful efforts
to escape from the necessity of recapitulating, and to substitute for
the ancestral method a more direct method." Surely it would be
foolish if education did not deliberately attempt to facilitate
similar efforts in conscious experience so that they become
increasingly successful.
The
two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled
from association with the false context which perverts them. On the
biological side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with
precisely the assortment of impulsive activities with which he does
start, they being blind, and many of them conflicting with one
another, casual, sporadic, and unadapted to their immediate
environment. The other point is that it is a part of wisdom to
utilize the products of past history so far as they are of help for
the future. Since they represent the results of prior experience,
their value for future experience may, of course, be indefinitely
great. Literatures produced in the past are, so far as men are now in
possession and use of them, a part of the present environment of
individuals; but there is an enormous difference between availing
ourselves of them as present resources and taking them as standards
and patterns in their retrospective character.
(1)
The distortion of the first point usually comes about through misuse
of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity means that past
life has somehow predetermined the main traits of an individual, and
that they are so fixed that little serious change can be introduced
into them. Thus taken, the influence of heredity is opposed to that
of the environment, and the efficacy of the latter belittled. But for
educational purposes heredity means neither more nor less than the
original endowment of an individual. Education must take the being as
he is; that a particular individual has just such and such an
equipment of native activities is a basic fact. That they were
produced in such and such a way, or that they are derived from one's
ancestry, is not especially important for the educator, however it
may be with the biologist, as compared with the fact that they now
exist. Suppose one had to advise or direct a person regarding his
inheritance of property. The fallacy of assuming that the fact it is
an inheritance, predetermines its future use, is obvious. The advisor
is concerned with making the best use of what is there -- putting it
at work under the most favorable conditions. Obviously he cannot
utilize what is not there; neither can the educator. In this sense,
heredity is a limit of education. Recognition of this fact prevents
the waste of energy and the irritation that ensue from the too
prevalent habit of trying to make by instruction something out of an
individual which he is not naturally fitted to become. But the
doctrine does not determine what use shall be made of the capacities
which exist. And, except in the case of the imbecile, these original
capacities are much more varied and potential, even in the case of
the more stupid, than we as yet know properly how to utilize.
Consequently, while a careful study of the native aptitudes and
deficiencies of an individual is always a preliminary necessity, the
subsequent and important step is to furnish an environment which will
adequately function whatever activities are present. The relation of
heredity and environment is well expressed in the case of language.
If a being had no vocal organs from which issue articulate sounds, if
he had no auditory or other sense- receptors and no connections
between the two sets of apparatus, it would be a sheer waste of time
to try to teach him to converse. He is born short in that respect,
and education must accept the limitation. But if he has this native
equipment, its possession in no way guarantees that he will ever talk
any language or what language he will talk. The environment in which
his activities occur and by which they are carried into execution
settles these things. If he lived in a dumb unsocial environment
where men refused to talk to one another and used only that minimum
of gestures without which they could not get along, vocal language
would be as unachieved by him as if he had no vocal organs. If the
sounds which he makes occur in a medium of persons speaking the
Chinese language, the activities which make like sounds will be
selected and coordinated. This illustration may be applied to the
entire range of the educability of any individual. It places the
heritage from the past in its right connection with the demands and
opportunities of the present.
(2)
The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is found in
the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or more
specifically in the particular literatures which were produced in the
culture epoch which is supposed to correspond with the stage of
development of those taught) affords another instance of that divorce
between the process and product of growth which has been criticized.
To keep the process alive, to keep it alive in ways which make it
easier to keep it alive in the future, is the function of educational
subject matter. But an individual can live only in the present. The
present is not just something which comes after the past; much less
something produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past
behind it. The study of past products will not help us understand the
present, because the present is not due to the products, but to the
life of which they were the products. A knowledge of the past and its
heritage is of great significance when it enters into the present,
but not otherwise. And the mistake of making the records and remains
of the past the main material of education is that it cuts the vital
connection of present and past, and tends to make the past a rival of
the present and the present a more or less futile imitation of the
past. Under such circumstances, culture becomes an ornament and
solace; a refuge and an asylum. Men escape from the crudities of the
present to live in its imagined refinements, instead of using what
the past offers as an agency for ripening these crudities. The
present, in short, generates the problems which lead us to search the
past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when
we search. The past is the past precisely because it does not include
what is characteristic in the present. The moving present includes
the past on condition that it uses the past to direct its own
movement. The past is a great resource for the imagination; it adds a
new dimension to life, but OD condition that it be seen as the past
of the present, and not as another and disconnected world. The
principle which makes little of the present act of living and
operation of growing, the only thing always present, naturally looks
to the past because the future goal which it sets up is remote and
empty. But having turned its back upon the present, it has no way of
returning to it laden with the spoils of the past. A mind that is
adequately sensitive to the needs and occasions of the present
actuality will have the liveliest of motives for interest in the
background of the present, and will never have to hunt for a way back
because it will never have lost connection.
3.
Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas both of
unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the formation from
without, whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of
the past, the ideal of growth results in the conception that
education is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience.
It has all the time an immediate end, and so far as activity is
educative, it reaches that end -- the direct transformation of the
quality of experience. Infancy, youth, adult life, -- all stand on
the same educative level in the sense that what is really learned at
any and every stage of experience constitutes the value of that
experience, and in the sense that it is the chief business of life at
every point to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of its
own perceptible meaning.
We
thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the
meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the
course of subsequent experience. (1) The increment of meaning
corresponds to the increased perception of the connections and
continuities of the activities in which we are engaged. The activity
begins in an impulsive form; that is, it is blind. It does not know
what it is about; that is to say, what are its interactions with
other activities. An activity which brings education or instruction
with it makes one aware of some of the connections which had been
imperceptible. To recur to our simple example, a child who reaches
for a bright light gets burned. Henceforth he knows that a certain
act of touching in connection with a certain act of vision (and
vice-versa) means heat and pain; or, a certain light means a source
of heat. The acts by which a scientific man in his laboratory learns
more about flame differ no whit in principle. By doing certain
things, he makes perceptible certain connections of heat with other
things, which had been previously ignored. Thus his acts in relation
to these things get more meaning; he knows better what he is doing or
"is about" when he has to do with them; he can intend
consequences instead of just letting them happen -- all synonymous
ways of saying the same thing. At the same stroke, the flame has
gained in meaning; all that is known about combustion, oxidation,
about light and temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its
intellectual content.
(2)
The other side of an educative experience is an added power of
subsequent direction or control. To say that one knows what he is
about, or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of course, that
he can better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can,
therefore, get ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial
consequences and avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative
experience, then, one in which instruction is conveyed and ability
increased, is contradistinguished from a routine activity on one
hand, and a capricious activity on the other. (a) In the latter one
"does not care what happens"; one just lets himself go and
avoids connecting the consequences of one's act (the evidences of its
connections with other things) with the act. It is customary to frown
upon such aimless random activity, treating it as willful mischief or
carelessness or lawlessness. But there is a tendency to seek the
cause of such aimless activities in the youth's own disposition,
isolated from everything else. But in fact such activity is
explosive, and due to maladjustment with surroundings. Individuals
act capriciously whenever they act under external dictation, or from
being told, without having a purpose of their own or perceiving the
bearing of the deed upon other acts. One may learn by doing something
which he does not understand; even in the most intelligent action, we
do much which we do not mean, because the largest portion of the
connections of the act we consciously intend are not perceived or
anticipated. But we learn only because after the act is performed we
note results which we had not noted before. But much work in school
consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of such a
sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to see the
connection between the result -- say the answer -- and the method
pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and
a kind of miracle. Such action is essentially capricious, and leads
to capricious habits. (b) Routine action, action which is automatic,
may increase skill to do a particular thing. In so far, it might be
said to have an educative effect. But it does not lead to new
perceptions of bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens
the meaning-horizon. And since the environment changes and our way of
acting has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced
connection with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes
disastrous at some critical moment. The vaunted "skill"
turns out gross ineptitude.
The
essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been
criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the
end (the result) and the process. This is verbally
self-contradictory, but only verbally. It means that experience as an
active process occupies time and that its later period completes its
earlier portion; it brings to light connections involved, but
hitherto unperceived. The later outcome thus reveals the meaning of
the earlier, while the experience as a whole establishes a bent or
disposition toward the things possessing this meaning. Every such
continuous experience or activity is educative, and all education
resides in having such experiences.
It
remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention
later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as
personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken in the
earlier chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which
fills them with the spirit of the social group to which they belong,
were a sort of catching up of the child with the aptitudes and
resources of the adult group. In static societies, societies which
make the maintenance of established custom their measure of value,
this conception applies in the main. But not in progressive
communities. They endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so
that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be
formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their
own. Men have long had some intimation of the extent to which
education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious social evils
through starting the young on paths which shall not produce these
ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made an
instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless
far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a
constructive agency of improving society, from realizing that it
represents not only a development of children and youth but also of
the future society of which they will be the constituents.
Summary.
Education may be conceived either retrospectively or prospectively.
That is to say, it may be treated as process of accommodating the
future to the past, or as an utilization of the past for a resource
in a developing future. The former finds its standards and patterns
in what has gone before. The mind may be regarded as a group of
contents resulting from having certain things presented. In this
case, the earlier presentations constitute the material to which the
later are to be assimilated. Emphasis upon the value of the early
experiences of immature beings is most important, especially because
of the tendency to regard them as of little account. But these
experiences do not consist of externally presented material, but of
interaction of native activities with the environment which
progressively modifies both the activities and the environment. The
defect of the Herbartian theory of formation through presentations
consists in slighting this constant interaction and change. The same
principle of criticism applies to theories which find the primary
subject matter of study in the cultural products -- especially the
literary products -- of man's history. Isolated from their connection
with the present environment in which individuals have to act, they
become a kind of rival and distracting environment. Their value lies
in their use to increase the meaning of the things with which we have
actively to do at the present time. The idea of education advanced in
these chapters is formally summed up in the idea of continuous
reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off from
education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as
external formation, and as recapitulation of the past.
Chapter
Seven
:
The Democratic Conception in Education
For
the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned
with education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to
make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of
education as it operates in different types of community life. To say
that education is a social function, securing direction and
development in the immature through their participation in the life
of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education
will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group.
Particularly is it true that a society which not only changes
but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have
different standards and methods of education from one which aims
simply at the perpetuation of its own customs. To make the general
ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is,
therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of
present social life.
1.
The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word, but many
things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds
of purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups,
in which his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if
they had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated
life. Within every larger social organization there are numerous
minor groups: not only political subdivisions, but industrial,
scientific, religious, associations. There are political parties with
differing aims, social sets, cliques, gangs, corporations,
partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties of blood, and so
on in endless variety. In many modern states and in some ancient,
there is great diversity of populations, of varying languages,
religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this standpoint, many a
minor political unit, one of our large cities, for example, is a
congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an inclusive
and permeating community of action and thought. (See ante, p. 20.)
The
terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a
eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning de
jure and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy, the former
connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one
by its very nature. The qualities which accompany this unity,
praiseworthy community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public
ends, mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at the
facts which the term denotes instead of confining our attention to
its intrinsic connotation, we find not unity, but a plurality of
societies, good and bad. Men banded together in a criminal
conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public while
serving it, political machines held together by the interest of
plunder, are included. If it is said that such organizations are not
societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the
notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of
society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having
no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations,
no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something
of the praiseworthy qualities of "Society" which hold it
together. There is honor among thieves, and a band of robbers has a
common interest as respects its members. Gangs are marked by
fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own
codes. Family life may be marked by exclusiveness, suspicion, and
jealousy as to those without, and yet be a model of amity and mutual
aid within. Any education given by a group tends to socialize its
members, but the quality and value of the socialization depends upon
the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a
measure for the worth of any given mode of social life. In seeking
this measure, we have to avoid two extremes. We cannot set up, out of
our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We must base our
conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have any
assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we have just
seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually
found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of
community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize
undesirable features and suggest improvement. Now in any social group
whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in
common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative
intercourse with other groups. From these two traits we derive our
standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are
consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other
forms of association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a
criminal band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the
members together are few in number, reducible almost to a common
interest in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate
the group from other groups with respect to give and take of the
values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is partial
and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life
which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material,
intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all participate and that
the progress of one member has worth for the experience of other
members -- it is readily communicable -- and that the family is not
an isolated whole, but enters intimately into relationships with
business groups, with schools, with all the agencies of culture, as
well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a due part in
the political organization and in return receives support from it. In
short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared;
and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of
association.
I.
Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically
governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an
organization between governed and governors. The authorities in
command must make some appeal to the native activities of the
subjects, must call some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said
that a government could do everything with bayonets except sit on
them. This cynical declaration is at least a recognition that the
bond of union is not merely one of coercive force. It may be said,
however, that the activities appealed to are themselves unworthy and
degrading -- that such a government calls into functioning activity
simply capacity for fear. In a way, this statement is true. But it
overlooks the fact that fear need not be an undesirable factor in
experience. Caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee
future events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits
are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is
cowardice and abject submission. The real difficulty is that the
appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread and hope of specific
tangible reward -- say comfort and ease -- many other capacities are
left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to
pervert them. Instead of operating on their own account they are
reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
This
is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common
interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of
the social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided.
In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members
of the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take
from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and
experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into
masters, educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party
loses in meaning, when the free interchange of varying modes of
life-experience is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a
subject-class prevents social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting
the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but
equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to
feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial;
their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their
manners fastidious rather than humane.
Lack
of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety of
shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity
of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought.
The more activity is restricted to a few definite lines -- as it is
when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of
experiences -- the more action tends to become routine on the part of
the class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive
on the part of the class having the materially fortunate position.
Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes
which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is
no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged
in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do
not understand and have no personal interest in. Much is said about
scientific management of work. It is a narrow view which restricts
the science which secures efficiency of operation to movements of the
muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the
relations of a man to his work--including his relations to others who
take part -- which will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is
doing. Efficiency in production often demands division of labor. But
it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the
technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in what
they do, and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished
by such perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as efficiency
of activity and scientific management to purely technical externals
is evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in
control of industry -- those who supply its aims. Because of their
lack of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not
sufficient stimulus for attention to the human factors and
relationships in industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors
concerned with technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt,
a very acute and intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be
developed, but the failure to take into account the significant
social factors means none the less an absence of mind, and a
corresponding distortion of emotional life. II. This illustration
(whose point is to be extended to all associations lacking
reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point. The isolation
and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its antisocial spirit
into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has
interests "of its own" which shut it out from full
interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the
protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress
through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from
one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if
they had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated
from the interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and
poor; learned and unlearned. The essential point is that isolation
makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static
and selfish ideals within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens
and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact
that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to
their past customs. On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear
intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom. It
would certainly occasion reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an
alert and expanding mental life depends upon an enlarging range of
contact with the physical environment. But the principle applies even
more significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it -- the
sphere of social contacts. Every expansive era in the history of
mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have tended
to eliminate distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed
off from one another. Even the alleged benefits of war, so far as
more than alleged, spring from the fact that conflict of peoples at
least enforces intercourse between them and thus accidentally enables
them to learn from one another, and thereby to expand their horizons.
Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far
to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into
closer and more perceptible connection with one another. It remains
for the most part to secure the intellectual and emotional
significance of this physical annihilation of space.
2.
The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point to
democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more varied
points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon the
recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The
second means not only freer interaction between social groups (once
isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change
in social habit -- its continuous readjustment through meeting the
new situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits
are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted
society.
Upon
the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of
social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and
where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes
a democratic community more interested than other communities have
cause to be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of
democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial
explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot
be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are
educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of
external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary
disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But
there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of
government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint
communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of
individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer
his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of
others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the
breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national
territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their
activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact
denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to
respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action.
They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as
the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group
which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.
The
widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a
greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a
democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and
conscious effort. On the contrary, they were caused by the
development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel, migration,
and intercommunication which flowed from the command of science over
natural energy. But after greater individualization on one hand, and
a broader community of interest on the other have come into
existence, it is a matter of deliberate effort to sustain and extend
them. Obviously a society to which stratification into separate
classes would be fatal, must see to it that intellectual
opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms. A
society marked off into classes need he specially attentive only to
the education of its ruling elements. A society which is mobile,
which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring
anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal
initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by
the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or
connections they do not perceive. The result will be a confusion in
which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of the blind
and externally directed activities of others.
3.
The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be
devoted to making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas
in education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall
consider the educational theories which have been evolved in three
epochs when the social import of education was especially
conspicuous. The first one to be considered is that of Plato. No one
could better express than did he the fact that a society is stably
organized when each individual is doing that for which he has
aptitude by nature in such a way as to be useful to others (or to
contribute to the whole to which he belongs); and that it is the
business of education to discover these aptitudes and progressively
to train them for social use. Much which has been said so far is
borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But
conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to
restrict these ideas in their application. He never got any
conception of the indefinite plurality of activities which may
characterize an individual and a social group, and consequently
limited his view to a limited number of classes of capacities and of
social arrangements. Plato's starting point is that the organization
of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence.
If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and
caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion
for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be
promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered. We shall
have no conception of the proper limits and distribution of
activities -- what he called justice -- as a trait of both individual
and social organization. But how is the knowledge of the final and
permanent good to be achieved? In dealing with this question we come
upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is not
possible save in a just and harmonious social order. Everywhere else
the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false
perspectives. A disorganized and factional society sets up a number
of different models and standards. Under such conditions it is
impossible for the individual to attain consistency of mind. Only a
complete whole is fully self-consistent. A society which rests upon
the supremacy of some factor over another irrespective of its
rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads thought astray. It
puts a premium on certain things and slurs over others, and creates a
mind whose seeming unity is forced and distorted. Education proceeds
ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and
laws. Only in a just state will these be such as to give the right
education; and only those who have rightly trained minds will be able
to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things. We seem to be
caught in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out. A
few men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom -- or truth -- may by study
learn at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence. If a
powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns, then its
regulations could be preserved. An education could be given which
would sift individuals, discovering what they were good for, and
supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which
his nature fits him. Each doing his own part, and never
transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be maintained.
It
would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a
more adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance
of social arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those
arrangements upon the means used to educate the young. It would be
impossible to find a deeper sense of the function of education in
discovering and developing personal capacities, and training them so
that they would connect with the activities of others. Yet the
society in which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that
Plato could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he
clearly saw.
While
he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society
should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional
status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of
education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For
him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of
classes at that. Consequently the testing and sifting function of
education only shows to which one of three classes an individual
belongs. There being no recognition that each individual constitutes
his own class, there could be no recognition of the infinite
diversity of active tendencies and combinations of tendencies of
which an individual is capable. There were only three types of
faculties or powers in the individual's constitution. Hence education
would soon reach a static limit in each class, for only diversity
makes change and progress.
In
some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned to
the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human
wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites,
they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition.
They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war;
its internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their
lack of reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who
possess this are capable of the highest kind of education, and become
in time the legislators of the state -- for laws are the universals
which control the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that
in intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole. But
it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every
individual, his incommensurability with others, and consequently not
recognizing that a society might change and yet be stable, his
doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net effect to the idea
of the subordination of individuality. We cannot better Plato's
conviction that an individual is happy and society well organized
when each individual engages in those activities for which he has a
natural equipment, nor his conviction that it is the primary office
of education to discover this equipment to its possessor and train
him for its effective use. But progress in knowledge has made us
aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and
their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has
taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and
variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the
degree in which society has become democratic, social organization
means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of
individuals, not stratification by classes. Although his educational
philosophy was revolutionary, it was none the less in bondage to
static ideals. He thought that change or alteration was evidence of
lawless flux; that true reality was unchangeable. Hence while he
would radically change the existing state of society, his aim was to
construct a state in which change would subsequently have no place.
The final end of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in
view, not even minor details are to be altered. Though they might not
be inherently important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds
of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic.
The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he
could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a
better society which should then improve education, and so on
indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until
an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted
simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was
obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom
should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the
state.
4.
The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In
the eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very
different circle of ideas. "Nature" still means something
antithetical to existing social organization; Plato exercised a great
influence upon Rousseau. But the voice of nature now speaks for the
diversity of individual talent and for the need of free development
of individuality in all its variety. Education in accord with nature
furnishes the goal and the method of instruction and discipline.
Moreover, the native or original endowment was conceived, in extreme
cases, as nonsocial or even as antisocial. Social arrangements were
thought of as mere external expedients by which these nonsocial
individuals might secure a greater amount of private happiness for
themselves. Nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate
idea of the true significance of the movement. In reality its chief
interest was in progress and in social progress. The seeming
antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus
toward a wider and freer society -- toward cosmopolitanism. The
positive ideal was humanity. In membership in humanity, as distinct
from a state, man's capacities would be liberated; while in existing
political organizations his powers were hampered and distorted to
meet the requirements and selfish interests of the rulers of the
state. The doctrine of extreme individualism was but the counterpart,
the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite perfectibility of man and of
a social organization having a scope as wide as humanity. The
emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a
comprehensive and progressive society.
The
heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the
social estate in which they found themselves. They attributed these
evils to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. Such
limitation was both distorting and corrupting. Their impassioned
devotion to emancipation of life from external restrictions which
operated to the exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past
feudal system consigned power, found intellectual formulation in a
worship of nature. To give "nature" full swing was to
replace an artificial, corrupt, and inequitable social order by a new
and better kingdom of humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both
a model and a working power was strengthened by the advances of
natural science. Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial
restraints of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene
of law. The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of
natural law, was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force
balanced with every other. Natural law would accomplish the same
result in human relations, if men would only get rid of the
artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.
Education
in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in insuring
this more social society. It was plainly seen that economic and
political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of
thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external
chains was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false
beliefs and ideals. What was called social life, existing
institutions, were too false and corrupt to be intrusted with this
work. How could it be expected to undertake it when the undertaking
meant its own destruction? "Nature" must then be the power
to which the enterprise was to be left. Even the extreme
sensationalistic theory of knowledge which was current derived itself
from this conception. To insist that mind is originally passive and
empty was one way of glorifying the possibilities of education. If
the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by objects, there were
no limits to the possibility of education by means of the natural
environment. And since the natural world of objects is a scene of
harmonious "truth," this education would infallibly produce
minds filled with the truth.
5.
Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm
for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the constructive
side became obvious. Merely to leave everything to nature was, after
all, but to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the
accidents of circumstance. Not only was some method required but also
some positive organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the
process of instruction. The "complete and harmonious development
of all powers," having as its social counterpart an enlightened
and progressive humanity, required definite organization for its
realization. Private individuals here and there could proclaim the
gospel; they could not execute the work. A Pestalozzi could try
experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined persons having
wealth and power to follow his example. But even Pestalozzi saw that
any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required the
support of the state. The realization of the new education destined
to produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon the
activities of existing states. The movement for the democratic idea
inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and administered
schools.
So
far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the
movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic
movement in political life -- a fact of incalculable significance for
subsequent movements. Under the influence of German thought in
particular, education became a civic function and the civic function
was identified with the realization of the ideal of the national
state. The "state" was substituted for humanity;
cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To form the citizen, not the
"man," became the aim of education. 1 The historic
situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of the
Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt
(and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief)
that systematic attention to education was the best means of
recovering and maintaining their political integrity and power.
Externally they were weak and divided. Under the leadership of
Prussian statesmen they made this condition a stimulus to the
development of an extensive and thoroughly grounded system of public
education.
This
change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory. The
individualistic theory receded into the background. The state
furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also
its goal. When the actual practice was such that the school system,
from the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied
the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and
administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and
political defense and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to
emphasize the aim of social efficiency. And with the immense
importance attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other
competing and more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible
to interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan
humanitarianism. Since the maintenance of a particular national
sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior
interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles for
international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was understood
to imply a like subordination. The educational process was taken to
be one of disciplinary training rather than of personal development.
Since, however, the ideal of culture as complete development of
personality persisted, educational philosophy attempted a
reconciliation of the two ideas. The reconciliation took the form of
the conception of the "organic" character of the state. The
individual in his isolation is nothing; only in and through an
absorption of the aims and meaning of organized institutions does he
attain true personality. What appears to be his subordination to
political authority and the demand for sacrifice of himself to the
commands of his superiors is in reality but making his own the
objective reason manifested in the state -- the only way in which he
can become truly rational. The notion of development which we have
seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the
Hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine the
two ideas of complete realization of personality and thoroughgoing
"disciplinary" subordination to existing institutions. The
extent of the transformation of educational philosophy which occurred
in Germany in the generation occupied by the struggle against
Napoleon for national independence, may be gathered from Kant, who
well expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his
treatise on Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later
years of the eighteenth century, he defines education as the process
by which man becomes man. Mankind begins its history submerged in
nature -- not as Man who is a creature of reason, while nature
furnishes only instinct and appetite. Nature offers simply the germs
which education is to develop and perfect. The peculiarity of truly
human life is that man has to create himself by his own voluntary
efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational, and free
being. This creative effort is carried on by the educational
activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon men
consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing
state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity.
But there is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to
educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of
with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best
possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their
children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as
instruments of their own purposes.
Who,
then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must
depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity.
"All culture begins with private men and spreads outward from
them. Simply through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations,
who are capable of grasping the ideal of a future better condition,
is the gradual approximation of human nature to its end possible.
Rulers are simply interested in such training as will make their
subjects better tools for their own intentions." Even the
subsidy by rulers of privately conducted schools must be carefully
safeguarded. For the rulers' interest in the welfare of their own
nation instead of in what is best for humanity, will make them, if
they give money for the schools, wish to draw their plans. We have in
this view an express statement of the points characteristic of the
eighteenth century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full
development of private personality is identified with the aims of
humanity as a whole and with the idea of progress. In addition we
have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted
and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas. But
in less than two decades after this time, Kant's philosophic
successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief
function of the state is educational; that in particular the
regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education carried
on in the interests of the state, and that the private individual is
of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his appetites
and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the educative
discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit, Germany
was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and
compulsory system of education extending from the primary school
through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and
supervision all private educational enterprises. Two results should
stand out from this brief historical survey. The first is that such
terms as the individual and the social conceptions of education are
quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato
had the ideal of an education which should equate individual
realization and social coherency and stability. His situation forced
his ideal into the notion of a society organized in stratified
classes, losing the individual in the class. The eighteenth century
educational philosophy was highly individualistic in form, but this
form was inspired by a noble and generous social ideal: that of a
society organized to include humanity, and providing for the
indefinite perfectibility of mankind. The idealistic philosophy of
Germany in the early nineteenth century endeavored again to equate
the ideals of a free and complete development of cultured personality
with social discipline and political subordination. It made the
national state an intermediary between the realization of private
personality on one side and of humanity on the other. Consequently,
it is equally possible to state its animating principle with equal
truth either in the classic terms of "harmonious development of
all the powers of personality" or in the more recent terminology
of "social efficiency." All this reinforces the statement
which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a social
process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind
of society we have in mind. These considerations pave the way for our
second conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in
and for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a
nationalistic and a wider social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and
"humanitarian" conception suffered both from vagueness and
from lack of definite organs of execution and agencies of
administration. In Europe, in the Continental states particularly,
the new idea of the importance of education for human welfare and
progress was captured by national interests and harnessed to do a
work whose social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. The social
aim of education and its national aim were identified, and the result
was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.
This
confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human intercourse.
On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend national
boundaries. They are largely international in quality and method.
They involve interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples
inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of
national sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it
is at the present time. Each nation lives in a state of suppressed
hostility and incipient war with its neighbors. Each is supposed to
be the supreme judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as
matter of course that each has interests which are exclusively its
own. To question this is to question the very idea of national
sovereignty which is assumed to be basic to political practice and
political science. This contradiction (for it is nothing less)
between the wider sphere of associated and mutually helpful social
life and the narrower sphere of exclusive and hence potentially
hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer
conception of the meaning of "social" as a function and
test of education than has yet been attained. Is it possible for an
educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the
full social ends of the educative process not be restricted,
constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to face the
tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split society
into classes some of which are made merely tools for the higher
culture of others. Externally, the question is concerned with the
reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior
devotion to the things which unite men in common ends, irrespective
of national political boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be
worked out by merely negative means. It is not enough to see to it
that education is not actively used as an instrument to make easier
the exploitation of one class by another. School facilities must be
secured of such amplitude and efficiency as will in fact and not
simply in name discount the effects of economic inequalities, and
secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their
future careers. Accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate
administrative provision of school facilities, and such
supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take
advantage of them, but also such modification of traditional ideals
of culture, traditional subjects of study and traditional methods of
teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth under
educational influences until they are equipped to be masters of their
own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem remote of
execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet
tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our
public system of education. The same principle has application on the
side of the considerations which concern the relations of one nation
to another. It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid
everything which would stimulate international jealousy and
animosity. The emphasis must be put upon whatever binds people
together in cooperative human pursuits and results, apart from
geographical limitations. The secondary and provisional character of
national sovereignty in respect to the fuller, freer, and more
fruitful association and intercourse of all human beings with one
another must be instilled as a working disposition of mind. If these
applications seem to be remote from a consideration of the philosophy
of education, the impression shows that the meaning of the idea of
education previously developed has not been adequately grasped. This
conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education as a freeing
of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social
aims. Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be
inconsistently applied.
Summary.
Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds of
societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction
implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which
to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which
the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the
fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An
undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and
externally sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of
experience. A society which makes provision for participation in its
good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible
readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different
forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must
have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest
in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which
secure social changes without introducing disorder. Three typical
historic philosophies of education were considered from this point of
view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar
to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out by
making a class rather than an individual the social unit. The
so-called individualism of the eighteenth- century enlightenment was
found to involve the notion of a society as broad as humanity, of
whose progress the individual was to be the organ. But it lacked any
agency for securing the development of its ideal as was evidenced in
its falling back upon Nature. The institutional idealistic
philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied this lack by making
the national state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the
conception of the social aim to those who were members of the same
political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the
individual to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain in
Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the
existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the
citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he preferred to try
for the latter rather than for the former. But there are many sayings
of his which point to the formation of the citizen as ideally the
higher, and which indicate that his own endeavor, as embodied in the
Emile, was simply the best makeshift the corruption of the times
permitted him to sketch.
Chapter
Eight
:
Aims in Education
1.
The Nature of an Aim.
The
account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
education in a democratic community. For it assumed that the aim of
education is to enable individuals to continue their education -- or
that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for
growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a
society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and
except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of
social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising
from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic
society. In our search for aims in education, we are not concerned,
therefore, with finding an end outside of the educative process to
which education is subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are
rather concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong
within the process in which they operate and when they are set up
from without. And the latter state of affairs must obtain when social
relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that case, some
portions of the whole social group will find their aims determined by
an external dictation; their aims will not arise from the free growth
of their own experience, and their nominal aims will be means to more
ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own.
Our
first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls
within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. We
approach the definition by a contrast of mere results with ends. Any
exhibition of energy has results. The wind blows about the sands of
the desert; the position of the grains is changed. Here is a result,
an effect, but not an end. For there is nothing in the outcome which
completes or fulfills what went before it. There is mere spatial
redistribution. One state of affairs is just as good as any other.
Consequently there is no basis upon which to select an earlier state
of affairs as a beginning, a later as an end, and to consider what
intervenes as a process of transformation and realization.
Consider
for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes in
the sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees'
actions may be called ends not because they are designed or
consciously intended, but because they are true terminations or
completions of what has preceded. When the bees gather pollen and
make wax and build cells, each step prepares the way for the next.
When cells are built, the queen lays eggs in them; when eggs are
laid, they are sealed and bees brood them and keep them at a
temperature required to hatch them. When they are hatched, bees feed
the young till they can take care of themselves. Now we are so
familiar with such facts, that we are apt to dismiss them on the
ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing anyway.
Thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the event
is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of each
element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while the
successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other
stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and
finishes off the process. Since aims relate always to results, the
first thing to look to when it is a question of aims, is whether the
work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity. Or is it a mere serial
aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and then another? To talk
about an educational aim when approximately each act of a pupil is
dictated by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his
acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the
giving of directions by another, is to talk nonsense. It is equally
fatal to an aim to permit capricious or discontinuous action in the
name of spontaneous self- expression. An aim implies an orderly and
ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive
completing of a process. Given an activity having a time span and
cumulative growth within the time succession, an aim means foresight
in advance of the end or possible termination. If bees anticipated
the consequences of their activity, if they perceived their end in
imaginative foresight, they would have the primary element in an aim.
Hence it is nonsense to talk about the aim of education--or any other
undertaking--where conditions do not permit of foresight of results,
and do not stimulate a person to look ahead to see what the outcome
of a given activity is to be. In the next place the aim as a foreseen
end gives direction to the activity; it is not an idle view of a mere
spectator, but influences the steps taken to reach the end. The
foresight functions in three ways. In the first place, it involves
careful observation of the given conditions to see what are the means
available for reaching the end, and to discover the hindrances in the
way. In the second place, it suggests the proper order or sequence in
the use of means. It facilitates an economical selection and
arrangement. In the third place, it makes choice of alternatives
possible. If we can predict the outcome of acting this way or that,
we can then compare the value of the two courses of action; we can
pass judgment upon their relative desirability. If we know that
stagnant water breeds mosquitoes and that they are likely to carry
disease, we can, disliking that anticipated result, take steps to
avert it. Since we do not anticipate results as mere intellectual
onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are partakers
in the process which produces the result. We intervene to bring about
this result or that.
Of
course these three points are closely connected with one another. We
can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of
present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the
motive for observations. The more adequate our observations, the more
varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents
itself, and the more numerous are the alternatives between which
choice may be made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized
possibilities of the situation, or alternatives of action, the more
meaning does the chosen activity possess, and the more flexibly
controllable is it. Where only a single outcome has been thought of,
the mind has nothing else to think of; the meaning attaching to the
act is limited. One only steams ahead toward the mark. Sometimes such
a narrow course may be effective. But if unexpected difficulties
offer themselves, one has not as many resources at command as if he
had chosen the same line of action after a broader survey of the
possibilities of the field. He cannot make needed readjustments
readily.
The
net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting
intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis
upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own
capacities. To do these things means to have a mind -- for mind is
precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of
facts and their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a
thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for
its accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan
capable of execution and the obstructions in the way, -- or, if it is
really a mind to do the thing and not a vague aspiration -- it is to
have a plan which takes account of resources and difficulties. Mind
is capacity to refer present conditions to future results, and future
consequences to present conditions. And these traits are just what is
meant by having an aim or a purpose. A man is stupid or blind or
unintelligent -- lacking in mind -- just in the degree in which in
any activity he does not know what he is about, namely, the probable
consequences of his acts. A man is imperfectly intelligent when he
contents himself with looser guesses about the outcome than is
needful, just taking a chance with his luck, or when he forms plans
apart from study of the actual conditions, including his own
capacities. Such relative absence of mind means to make our feelings
the measure of what is to happen. To be intelligent we must "stop,
look, listen" in making the plan of an activity.
To
identify acting with an aim and intelligent activity is enough to
show its value -- its function in experience. We are only too given
to making an entity out of the abstract noun "consciousness."
We forget that it comes from the adjective "conscious." To
be conscious is to be aware of what we are about; conscious signifies
the deliberate, observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness
is nothing which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or
which has impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a name
for the purposeful quality of an activity, for the fact that it is
directed by an aim. Put the other way about, to have an aim is to act
with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do
something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light of that
intent.
2.
The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our discussion
to a consideration of the criteria involved in a correct establishing
of aims. (1) The aim set up must be an outgrowth of existing
conditions. It must be based upon a consideration of what is already
going on; upon the resources and difficulties of the situation.
Theories about the proper end of our activities -- educational and
moral theories -- often violate this principle. They assume ends
lying outside our activities; ends foreign to the concrete makeup of
the situation; ends which issue from some outside source. Then the
problem is to bring our activities to bear upon the realization of
these externally supplied ends. They are something for which we ought
to act. In any case such "aims" limit intelligence; they
are not the expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice
of the better among alternative possibilities. They limit
intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some
authority external to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but
a mechanical choice of means.
(2)
We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the
attempt to realize them. This impression must now be qualified. The
aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative sketch. The act of
striving to realize it tests its worth. If it suffices to direct
activity successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole
function is to set a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may
suffice. But usually -- at least in complicated situations -- acting
upon it brings to light conditions which had been overlooked. This
calls for revision of the original aim; it has to be added to and
subtracted from. An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable
of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to
the process of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from
without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the
concrete conditions of the situation. What happens in the course of
action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it. Such an end can only
be insisted upon. The failure that results from its lack of
adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions,
not to the fact that the end is not reasonable under the
circumstances. The value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary, lies
in the fact that we can use it to change conditions. It is a method
for dealing with conditions so as to effect desirable alterations in
them. A farmer who should passively accept things just as he finds
them would make as great a mistake as he who framed his plans in
complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the
evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its
very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard
snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present
state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of
treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as
conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence
constantly growing as it is tested in action.
(3)
The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The term end
in view is suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination or
conclusion of some process. The only way in which we can define an
activity is by putting before ourselves the objects in which it
terminates -- as one's aim in shooting is the target. But we must
remember that the object is only a mark or sign by which the mind
specifies the activity one desires to carry out. Strictly speaking,
not the target but hitting the target is the end in view; one takes
aim by means of the target, but also by the sight on the gun. The
different objects which are thought of are means of directing the
activity. Thus one aims at, say, a rabbit; what he wants is to shoot
straight: a certain kind of activity. Or, if it is the rabbit he
wants, it is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor in
activity; he wants to eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence of
his marksmanship -- he wants to do something with it. The doing with
the thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end. The object is but
a phase of the active end, -- continuing the activity successfully.
This is what is meant by the phrase, used above, "freeing
activity."
In
contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go
on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed from
without the activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is
something to be attained and possessed. When one has such a notion,
activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else; it is not
significant or important on its own account. As compared with the end
it is but a necessary evil; something which must be gone through
before one can reach the object which is alone worth while. In other
words, the external idea of the aim leads to a separation of means
from end, while an end which grows up within an activity as plan for
its direction is always both ends and means, the distinction being
only one of convenience. Every means is a temporary end until we have
attained it. Every end becomes a means of carrying activity further
as soon as it is achieved. We call it end when it marks off the
future direction of the activity in which we are engaged; means when
it marks off the present direction. Every divorce of end from means
diminishes by that much the significance of the activity and tends to
reduce it to a drudgery from which one would escape if he could. A
farmer has to use plants and animals to carry on his farming
activities. It certainly makes a great difference to his life whether
he is fond of them, or whether he regards them merely as means which
he has to employ to get something else in which alone he is
interested. In the former case, his entire course of activity is
significant; each phase of it has its own value. He has the
experience of realizing his end at every stage; the postponed aim, or
end in view, being merely a sight ahead by which to keep his activity
going fully and freely. For if he does not look ahead, he is more
likely to find himself blocked. The aim is as definitely a means of
action as is any other portion of an activity.
3.
Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about
educational aims. They are just like aims in any directed occupation.
The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to do, certain
resources with which to do, and certain obstacles with which to
contend. The conditions with which the farmer deals, whether as
obstacles or resources, have their own structure and operation
independently of any purpose of his. Seeds sprout, rain falls, the
sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, the seasons change. His aim
is simply to utilize these various conditions; to make his activities
and their energies work together, instead of against one another. It
would be absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without
any reference to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristic of
plant growth, etc. His purpose is simply a foresight of the
consequences of his energies connected with those of the things about
him, a foresight used to direct his movements from day to day.
Foresight of possible consequences leads to more careful and
extensive observation of the nature and performances of the things he
had to do with, and to laying out a plan -- that is, of a certain
order in the acts to be performed.
It
is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as
absurd for the latter to set up his "own" aims as the
proper objects of the growth of the children as it would be for the
farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Aims
mean acceptance of responsibility for the observations,
anticipations, and arrangements required in carrying on a function --
whether farming or educating. Any aim is of value so far as it
assists observation, choice, and planning in carrying on activity
from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it gets in the way of the
individual's own common sense (as it will surely do if imposed from
without or accepted on authority) it does harm.
And
it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims.
Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract
idea like education. And consequently their purposes are indefinitely
varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow
and with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches.
Even the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do
more harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but
rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look
ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing the energies of
the concrete situations in which they find themselves. As a recent
writer has said: "To lead this boy to read Scott's novels
instead of old Sleuth's stories; to teach this girl to sew; to root
out the habit of bullying from John's make-up; to prepare this class
to study medicine, -- these are samples of the millions of aims we
have actually before us in the concrete work of education."
Bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall proceed to state some
of the characteristics found in all good educational aims. (1) An
educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and
needs (including original instincts and acquired habits) of the given
individual to be educated. The tendency of such an aim as preparation
is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers, and find the aim in
some remote accomplishment or responsibility. In general, there is a
disposition to take considerations which are dear to the hearts of
adults and set them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of
those educated. There is also an inclination to propound aims which
are so uniform as to neglect the specific powers and requirements of
an individual, forgetting that all learning is something which
happens to an individual at a given time and place. The larger range
of perception of the adult is of great value in observing the
abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they may
amount to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what
certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did not have
the adult achievements we should be without assurance as to the
significance of the drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring
activities of childhood. So if it were not for adult language, we
should not be able to see the import of the babbling impulses of
infancy. But it is one thing to use adult accomplishments as a
context in which to place and survey the doings of childhood and
youth; it is quite another to set them up as a fixed aim without
regard to the concrete activities of those educated.
(2)
An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating
with the activities of those undergoing instruction. It must suggest
the kind of environment needed to liberate and to organize their
capacities. Unless it lends itself to the construction of specific
procedures, and unless these procedures test, correct, and amplify
the aim, the latter is worthless. Instead of helping the specific
task of teaching, it prevents the use of ordinary judgment in
observing and sizing up the situation. It operates to exclude
recognition of everything except what squares up with the fixed end
in view. Every rigid aim just because it is rigidly given seems to
render it unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete
conditions. Since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting
details which do not count?
The
vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers receive them
from superior authorities; these authorities accept them from what is
current in the community. The teachers impose them upon children. As
a first consequence, the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it
is confined to receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is
the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative
supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc.,
that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind
and the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher's experience is
then reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The
latter receive their aims through a double or treble external
imposition, and are constantly confused by the conflict between the
aims which are natural to their own experience at the time and those
in which they are taught to acquiesce. Until the democratic criterion
of the intrinsic significance of every growing experience is
recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by the demand for
adaptation to external aims.
(3)
Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are alleged to
be general and ultimate. Every activity, however specific, is, of
course, general in its ramified connections, for it leads out
indefinitely into other things. So far as a general idea makes us
more alive to these connections, it cannot be too general. But
"general" also means "abstract," or detached from
all specific context. And such abstractness means remoteness, and
throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as mere means
of getting ready for an end disconnected from the means. That
education is literally and all the time its own reward means that no
alleged study or discipline is educative unless it is worth while in
its own immediate having. A truly general aim broadens the outlook;
it stimulates one to take more consequences (connections) into
account. This means a wider and more flexible observation of means.
The more interacting forces, for example, the farmer takes into
account, the more varied will be his immediate resources. He will see
a greater number of possible starting places, and a greater number of
ways of getting at what he wants to do. The fuller one's conception
of possible future achievements, the less his present activity is
tied down to a small number of alternatives. If one knew enough, one
could start almost anywhere and sustain his activities continuously
and fruitfully.
Understanding
then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the sense of a
broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall take up
some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational
theories of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the
immediate concrete and diversified aims which are always the
educator's real concern. We premise (as indeed immediately follows
from what has been said) that there is no need of making a choice
among them or regarding them as competitors. When we come to act in a
tangible way we have to select or choose a particular act at a
particular time, but any number of comprehensive ends may exist
without competition, since they mean simply different ways of looking
at the same scene. One cannot climb a number of different mountains
simultaneously, but the views had when different mountains are
ascended supplement one another: they do not set up incompatible,
competing worlds. Or, putting the matter in a slightly different way,
one statement of an end may suggest certain questions and
observations, and another statement another set of questions, calling
for other observations. Then the more general ends we have, the
better. One statement will emphasize what another slurs over. What a
plurality of hypotheses does for the scientific investigator, a
plurality of stated aims may do for the instructor.
Summary.
An aim denotes the result of any natural process brought to
consciousness and made a factor in determining present observation
and choice of ways of acting. It signifies that an activity has
become intelligent. Specifically it means foresight of the
alternative consequences attendant upon acting in a given situation
in different ways, and the use of what is anticipated to direct
observation and experiment. A true aim is thus opposed at every point
to an aim which is imposed upon a process of action from without. The
latter is fixed and rigid; it is not a stimulus to intelligence in
the given situation, but is an externally dictated order to do such
and such things. Instead of connecting directly with present
activities, it is remote, divorced from the means by which it is to
be reached. Instead of suggesting a freer and better balanced
activity, it is a limit set to activity. In education, the currency
of these externally imposed aims is responsible for the emphasis put
upon the notion of preparation for a remote future and for rendering
the work of both teacher and pupil mechanical and slavish.
Chapter
Nine
:
Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims
1.
Nature as Supplying the Aim. We have just pointed out the futility of
trying to establish the aim of education--some one final aim which
subordinates all others to itself. We have indicated that since
general aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey
the existing conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might
have any number of them, all consistent with one another. As matter
of fact, a large number have been stated at different times, all
having great local value. For the statement of aim is a matter of
emphasis at a given time. And we do not emphasize things which do not
require emphasis--that is, such things as are taking care of
themselves fairly well. We tend rather to frame our statement on the
basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation; we take
for granted, without explicit statement which would be of no use,
whatever is right or approximately so. We frame our explicit aims in
terms of some alteration to be brought about. It is, then, DO paradox
requiring explanation that a given epoch or generation tends to
emphasize in its conscious projections just the things which it has
least of in actual fact. A time of domination by authority will call
out as response the desirability of great individual freedom; one of
disorganized individual activities the need of social control as an
educational aim.
The
actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus
balance each other. At different times such aims as complete living,
better methods of language study, substitution of things for words,
social efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete
development of personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, a
esthetic contemplation, utility, etc., have served. The following
discussion takes up three statements of recent influence; certain
others have been incidentally discussed in the previous chapters, and
others will be considered later in a discussion of knowledge and of
the values of studies. We begin with a consideration that education
is a process of development in accordance with nature, taking
Rousseau's statement, which opposed natural to social (See ante, p.
91); and then pass over to the antithetical conception of social
efficiency, which often opposes social to natural.
(1)
Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and
artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are
prone to resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to
furnish the law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and
conform to her ways. The positive value of this conception lies in
the forcible way in which it calls attention to the wrongness of aims
which do not have regard to the natural endowment of those educated.
Its weakness is the ease with which natural in the sense of normal is
confused with the physical. The constructive use of intelligence in
foresight, and contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out
of the way and allow nature to do the work. Since no one has stated
in the doctrine both its truth and falsity better than Rousseau, we
shall turn to him.
"Education,"
he says, "we receive from three sources--Nature, men, and
things. The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities
constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which we are taught
to put this development constitutes that education given us by Men.
The acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects
constitutes that of things. Only when these three kinds of education
are consonant and make for the same end, does a man tend towards his
true goal. If we are asked what is this end, the answer is that of
Nature. For since the concurrence of the three kinds of education is
necessary to their completeness, the kind which is entirely
independent of our control must necessarily regulate us in
determining the other two." Then he defines Nature to mean the
capacities and dispositions which are inborn, "as they exist
prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the
influence of the opinion of others."
The
wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as
fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in
conjunction with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say
better what is said in the first sentences. The three factors of
educative development are (a) the native structure of our bodily
organs and their functional activities; (b) the uses to which the
activities of these organs are put under the influence of other
persons; (c) their direct interaction with the environment. This
statement certainly covers the ground. His other two propositions are
equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the three factors of
education are consonant and cooperative does adequate development of
the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities of the
organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But it
requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other
statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these
three things as factors which must work together to some extent in
order that any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them
as separate and independent operations. Especially does he believe
that there is an independent and, as he says, "spontaneous"
development of the native organs and faculties. He thinks that this
development can go on irrespective of the use to which they are put.
And it is to this separate development that education coming from
social contact is to be subordinated. Now there is an immense
difference between a use of native activities in accord with those
activities themselves -- as distinct from forcing them and perverting
them -- and supposing that they have a normal development apart from
any use, which development furnishes the standard and norm of all
learning by use. To recur to our previous illustration, the process
of acquiring language is a practically perfect model of proper
educative growth. The start is from native activities of the vocal
apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose that
these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself
would evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle
would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and
noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the development of
articulate speech -- which they are -- but as furnishing language
itself -- the standard for all teaching of language.
The
point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right,
introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the
structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all
teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating
that they supply not only the conditions but also the ends of their
development. As matter of fact, the native activities develop, in
contrast with random and capricious exercise, through the uses to
which they are put. And the office of the social medium is, as we
have seen, to direct growth through putting powers to the best
possible use. The instinctive activities may be called,
metaphorically, spontaneous, in the sense that the organs give a
strong bias for a certain sort of operation, -- a bias so strong that
we cannot go contrary to it, though by trying to go contrary we may
pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. But the notion of a spontaneous
normal development of these activities is pure mythology. The
natural, or native, powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces
in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims. There is no
learning except from a beginning in unlearned powers, but learning is
not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the unlearned powers.
Rousseau's contrary opinion is doubtless due to the fact that he
identified God with Nature; to him the original powers are wholly
good, coming directly from a wise and good creator. To paraphrase the
old saying about the country and the town, God made the original
human organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put.
Consequently the development of the former furnishes the standard to
which the latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to determine
the uses to which the original activities shall be put, they
interfere with a divine plan. The interference by social arrangements
with Nature, God's work, is the primary source of corruption in
individuals.
Rousseau's
passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all natural
tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total
depravity of innate human nature, and has had a powerful influence in
modifying the attitude towards children's interests. But it is hardly
necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither
good nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects
for which they are employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature
forcing of some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible
for many avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not
to leave them alone to follow their own "spontaneous
development," but to provide an environment which shall organize
them.
Returning
to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's statements, we find
that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point the means
of correcting many evils in current practices, and to indicate a
number of desirable specific aims. (1) Natural development as an aim
fixes attention upon the bodily organs and the need of health and
vigor. The aim of natural development says to parents and teachers:
Make health an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard
to the vigor of the body--an obvious enough fact and yet one whose
due recognition in practice would almost automatically revolutionize
many of our educational practices. "Nature" is indeed a
vague and metaphorical term, but one thing that "Nature"
may be said to utter is that there are conditions of educational
efficiency, and that till we have learned what these conditions are
and have learned to make our practices accord with them, the noblest
and most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer -- are verbal and
sentimental rather than efficacious.
(2)
The aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect for
physical mobility. In Rousseau's words: "Children are always in
motion; a sedentary life is injurious." When he says that
"Nature's intention is to strengthen the body before exercising
the mind" he hardly states the fact fairly. But if he had said
that nature's "intention" (to adopt his poetical form of
speech) is to develop the mind especially by exercise of the muscles
of the body he would have stated a positive fact. In other words, the
aim of following nature means, in the concrete, regard for the actual
part played by use of the bodily organs in explorations, in handling
of materials, in plays and games. (3) The general aim translates into
the aim of regard for individual differences among children. Nobody
can take the principle of consideration of native powers into account
without being struck by the fact that these powers differ in
different individuals. The difference applies not merely to their
intensity, but even more to their quality and arrangement. As Rouseau
said: "Each individual is born with a distinctive temperament.
We indiscriminately employ children of different bents on the same
exercises; their education destroys the special bent and leaves a
dull uniformity. Therefore after we have wasted our efforts in
stunting the true gifts of nature we see the short-lived and illusory
brilliance we have substituted die away, while the natural abilities
we have crushed do not revive."
Lastly,
the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the waxing, and
waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and bloom
irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. We must
strike while the iron is hot. Especially precious are the first
dawnings of power. More than we imagine, the ways in which the
tendencies of early childhood are treated fix fundamental
dispositions and condition the turn taken by powers that show
themselves later. Educational concern with the early years of life --
as distinct from inculcation of useful arts -- dates almost entirely
from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi and Froebel, following
Rousseau, of natural principles of growth. The irregularity of growth
and its significance is indicated in the following passage of a
student of the growth of the nervous system. "While growth
continues, things bodily and mental are lopsided, for growth is never
general, but is accentuated now at one spot, now at another. The
methods which shall recognize in the presence of these enormous
differences of endowment the dynamic values of natural inequalities
of growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity to the rounding
out gained by pruning will most closely follow that which takes place
in the body and thus prove most effective." 1 Observation of
natural tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint. They
show themselves most readily in a child's spontaneous sayings and
doings, -- that is, in those he engages in when not put at set tasks
and when not aware of being under observation. It does not follow
that these tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but
it does follow that since they are there, they are operative and must
be taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones have
an environment which keeps them active, and that their activity shall
control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse
of the latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that
trouble parents when they appear are likely to be transitory, and
sometimes too much direct attention to them only fixes a child's
attention upon them. At all events, adults too easily assume their
own habits and wishes as standards, and regard all deviations of
children's impulses as evils to be eliminated. That artificiality
against which the conception of following nature is so largely a
protest, is the outcome of attempts to force children directly into
the mold of grown-up standards.
In
conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following
nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one
another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been
inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically
unlimited power to it. All the differences between peoples and
between classes and persons among the same people were said to be due
to differences of training, of exercise, and practice. Originally,
mind, reason, understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same
in all. This essential identity of mind means the essential equality
of all and the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As
a protest against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant
a much less formal and abstract view of mind and its powers. It
substituted specific instincts and impulses and physiological
capacities, differing from individual to individual (just as they
differ, as Rousseau pointed out, even in dogs of the same litter),
for abstract faculties of discernment, memory, and generalization.
Upon this side, the doctrine of educative accord with nature has been
reinforced by the development of modern biology, physiology, and
psychology. It means, in effect, that great as is the significance of
nurture, of modification, and transformation through direct
educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities, affords the
foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. On the other
hand, the doctrine of following nature was a political dogma. It
meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs, and
ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau's statement that everything is
good as it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification
only in its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence:
"Everything degenerates in the hands of man." And again he
says: "Natural man has an absolute value; he is a numerical
unit, a complete integer and has no relation save to himself and to
his fellow man. Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator
of a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its relation to
the integral body of society. Good political institutions are those
which make a man unnatural." It is upon this conception of the
artificial and harmful character of organized social life as it now
exists 2 that he rested the notion that nature not merely furnishes
prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan and goal. That
evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a
wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is
true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart from the
environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers
will be put to better uses.
2.
Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the
end of a true education and society the end of an evil one, could
hardly fail to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the
form of a doctrine that the business of education is to supply
precisely what nature fails to secure; namely, habituation of an
individual to social control; subordination of natural powers to
social rules. It is not surprising to find that the value in the idea
of social efficiency resides largely in its protest against the
points at which the doctrine of natural development went astray;
while its misuse comes when it is employed to slur over the truth in
that conception. It is a fact that we must look to the activities and
achievements of associated life to find what the development of power
-- that is to say, efficiency -- means. The error is in implying that
we must adopt measures of subordination rather than of utilization to
secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered adequate when we
recognize that social efficiency is attained not by negative
constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in
occupations having a social meaning. (1) Translated into specific
aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial
competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the
ways in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound
influence upon all the relationships of persons to one another. If an
individual is not able to earn his own living and that of the
children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the
activities of others. He misses for himself one of the most educative
experiences of life. If he is not trained in the right use of the
products of industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave
himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No scheme of
education can afford to neglect such basic considerations. Yet in the
name of higher and more spiritual ideals, the arrangements for higher
education have often not only neglected them, but looked at them with
scorn as beneath the level of educative concern. With the change from
an oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the
significance of an education which should have as a result ability to
make one's way economically in the world, and to manage economic
resources usefully instead of for mere display and luxury, should
receive emphasis.
There
is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end, existing
economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final. A
democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of
competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is
violated when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for
definite industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained
original capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of
parents. As a matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes
rapid and abrupt changes through the evolution of new inventions. New
industries spring up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently
an attempt to train for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its
own purpose. When the occupation changes its methods, such
individuals are left behind with even less ability to readjust
themselves than if they had a less definite training. But, most of
all, the present industrial constitution of society is, like every
society which has ever existed, full of inequities. It is the aim of
progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and
unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. Wherever social control
means subordination of individual activities to class authority,
there is danger that industrial education will be dominated by
acceptance of the status quo. Differences of economic opportunity
then dictate what the future callings of individuals are to be. We
have an unconscious revival of the defects of the Platonic scheme
(ante, p. 89) without its enlightened method of selection.
(2)
Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary to
separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. But
the latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications
which are vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from
whatever make an individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship
in the political sense: it denotes ability to judge men and measures
wisely and to take a determining part in making as well as obeying
laws. The aim of civic efficiency has at least the merit of
protecting us from the notion of a training of mental power at large.
It calls attention to the fact that power must be relative to doing
something, and to the fact that the things which most need to be done
are things which involve one's relationships with others.
Here
again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too
narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain periods
have excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in
the last analysis security of social progress depends upon them. For
scientific men would have been thought to be mere theoretical
dreamers, totally lacking in social efficiency. It must be borne in
mind that ultimately social efficiency means neither more nor less
than capacity to share in a give and take of experience. It covers
all that makes one's own experience more worth while to others, and
all that enables one to participate more richly in the worthwhile
experiences of others. Ability to produce and to enjoy art, capacity
for recreation, the significant utilization of leisure, are more
important elements in it than elements conventionally associated
oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest sense, social efficiency
is nothing less than that socialization of mind which is actively
concerned in making experiences more communicable; in breaking down
the barriers of social stratification which make individuals
impervious to the interests of others. When social efficiency is
confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its chief constituent
(because its only guarantee) is omitted, -- intelligent sympathy or
good will. For sympathy as a desirable quality is something more than
mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have in
common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them. What
is sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an
unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good
shall be, instead of an endeavor to free them so that they may seek
and find the good of their own choice. Social efficiency, even social
service, are hard and metallic things when severed from an active
acknowledgment of the diversity of goods which life may afford to
different persons, and from faith in the social utility of
encouraging every individual to make his own choice intelligent.
3.
Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is
consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture
means at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed
to the raw and crude. When the "natural" is identified with
this rawness, culture is opposed to what is called natural
development. Culture is also something personal; it is cultivation
with respect to appreciation of ideas and art and broad human
interests. When efficiency is identified with a narrow range of acts,
instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is
opposed to efficiency. Whether called culture or complete development
of personality, the outcome is identical with the true meaning of
social efficiency whenever attention is given to what is unique in an
individual--and he would not be an individual if there were not
something incommensurable about him. Its opposite is the mediocre,
the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed, distinction
of personality results, and with it greater promise for a social
service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material
commodities. For how can there be a society really worth serving
unless it is constituted of individuals of significant personal
qualities?
The
fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social
efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its
rigid division of inferior and superior. The latter are supposed to
have time and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the
former are confined to providing external products. When social
efficiency as measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a
would-be democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate
of the masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted
and carried over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it
is that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for
development of distinctive capacities be afforded all. The separation
of the two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of
the narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential
justification.
The
aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within
the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external
products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable
experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of
commodities which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality
are, in the strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products
which are inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. To
set up an external aim strengthens by reaction the false conception
of culture which identifies it with something purely "inner."
And the idea of perfecting an "inner" personality is a sure
sign of social divisions. What is called inner is simply that which
does not connect with others -- which is not capable of free and full
communication. What is termed spiritual culture has usually been
futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been
conceived as a thing which a man might have internally -- and
therefore exclusively. What one is as a person is what one is as
associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse. This
transcends both the efficiency which consists in supplying products
to others and the culture which is an exclusive refinement and
polish.
Any
individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher,
student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of
value to others is an accompaniment of a process of experience
inherently worth while. Why then should it be thought that one must
take his choice between sacrificing himself to doing useful things
for others, or sacrificing them to pursuit of his own exclusive ends,
whether the saving of his own soul or the building of an inner
spiritual life and personality? What happens is that since neither of
these things is persistently possible, we get a compromise and an
alternation. One tries each course by turns. There is no greater
tragedy than that so much of the professedly spiritual and religious
thought of the world has emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice
and spiritual self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against
this dualism of life. The dualism is too deeply established to be
easily overthrown; for that reason, it is the particular task of
education at the present time to struggle in behalf of an aim in
which social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead of
antagonists.
Summary.
General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying the
specific problems of education. Consequently it is a test of the
value of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it
will translate readily and consistently into the procedures which are
suggested by another. We have applied this test to three general
aims: Development according to nature, social efficiency, and culture
or personal mental enrichment. In each case we have seen that the
aims when partially stated come into conflict with each other. The
partial statement of natural development takes the primitive powers
in an alleged spontaneous development as the end-all. From this point
of view training which renders them useful to others is an abnormal
constraint; one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate
nurture is corrupting. But when we recognize that natural activities
mean native activities which develop only through the uses in which
they are nurtured, the conflict disappears. Similarly a social
efficiency which is defined in terms of rendering external service to
others is of necessity opposed to the aim of enriching the meaning of
experience, while a culture which is taken to consist in an internal
refinement of a mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But
social efficiency as an educational purpose should mean cultivation
of power to join freely and fully in shared or common activities.
This is impossible without culture, while it brings a reward in
culture, because one cannot share in intercourse with others without
learning -- without getting a broader point of view and perceiving
things of which one would otherwise be ignorant. And there is perhaps
no better definition of culture than that it is the capacity for
constantly expanding the range and accuracy of one's perception of
meanings.
1
Donaldson, Growth of Brain, p. 356.
2
We must not forget that Rousseau had the idea of a radically
different sort of society, a fraternal society whose end should be
identical with the good of all its members, which he thought to be as
much better than existing states as these are worse than the state of
nature.
Chapter
Ten
:
Interest and Discipline
1.
The Meaning of the Terms. We have already noticed the difference in
the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The
former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good
as another, since each is just something to look at. The latter is
bound up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to
him. His fortunes are more or less at stake in the issue of events.
Consequently he does whatever he can to influence the direction
present occurrences take. One is like a man in a prison cell watching
the rain out of the window; it is all the same to him. The other is
like a man who has planned an outing for the next day which
continuing rain will frustrate. He cannot, to be sure, by his present
reactions affect to-morrow's weather, but he may take some steps
which will influence future happenings, if only to postpone the
proposed picnic. If a man sees a carriage coming which may run over
him, if he cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the
way if he foresees the consequence in time. In many instances, he can
intervene even more directly. The attitude of a participant in the
course of affairs is thus a double one: there is solicitude, anxiety
concerning future consequences, and a tendency to act to assure
better, and avert worse, consequences. There are words which denote
this attitude: concern, interest. These words suggest that a person
is bound up with the possibilities inhering in objects; that he is
accordingly on the lookout for what they are likely to do to him; and
that, on the basis of his expectation or foresight, he is eager to
act so as to give things one turn rather than another. Interest and
aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily connected. Such words as
aim, intent, end, emphasize the results which are wanted and striven
for; they take for granted the personal attitude of solicitude and
attentive eagerness. Such words as interest, affection, concern,
motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is foreseen upon the
individual's fortunes, and his active desire to act to secure a
possible result. They take for granted the objective changes. But the
difference is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in one
set of words is illuminated in the other. What is anticipated is
objective and impersonal; to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being
run over. But for an active being, a being who partakes of the
consequences instead of standing aloof from them, there is at the
same time a personal response. The difference imaginatively foreseen
makes a present difference, which finds expression in solicitude and
effort. While such words as affection, concern, and motive indicate
an attitude of personal preference, they are always attitudes toward
objects -- toward what is foreseen. We may call the phase of
objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal concern
emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in the facts of
the situation.
Such
a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran their
course in a world by themselves. But they are always responses to
what is going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their
successful or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction
with other changes. Life activities flourish and fail only in
connection with changes of the environment. They are literally bound
up with these changes; our desires, emotions, and affections are but
various ways in which our doings are tied up with the doings of
things and persons about us. Instead of marking a purely personal or
subjective realm, separated from the objective and impersonal, they
indicate the non-existence of such a separate world. They afford
convincing evidence that changes in things are not alien to the
activities of a self, and that the career and welfare of the self are
bound up with the movement of persons and things. Interest, concern,
mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a developing
situation.
The
word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole state
of active development, (ii) the objective results that are foreseen
and wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional inclination.
(I)
An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often referred to as
an interest. Thus we say that a man's interest is politics, or
journalism, or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting Japanese
prints, or banking.
(ii)
By an interest we also mean the point at which an object touches or
engages a man; the point where it influences him. In some legal
transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to have
a standing at court. He has to show that some proposed step concerns
his affairs. A silent partner has an interest in a business, although
he takes no active part in its conduct because its prosperity or
decline affects his profits and liabilities.
(iii)
When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the emphasis
falls directly upon his personal attitude. To be interested is to be
absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an
interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive. We
say of an interested person both that he has lost himself in some
affair and that he has found himself in it. Both terms express the
engrossment of the self in an object.
When
the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory
way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is
first exaggerated and then isolated. Interest is taken to mean merely
the effect of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage,
success or failure. Separated from any objective development of
affairs, these are reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or
pain. Educationally, it then follows that to attach importance to
interest means to attach some feature of seductiveness to material
otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and effort by offering a
bribe of pleasure. This procedure is properly stigmatized as "soft"
pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of education.
But
the objection is based upon the fact -- or assumption -- that the
forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be
appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other words,
they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the
pupils. The remedy is not in finding fault with the doctrine of
interest, any more than it is to search for some pleasant bait that
may be hitched to the alien material. It is to discover objects and
modes of action, which are connected with present powers. The
function of this material in engaging activity and carrying it on
consistently and continuously is its interest. If the material
operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for devices
which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary,
semi-coerced effort.
The
word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between, -- that
which connects two things otherwise distant. In education, the
distance covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a
process takes time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make
it explicit. We overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to
be covered between an initial stage of process and the completing
period; that there is something intervening. In learning, the present
powers of the pupil are the initial stage; the aim of the teacher
represents the remote limit. Between the two lie means -- that is
middle conditions: -- acts to be performed; difficulties to be
overcome; appliances to be used. Only through them, in the literal
time sense, will the initial activities reach a satisfactory
consummation.
These
intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because the
development of existing activities into the foreseen and desired end
depends upon them. To be means for the achieving of present
tendencies, to be "between" the agent and his end, to be of
interest, are different names for the same thing. When material has
to be made interesting, it signifies that as presented, it lacks
connection with purposes and present power: or that if the connection
be there, it is not perceived. To make it interesting by leading one
to realize the connection that exists is simply good sense; to make
it interesting by extraneous and artificial inducements deserves all
the bad names which have been applied to the doctrine of interest in
education.
So
much for the meaning of the term interest. Now for that of
discipline. Where an activity takes time, where many means and
obstacles lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation and
persistence are required. It is obvious that a very large part of the
everyday meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or conscious
disposition to persist and endure in a planned course of action in
spite of difficulties and contrary solicitations. A man of strong
will, in the popular usage of the words, is a man who is neither
fickle nor half-hearted in achieving chosen ends. His ability is
executive; that is, he persistently and energetically strives to
execute or carry out his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.
Clearly
there are two factors in will. One has to do with the foresight of
results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has
upon the person.
(I)
Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition.
Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps
on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any
clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally
declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make
clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if
he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not
be worth while. Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to
criticize ends which present themselves than it does in persistence
and energy in use of means to achieve the end. The really executive
man is a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results
of his actions as clear and full as possible. The people we called
weak-willed or self-indulgent always deceive themselves as to the
consequences of their acts. They pick out some feature which is
agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances. When they begin to
act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to show themselves.
They are discouraged, or complain of being thwarted in their good
purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action. That
the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is
intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and
fullness with which consequences are thought out, cannot be
over-emphasized.
(ii)
There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of
results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of a
person. They are something to look at and for curiosity to play with
rather than something to achieve. There is no such thing as
over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-sided
intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as we say in
considering the consequences of proposed lines of action. A certain
flabbiness of fiber prevents the contemplated object from gripping
him and engaging him in action. And most persons are naturally
diverted from a proposed course of action by unusual, unforeseen
obstacles, or by presentation of inducements to an action that is
directly more agreeable.
A
person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them
deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a
power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of
distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of
discipline. Discipline means power at command; mastery of the
resources available for carrying through the action undertaken. To
know what one is to do and to move to do it promptly and by use of
the requisite means is to be disciplined, whether we are thinking of
an army or a mind. Discipline is positive. To cow the spirit, to
subdue inclination, to compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to
make a subordinate perform an uncongenial task -- these things are or
are not disciplinary according as they do or do not tend to the
development of power to recognize what one is about and to
persistence in accomplishment.
It
is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline
are connected, not opposed.
(i)
Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained power --
apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in consequences -- is
not possible without interest. Deliberation will be perfunctory and
superficial where there is no interest. Parents and teachers often
complain -- and correctly -- that children "do not want to hear,
or want to understand." Their minds are not upon the subject
precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into
their concerns. This is a state of things that needs to be remedied,
but the remedy is not in the use of methods which increase
indifference and aversion. Even punishing a child for inattention is
one way of trying to make him realize that the matter is not a thing
of complete unconcern; it is one way of arousing "interest,"
or bringing about a sense of connection. In the long run, its value
is measured by whether it supplies a mere physical excitation to act
in the way desired by the adult or whether it leads the child "to
think"--that is, to reflect upon his acts and impregnate them
with aims.
(ii)
That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even more
obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who are not
interested in what they are doing. If one were engaging a lawyer or a
doctor, it would never occur to one to reason that the person engaged
would stick to his work more conscientiously if it was so uncongenial
to him that he did it merely from a sense of obligation. Interest
measures -- or rather is -- the depth of the grip which the foreseen
end has upon one, moving one to act for its realization.
2.
The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education. Interest
represents the moving force of objects -- whether perceived or
presented in imagination -- in any experience having a purpose. In
the concrete, the value of recognizing the dynamic place of interest
in an educative development is that it leads to considering
individual children in their specific capabilities, needs, and
preferences. One who recognizes the importance of interest will not
assume that all minds work in the same way because they happen to
have the same teacher and textbook. Attitudes and methods of approach
and response vary with the specific appeal the same material makes,
this appeal itself varying with difference of natural aptitude, of
past experience, of plan of life, and so on. But the facts of
interest also supply considerations of general value to the
philosophy of education. Rightly understood, they put us on our guard
against certain conceptions of mind and of subject matter which have
had great vogue in philosophic thought in the past, and which
exercise a serious hampering influence upon the conduct of
instruction and discipline. Too frequently mind is set over the world
of things and facts to be known; it is regarded as something existing
in isolation, with mental states and operations that exist
independently. Knowledge is then regarded as an external application
of purely mental existences to the things to be known, or else as a
result of the impressions which this outside subject matter makes on
mind, or as a combination of the two. Subject matter is then regarded
as something complete in itself; it is just something to be learned
or known, either by the voluntary application of mind to it or
through the impressions it makes on mind.
The
facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind
appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the
basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a
view to controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place.
The things, the subject matter known, consist of whatever is
recognized as having a bearing upon the anticipated course of events,
whether assisting or retarding it. These statements are too formal to
be very intelligible. An illustration may clear up their
significance. You are engaged in a certain occupation, say writing
with a typewriter. If you are an expert, your formed habits take care
of the physical movements and leave your thoughts free to consider
your topic. Suppose, however, you are not skilled, or that, even if
you are, the machine does not work well. You then have to use
intelligence. You do not wish to strike the keys at random and let
the consequences be what they may; you wish to record certain words
in a given order so as to make sense. You attend to the keys, to what
you have written, to your movements, to the ribbon or the mechanism
of the machine. Your attention is not distributed indifferently and
miscellaneously to any and every detail. It is centered upon whatever
has a bearing upon the effective pursuit of your occupation. Your
look is ahead, and you are concerned to note the existing facts
because and in so far as they are factors in the achievement of the
result intended. You have to find out what your resources are, what
conditions are at command, and what the difficulties and obstacles
are. This foresight and this survey with reference to what is
foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not involve such a
forecast of results and such an examination of means and hindrances
is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither case is
it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended and
careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to be, in
that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
If
we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical
manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write,
the case is the same. There is an activity in process; one is taken
up with the development of a theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph
talks, this means intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the
various conclusions to which present data and considerations are
tending, together with continually renewed observation and
recollection to get hold of the subject matter which bears upon the
conclusions to be reached. The whole attitude is one of concern with
what is to be, and with what is so far as the latter enters into the
movement toward the end. Leave out the direction which depends upon
foresight of possible future results, and there is no intelligence in
present behavior. Let there be imaginative forecast but no attention
to the conditions upon which its attainment depends, and there is
self-deception or idle dreaming -- abortive intelligence.
If
this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something
complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as
that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims,
ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the
attainment of aims. Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a
person owns; but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities
in which he plays a part have the qualities mentioned. Nor are the
activities in which a person engages, whether intelligently or not,
exclusive properties of himself; they are something in which he
engages and partakes. Other things, the independent changes of other
things and persons, cooperate and hinder. The individual's act may be
initial in a course of events, but the outcome depends upon the
interaction of his response with energies supplied by other agencies.
Conceive mind as anything but one factor partaking along with others
in the production of consequences, and it becomes meaningless.
The
problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will
engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of
moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic
appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends. The remedy
for the evils attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously
spoken of, is not to be found by substituting a doctrine of
specialized disciplines, but by reforming the notion of mind and its
training. Discovery of typical modes of activity, whether play or
useful occupations, in which individuals are concerned, in whose
outcome they recognize they have something at stake, and which cannot
be carried through without reflection and use of judgment to select
material of observation and recollection, is the remedy. In short,
the root of the error long prevalent in the conception of training of
mind consists in leaving out of account movements of things to future
results in which an individual shares, and in the direction of which
observation, imagination, and memory are enlisted. It consists in
regarding mind as complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to
a present material.
In
historic practice the error has cut two ways. On one hand, it has
screened and protected traditional studies and methods of teaching
from intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say that they are
"disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all inquiry. It
has not been enough to show that they were of no use in life or that
they did not really contribute to the cultivation of the self. That
they were "disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued
every doubt, and removed the subject from the realm of rational
discussion. By its nature, the allegation could not be checked up.
Even when discipline did not accrue as matter of fact, when the pupil
even grew in laxity of application and lost power of intelligent
self-direction, the fault lay with him, not with the study or the
methods of teaching. His failure was but proof that he needed more
discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the old methods.
The responsibility was transferred from the educator to the pupil
because the material did not have to meet specific tests; it did not
have to be shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served any
specific end. It was designed to discipline in general, and if it
failed, it was because the individual was unwilling to be
disciplined. In the other direction, the tendency was towards a
negative conception of discipline, instead of an identification of it
with growth in constructive power of achievement. As we have already
seen, will means an attitude toward the future, toward the production
of possible consequences, an attitude involving effort to foresee
clearly and comprehensively the probable results of ways of acting,
and an active identification with some anticipated consequences.
Identification of will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a
mind is set up, endowed with powers that are only to be applied to
existing material. A person just either will or will not apply
himself to the matter in hand. The more indifferent the subject
matter, the less concern it has for the habits and preferences of the
individual, the more demand there is for an effort to bring the mind
to bear upon it--and hence the more discipline of will. To attend to
material because there is something to be done in which the person is
concerned is not disciplinary in this view; not even if it results in
a desirable increase of constructive power. Application just for the
sake of application, for the sake of training, is alone disciplinary.
This is more likely to occur if the subject matter presented is
uncongenial, for then there is no motive (so it is supposed) except
the acknowledgment of duty or the value of discipline. The logical
result is expressed with literal truth in the words of an American
humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a boy so long
as he doesn't like it."
The
counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing with
objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject matter to be
learned. In the traditional schemes of education, subject matter
means so much material to be studied. Various branches of study
represent so many independent branches, each having its principles of
arrangement complete within itself. History is one such group of
facts; algebra another; geography another, and so on till we have run
through the entire curriculum. Having a ready- made existence on
their own account, their relation to mind is exhausted in what they
furnish it to acquire. This idea corresponds to the conventional
practice in which the program of school work, for the day, month, and
successive years, consists of "studies" all marked off from
one another, and each supposed to be complete by itself -- for
educational purposes at least.
Later
on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the meaning
of the subject matter of instruction. At this point, we need only to
say that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything which
intelligence studies represents things in the part which they play in
the carrying forward of active lines of interest. Just as one
"studies" his typewriter as part of the operation of
putting it to use to effect results, so with any fact or truth. It
becomes an object of study -- that is, of inquiry and reflection --
when it figures as a factor to be reckoned with in the completion of
a course of events in which one is engaged and by whose outcome one
is affected. Numbers are not objects of study just because they are
numbers already constituting a branch of learning called mathematics,
but because they represent qualities and relations of the world in
which our action goes on, because they are factors upon which the
accomplishment of our purposes depends. Stated thus broadly, the
formula may appear abstract. Translated into details, it means that
the act of learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the
degree in which pupils are merely presented with a lesson to be
learned. Study is effectual in the degree in which the pupil realizes
the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with in carrying to
fruition activities in which he is concerned. This connection of an
object and a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose
is the first and the last word of a genuine theory of interest in
education.
3.
Some Social Aspects of the Question. While the theoretical errors of
which we have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of
schools, they are themselves the outcome of conditions of social
life. A change confined to the theoretical conviction of educators
will not remove the difficulties, though it should render more
effective efforts to modify social conditions. Men's fundamental
attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of
the activities in which they partake. The ideal of interest is
exemplified in the artistic attitude. Art is neither merely internal
nor merely external; merely mental nor merely physical. Like every
mode of action, it brings about changes in the world. The changes
made by some actions (those which by contrast may be called
mechanical) are external; they are shifting things about. No ideal
reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them.
Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external
adornment and display. Many of our existing social activities,
industrial and political, fall in these two classes. Neither the
people who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by
them, are capable of full and free interest in their work. Because of
the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing it, or because
of the restricted character of its aim, intelligence is not
adequately engaged. The same conditions force many people back upon
themselves. They take refuge in an inner play of sentiment and
fancies. They are aesthetic but not artistic, since their feelings
and ideas are turned upon themselves, instead of being methods in
acts which modify conditions. Their mental life is sentimental; an
enjoyment of an inner landscape. Even the pursuit of science may
become an asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life -- not a
temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification in
future dealings with the world. The very word art may become
associated not with specific transformation of things, making them
more significant for mind, but with stimulations of eccentric fancy
and with emotional indulgences. The separation and mutual contempt of
the "practical" man and the man of theory or culture, the
divorce of fine and industrial arts, are indications of this
situation. Thus interest and mind are either narrowed, or else made
perverse. Compare what was said in an earlier chapter about the
one-sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of
efficiency and of culture.
This
state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a basis
of division between laboring classes and leisure classes. The
intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting
struggle with things; that of those freed from the discipline of
occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate. Moreover, the majority
of human beings still lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are fixed
by accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal
expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and
resources of the environment. Our economic conditions still relegate
many men to a servile status. As a consequence, the intelligence of
those in control of the practical situation is not liberal. Instead
of playing freely upon the subjugation of the world for human ends,
it is devoted to the manipulation of other men for ends that are
non-human in so far as they are exclusive.
This
state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational
traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in
different portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian
character of most elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary
or cultural character of most higher education. It accounts for the
tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is
scholastic, academic, and professionally technical, and for the
widespread conviction that liberal education is opposed to the
requirements of an education which shall count in the vocations of
life. But it also helps define the peculiar problem of present
education. The school cannot immediately escape from the ideals set
by prior social conditions. But it should contribute through the type
of intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the
improvement of those conditions. And just here the true conceptions
of interest and discipline are full of significance. Persons whose
interests have been enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with
things and facts in active occupations having a purpose (whether in
play or work) will be those most likely to escape the alternatives of
an academic and aloof knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely
"practical" practice. To organize education so that natural
active tendencies shall be fully enlisted in doing something, while
seeing to it that the doing requires observation, the acquisition of
information, and the use of a constructive imagination, is what most
needs to be done to improve social conditions. To oscillate between
drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing
without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge
that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that
education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby
takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A
reorganization of education so that learning takes place in
connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful
activities is a slow work. It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a
step at a time. But this is not a reason for nominally accepting one
educational philosophy and accommodating ourselves in practice to
another. It is a challenge to undertake the task of reorganization
courageously and to keep at it persistently.
Summary.
Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity having an
aim. Interest means that one is identified with the objects which
define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to its
realization. Any activity with an aim implies a distinction between
an earlier incomplete phase and later completing phase; it implies
also intermediate steps. To have an interest is to take things as
entering into such a continuously developing situation, instead of
taking them in isolation. The time difference between the given
incomplete state of affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort
in transformation, it demands continuity of attention and endurance.
This attitude is what is practically meant by will. Discipline or
development of power of continuous attention is its fruit. The
significance of this doctrine for the theory of education is twofold.
On the one hand it protects us from the notion that mind and mental
states are something complete in themselves, which then happen to be
applied to some ready-made objects and topics so that knowledge
results. It shows that mind and intelligent or purposeful engagement
in a course of action into which things enter are identical. Hence to
develop and train mind is to provide an environment which induces
such activity. On the other side, it protects us from the notion that
subject matter on its side is something isolated and independent. It
shows that subject matter of learning is identical with all the
objects, ideas, and principles which enter as resources or obstacles
into the continuous intentional pursuit of a course of action. The
developing course of action, whose end and conditions are perceived,
is the unity which holds together what are often divided into an
independent mind on one side and an independent world of objects and
facts on the other.
Chapter
Eleven
:
Experience and Thinking
1.
The Nature of Experience. The nature of experience can be understood
only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element
peculiarly combined. On the active hand, experience is trying -- a
meaning which is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On
the passive, it is undergoing. When we experience something we act
upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer or undergo the
consequences. We do something to the thing and then it does something
to us in return: such is the peculiar combination. The connection of
these two phases of experience measures the fruitfulness or value of
the experience. Mere activity does not constitute experience. It is
dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating. Experience as trying involves
change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously
connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it.
When an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences,
when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made
in us, the mere flux is loaded with significance. We learn something.
It is not experience when a child merely sticks his finger into a
flame; it is experience when the movement is connected with the pain
which he undergoes in consequence. Henceforth the sticking of the
finger into flame means a burn. Being burned is a mere physical
change, like the burning of a stick of wood, if it is not perceived
as a consequence of some other action. Blind and capricious impulses
hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. So far as this
happens, everything is writ in water. There is none of that
cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of
that term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of
pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of
our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is
no before or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and
consequently no meaning. We get nothing which may be carried over to
foresee what is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to
adjust ourselves to what is coming--no added control. Only by
courtesy can such an experience be called experience. To "learn
from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection
between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things
in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an
experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing
becomes instruction--discovery of the connection of things.
Two
conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience is
primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive.
But (2) the measure of the value of an experience lies in the
perception of relationships or continuities to which it leads up. It
includes cognition in the degree in which it is cumulative or amounts
to something, or has meaning. In schools, those under instruction are
too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical
spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of
intellect. The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is
engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge
directly. Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed
from the physical organs of activity. The former is then thought to
be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an irrelevant
and intruding physical factor. The intimate union of activity and
undergoing its consequences which leads to recognition of meaning is
broken; instead we have two fragments: mere bodily action on one
side, and meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity
on the other.
It
would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have
flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate
them. Some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated.
(a) In part bodily activity becomes an intruder. Having nothing, so
it is thought, to do with mental activity, it becomes a distraction,
an evil to be contended with. For the pupil has a body, and brings it
to school along with his mind. And the body is, of necessity, a
wellspring of energy; it has to do something. But its activities, not
being utilized in occupation with things which yield significant
results, have to be frowned upon. They lead the pupil away from the
lesson with which his "mind" ought to be occupied; they are
sources of mischief. The chief source of the "problem of
discipline" in schools is that the teacher has often to spend
the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities
which take the mind away from its material. A premium is put on
physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and
movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of
intelligent interest. The teachers' business is to hold the pupils up
to these requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which
occur.
The
nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil
are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in
which bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning.
Callous indifference and explosions from strain alternate. The
neglected body, having no organized fruitful channels of activity,
breaks forth, without knowing why or how, into meaningless
boisterousness, or settles into equally meaningless fooling -- both
very different from the normal play of children. Physically active
children become restless and unruly; the more quiescent, so-called
conscientious ones spend what energy they have in the negative task
of keeping their instincts and active tendencies suppressed, instead
of in a positive one of constructive planning and execution; they are
thus educated not into responsibility for the significant and
graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty not to give
them free play. It may be seriously asserted that a chief cause for
the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that it was never
misled by false notions into an attempted separation of mind and
body.
(b)
Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned
by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have
to be used. The senses -- especially the eye and ear -- have to be
employed to take in what the book, the map, the blackboard, and the
teacher say. The lips and vocal organs, and the hands, have to be
used to reproduce in speech and writing what has been stowed away.
The senses are then regarded as a kind of mysterious conduit through
which information is conducted from the external world into the mind;
they are spoken of as gateways and avenues of knowledge. To keep the
eyes on the book and the ears open to the teacher's words is a
mysterious source of intellectual grace. Moreover, reading, writing,
and figuring -- important school arts -- demand muscular or motor
training. The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs accordingly have
to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back out of the
mind into external action. For it happens that using the muscles
repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an automatic tendency to
repeat.
The
obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which (in
spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering character of the
body in mental action) have to be employed more or less. For the
senses and muscles are used not as organic participants in having an
instructive experience, but as external inlets and outlets of mind.
Before the child goes to school, he learns with his hand, eye, and
ear, because they are organs of the process of doing something from
which meaning results. The boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on
the kite, and has to note the various pressures of the string on his
hand. His senses are avenues of knowledge not because external facts
are somehow "conveyed" to the brain, but because they are
used in doing something with a purpose. The qualities of seen and
touched things have a bearing on what is done, and are alertly
perceived; they have a meaning. But when pupils are expected to use
their eyes to note the form of words, irrespective of their meaning,
in order to reproduce them in spelling or reading, the resulting
training is simply of isolated sense organs and muscles. It is such
isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it mechanical. It is
customary for teachers to urge children to read with expression, so
as to bring out the meaning. But if they originally learned the
sensory- motor technique of reading -- the ability to identify forms
and to reproduce the sounds they stand for -- by methods which did
not call for attention to meaning, a mechanical habit was established
which makes it difficult to read subsequently with intelligence. The
vocal organs have been trained to go their own way automatically in
isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will. Drawing, singing,
and writing may be taught in the same mechanical way; for, we repeat,
any way is mechanical which narrows down the bodily activity so that
a separation of body from mind -- that is, from recognition of
meaning -- is set up. Mathematics, even in its higher branches, when
undue emphasis is put upon the technique of calculation, and science,
when laboratory exercises are given for their own sake, suffer from
the same evil.
(c)
On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from
direct occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the
expense of relations or connections. It is altogether too common to
separate perceptions and even ideas from judgments. The latter are
thought to come after the former in order to compare them. It is
alleged that the mind perceives things apart from relations; that it
forms ideas of them in isolation from their connections -- with what
goes before and comes after. Then judgment or thought is called upon
to combine the separated items of "knowledge" so that their
resemblance or causal connection shall be brought out. As matter of
fact, every perception and every idea is a sense of the bearings,
use, and cause, of a thing. We do not really know a chair or have an
idea of it by inventorying and enumerating its various isolated
qualities, but only by bringing these qualities into connection with
something else -- the purpose which makes it a chair and not a table;
or its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or the
"period" which it represents, and so on. A wagon is not
perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic
connection of the parts which makes it a wagon. And these connections
are not those of mere physical juxtaposition; they involve connection
with the animals that draw it, the things that are carried on it, and
so on. Judgment is employed in the perception; otherwise the
perception is mere sensory excitation or else a recognition of the
result of a prior judgment, as in the case of familiar objects.
Words,
the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for ideas. And in
just the degree in which mental activity is separated from active
concern with the world, from doing something and connecting the doing
with what is undergone, words, symbols, come to take the place of
ideas. The substitution is the more subtle because some meaning is
recognized. But we are very easily trained to be content with a
minimum of meaning, and to fail to note how restricted is our
perception of the relations which confer significance. We get so
thoroughly used to a kind of pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we
are not aware how half-dead our mental action is, and how much keener
and more extensive our observations and ideas would be if we formed
them under conditions of a vital experience which required us to use
judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with. There
is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter. All
authorities agree that that discernment of relationships is the
genuinely intellectual matter; hence, the educative matter. The
failure arises in supposing that relationships can become perceptible
without experience -- without that conjoint trying and undergoing of
which we have spoken. It is assumed that "mind" can grasp
them if it will only give attention, and that this attention may be
given at will irrespective of the situation. Hence the deluge of
half-observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated "knowledge"
which afflicts the world. An ounce of experience is better than a ton
of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has
vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble
experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of
theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an
experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. It tends to
become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to render
thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary and impossible. Because
of our education we use words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of
questions, the disposal being in reality simply such an obscuring of
perception as prevents us from seeing any longer the difficulty.
2.
Reflection in Experience. Thought or reflection, as we have already
seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation
between what we try to do and what happens in consequence. No
experience having a meaning is possible without some element of
thought. But we may contrast two types of experience according to the
proportion of reflection found in them. All our experiences have a
phase of "cut and try" in them -- what psychologists call
the method of trial and error. We simply do something, and when it
fails, we do something else, and keep on trying till we hit upon
something which works, and then we adopt that method as a rule of
thumb measure in subsequent procedure. Some experiences have very
little else in them than this hit and miss or succeed process. We see
that a certain way of acting and a certain consequence are connected,
but we do not see how they are. We do not see the details of the
connection; the links are missing. Our discernment is very gross. In
other cases we push our observation farther. We analyze to see just
what lies between so as to bind together cause and effect, activity
and consequence. This extension of our insight makes foresight more
accurate and comprehensive. The action which rests simply upon the
trial and error method is at the mercy of circumstances; they may
change so that the act performed does not operate in the way it was
expected to. But if we know in detail upon what the result depends,
we can look to see whether the required conditions are there. The
method extends our practical control. For if some of the conditions
are missing, we may, if we know what the needed antecedents for an
effect are, set to work to supply them; or, if they are such as to
produce undesirable effects as well, we may eliminate some of the
superfluous causes and economize effort.
In
discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what
happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience
is made explicit. Its quantity increases so that its proportionate
value is very different. Hence the quality of the experience changes;
the change is so significant that we may call this type of experience
reflective -- that is, reflective par excellence. The deliberate
cultivation of this phase of thought constitutes thinking as a
distinctive experience. Thinking, in other words, is the intentional
endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we
do and the consequences which result, so that the two become
continuous. Their isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary
going together, is canceled; a unified developing situation takes its
place. The occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is
reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does.
Thinking
is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the intelligent
element in our experience. It makes it possible to act with an end in
view. It is the condition of our having aims. As soon as an infant
begins to expect he begins to use something which is now going on as
a sign of something to follow; he is, in however simple a fashion,
judging. For he takes one thing as evidence of something else, and so
recognizes a relationship. Any future development, however elaborate
it may be, is only an extending and a refining of this simple act of
inference. All that the wisest man can do is to observe what is going
on more widely and more minutely and then select more carefully from
what is noted just those factors which point to something to happen.
The opposites, once more, to thoughtful action are routine and
capricious behavior. The former accepts what has been customary as a
full measure of possibility and omits to take into account the
connections of the particular things done. The latter makes the
momentary act a measure of value, and ignores the connections of our
personal action with the energies of the environment. It says,
virtually, "things are to be just as I happen to like them at
this instant," as routine says in effect "let things
continue just as I have found them in the past." Both refuse to
acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which flow
from present action. Reflection is the acceptance of such
responsibility.
The
starting point of any process of thinking is something going on,
something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled. Its
point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how
it is going to turn out. As this is written, the world is filled with
the clang of contending armies. For an active participant in the war,
it is clear that the momentous thing is the issue, the future
consequences, of this and that happening. He is identified, for the
time at least, with the issue; his fate hangs upon the course things
are taking. But even for an onlooker in a neutral country, the
significance of every move made, of every advance here and retreat
there, lies in what it portends. To think upon the news as it comes
to us is to attempt to see what is indicated as probable or possible
regarding an outcome. To fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with this
and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is not to think. It
is to turn ourselves into a piece of registering apparatus. To
consider the bearing of the occurrence upon what may be, but is not
yet, is to think. Nor will the reflective experience be different in
kind if we substitute distance in time for separation in space.
Imagine the war done with, and a future historian giving an account
of it. The episode is, by assumption, past. But he cannot give a
thoughtful account of the war save as he preserves the time sequence;
the meaning of each occurrence, as he deals with it, lies in what was
future for it, though not for the historian. To take it by itself as
a complete existence is to take it unreflectively. Reflection also
implies concern with the issue -- a certain sympathetic
identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome
of the course of events. For the general in the war, or a common
soldier, or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus
to thinking is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is indirect and
dependent upon imagination. But the flagrant partisanship of human
nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to identify
ourselves with one possible course of events, and to reject the other
as foreign. If we cannot take sides in overt action, and throw in our
little weight to help determine the final balance, we take sides
emotionally and imaginatively. We desire this or that outcome. One
wholly indifferent to the outcome does not follow or think about what
is happening at all. From this dependence of the act of thinking upon
a sense of sharing in the consequences of what goes on, flows one of
the chief paradoxes of thought. Born in partiality, in order to
accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached impartiality.
The general who allows his hopes and desires to affect his
observations and interpretations of the existing situation will
surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes and fears may be
the chief motive for a thoughtful following of the war on the part of
an onlooker in a neutral country, he too will think ineffectively in
the degree in which his preferences modify the stuff of his
observations and reasonings. There is, however, no incompatibility
between the fact that the occasion of reflection lies in a personal
sharing in what is going on and the fact that the value of the
reflection lies upon keeping one's self out of the data. The almost
insurmountable difficulty of achieving this detachment is evidence
that thinking originates in situations where the course of thinking
is an actual part of the course of events and is designed to
influence the result. Only gradually and with a widening of the area
of vision through a growth of social sympathies does thinking develop
to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of great
significance for education.
To
say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which are still
going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking occurs when things
are uncertain or doubtful or problematic. Only what is finished,
completed, is wholly assured. Where there is reflection there is
suspense. The object of thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to
project a possible termination on the basis of what is already given.
Certain other facts about thinking accompany this feature. Since the
situation in which thinking occurs is a doubtful one, thinking is a
process of inquiry, of looking into things, of investigating.
Acquiring is always secondary, and instrumental to the act of
inquiring. It is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand.
We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar
prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all
thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him
who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is
sure of what he is still looking for.
It
also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be
guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature
of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. The conclusions of
thinking, till confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less
tentative or hypothetical. Their dogmatic assertion as final is
unwarranted, short of the issue, in fact. The Greeks acutely raised
the question: How can we learn? For either we know already what we
are after, or else we do not know. In neither case is learning
possible; on the first alternative because we know already; on the
second, because we do not know what to look for, nor if, by chance,
we find it can we tell that it is what we were after. The dilemma
makes no provision for coming to know, for learning; it assumes
either complete knowledge or complete ignorance. Nevertheless the
twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists. The possibility of
hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact which the
Greek dilemma overlooked. The perplexities of the situation suggest
certain ways out. We try these ways, and either push our way out, in
which case we know we have found what we were looking for, or the
situation gets darker and more confused--in which case, we know we
are still ignorant. Tentative means trying out, feeling one's way
along provisionally. Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice
piece of formal logic. But it is also true that as long as men kept a
sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science made only
slow and accidental advance. Systematic advance in invention and
discovery began when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for
purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to guide action in
tentative explorations, whose development would confirm, refute, or
modify the guiding conjecture. While the Greeks made knowledge more
than learning, modern science makes conserved knowledge only a means
to learning, to discovery. To recur to our illustration. A commanding
general cannot base his actions upon either absolute certainty or
absolute ignorance. He has a certain amount of information at hand
which is, we will assume, reasonably trustworthy. He then infers
certain prospective movements, thus assigning meaning to the bare
facts of the given situation. His inference is more or less dubious
and hypothetical. But he acts upon it. He develops a plan of
procedure, a method of dealing with the situation. The consequences
which directly follow from his acting this way rather than that test
and reveal the worth of his reflections. What he already knows
functions and has value in what he learns. But will this account
apply in the case of the one in a neutral country who is thoughtfully
following as best he can the progress of events? In form, yes, though
not of course in content. It is self-evident that his guesses about
the future indicated by present facts, guesses by which he attempts
to supply meaning to a multitude of disconnected data, cannot be the
basis of a method which shall take effect in the campaign. That is
not his problem. But in the degree in which he is actively thinking,
and not merely passively following the course of events, his
tentative inferences will take effect in a method of procedure
appropriate to his situation. He will anticipate certain future
moves, and will be on the alert to see whether they happen or not. In
the degree in which he is intellectually concerned, or thoughtful, he
will be actively on the lookout; he will take steps which although
they do not affect the campaign, modify in some degree his subsequent
actions. Otherwise his later "I told you so" has no
intellectual quality at all; it does not mark any testing or
verification of prior thinking, but only a coincidence that yields
emotional satisfaction -- and includes a large factor of
self-deception. The case is comparable to that of an astronomer who
from given data has been led to foresee (infer) a future eclipse. No
matter how great the mathematical probability, the inference is
hypothetical -- a matter of probability. 1 The hypothesis as to the
date and position of the anticipated eclipse becomes the material of
forming a method of future conduct. Apparatus is arranged; possibly
an expedition is made to some far part of the globe. In any case,
some active steps are taken which actually change some physical
conditions. And apart from such steps and the consequent modification
of the situation, there is no completion of the act of thinking. It
remains suspended. Knowledge, already attained knowledge, controls
thinking and makes it fruitful.
So
much for the general features of a reflective experience. They are
(i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is
implicated in an incomplete situation whose full character is not yet
determined; (ii) a conjectural anticipation -- a tentative
interpretation of the given elements, attributing to them a tendency
to effect certain consequences; (iii) a careful survey (examination,
inspection, exploration, analysis) of all attainable consideration
which will define and clarify the problem in hand; (iv) a consequent
elaboration of the tentative hypothesis to make it more precise and
more consistent, because squaring with a wider range of facts; (v)
taking one stand upon the projected hypothesis as a plan of action
which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing something
overtly to bring about the anticipated result, and thereby testing
the hypothesis. It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four
which mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the
trial and error plane. They make thinking itself into an experience.
Nevertheless, we never get wholly beyond the trial and error
situation. Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has
to be tried in the world and thereby tried out. And since it can
never take into account all the connections, it can never cover with
perfect accuracy all the consequences. Yet a thoughtful survey of
conditions is so careful, and the guessing at results so controlled,
that we have a right to mark off the reflective experience from the
grosser trial and error forms of action.
Summary.
In determining the place of thinking in experience we first noted
that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with
something which is undergone in consequence. A separation of the
active doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the
vital meaning of an experience. Thinking is the accurate and
deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its
consequences. It notes not only that they are connected, but the
details of the connection. It makes connecting links explicit in the
form of relationships. The stimulus to thinking is found when we wish
to determine the significance of some act, performed or to be
performed. Then we anticipate consequences. This implies that the
situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us, incomplete and
hence indeterminate. The projection of consequences means a proposed
or tentative solution. To perfect this hypothesis, existing
conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of
the hypothesis developed -- an operation called reasoning. Then the
suggested solution -- the idea or theory -- has to be tested by
acting upon it. If it brings about certain consequences, certain
determinate changes, in the world, it is accepted as valid. Otherwise
it is modified, and another trial made. Thinking includes all of
these steps, -- the sense of a problem, the observation of
conditions, the formation and rational elaboration of a suggested
conclusion, and the active experimental testing. While all thinking
results in knowledge, ultimately the value of knowledge is
subordinate to its use in thinking. For we live not in a settled and
finished world, but in one which is going on, and where our main task
is prospective, and where retrospect -- and all knowledge as distinct
from thought is retrospect -- is of value in the solidity, security,
and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.
1
It is most important for the practice of science that men in many
cases can calculate the degree of probability and the amount of
probable error involved, but that does alter the features of the
situation as described. It refines them.
Chapter
Twelve
:
Thinking in Education
1.
The Essentials of Method. No one doubts, theoretically, the
importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking. But apart
from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as
in theory, there is not adequate theoretical recognition that all
which the school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are
concerned (that is, leaving out certain specialized muscular
abilities), is to develop their ability to think. The parceling out
of instruction among various ends such as acquisition of skill (in
reading, spelling, writing, drawing, reciting); acquiring information
(in history and geography), and training of thinking is a measure of
the ineffective way in which we accomplish all three. Thinking which
is not connected with increase of efficiency in action, and with
learning more about ourselves and the world in which we live, has
something the matter with it just as thought (See ante, p. 147). And
skill obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of
the purposes for which it is to be used. It consequently leaves a man
at the mercy of his routine habits and of the authoritative control
of others, who know what they are about and who are not especially
scrupulous as to their means of achievement. And information severed
from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing load. Since it
simulates knowledge and thereby develops the poison of conceit, it is
a most powerful obstacle to further growth in the grace of
intelligence. The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the
methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the
conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking. Thinking is the
method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards
mind. We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking,
but the important thing to bear in mind about method is that thinking
is method, the method of intelligent experience in the course which
it takes.
I.
The initial stage of that developing experience which is called
thinking is experience. This remark may sound like a silly truism. It
ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not. On the contrary,
thinking is often regarded both in philosophic theory and in
educational practice as something cut off from experience, and
capable of being cultivated in isolation. In fact, the inherent
limitations of experience are often urged as the sufficient ground
for attention to thinking. Experience is then thought to be confined
to the senses and appetites; to a mere material world, while thinking
proceeds from a higher faculty (of reason), and is occupied with
spiritual or at least literary things. So, oftentimes, a sharp
distinction is made between pure mathematics as a peculiarly fit
subject matter of thought (since it has nothing to do with physical
existences) and applied mathematics, which has utilitarian but not
mental value.
Speaking
generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of instruction lies in
supposing that experience on the part of pupils may be assumed. What
is here insisted upon is the necessity of an actual empirical
situation as the initiating phase of thought. Experience is here
taken as previously defined: trying to do something and having the
thing perceptibly do something to one in return. The fallacy consists
in supposing that we can begin with ready-made subject matter of
arithmetic, or geography, or whatever, irrespective of some direct
personal experience of a situation. Even the kindergarten and
Montessori techniques are so anxious to get at intellectual
distinctions, without "waste of time," that they tend to
ignore -- or reduce -- the immediate crude handling of the familiar
material of experience, and to introduce pupils at once to material
which expresses the intellectual distinctions which adults have made.
But the first stage of contact with any new material, at whatever age
of maturity, must inevitably be of the trial and error sort. An
individual must actually try, in play or work, to do something with
material in carrying out his own impulsive activity, and then note
the interaction of his energy and that of the material employed. This
is what happens when a child at first begins to build with blocks,
and it is equally what happens when a scientific man in his
laboratory begins to experiment with unfamiliar objects.
Hence
the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be
aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as
possible. To realize what an experience, or empirical situation,
means, we have to call to mind the sort of situation that presents
itself outside of school; the sort of occupations that interest and
engage activity in ordinary life. And careful inspection of methods
which are permanently successful in formal education, whether in
arithmetic or learning to read, or studying geography, or learning
physics or a foreign language, will reveal that they depend for their
efficiency upon the fact that they go back to the type of the
situation which causes reflection out of school in ordinary life.
They give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the
doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking, or the intentional
noting of connections; learning naturally results.
That
the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse thinking means
of course that it should suggest something to do which is not either
routine or capricious--something, in other words, presenting what is
new (and hence uncertain or problematic) and yet sufficiently
connected with existing habits to call out an effective response. An
effective response means one which accomplishes a perceptible result,
in distinction from a purely haphazard activity, where the
consequences cannot be mentally connected with what is done. The most
significant question which can be asked, accordingly, about any
situation or experience proposed to induce learning is what quality
of problem it involves.
At
first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods measured well
up to the standard here set. The giving of problems, the putting of
questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is
a large part of school work. But it is indispensable to discriminate
between genuine and simulated or mock problems. The following
questions may aid in making such discrimination. (a) Is there
anything but a problem? Does the question naturally suggest itself
within some situation or personal experience? Or is it an aloof
thing, a problem only for the purposes of conveying instruction in
some school topic? Is it the sort of trying that would arouse
observation and engage experimentation outside of school? (b) Is it
the pupil's own problem, or is it the teacher's or textbook's
problem, made a problem for the pupil only because he cannot get the
required mark or be promoted or win the teacher's approval, unless he
deals with it? Obviously, these two questions overlap. They are two
ways of getting at the same point: Is the experience a personal thing
of such a nature as inherently to stimulate and direct observation of
the connections involved, and to lead to inference and its testing?
Or is it imposed from without, and is the pupil's problem simply to
meet the external requirement? Such questions may give us pause in
deciding upon the extent to which current practices are adapted to
develop reflective habits. The physical equipment and arrangements of
the average schoolroom are hostile to the existence of real
situations of experience. What is there similar to the conditions of
everyday life which will generate difficulties? Almost everything
testifies to the great premium put upon listening, reading, and the
reproduction of what is told and read. It is hardly possible to
overstate the contrast between such conditions and the situations of
active contact with things and persons in the home, on the
playground, in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life. Much
of it is not even comparable with the questions which may arise in
the mind of a boy or girl in conversing with others or in reading
books outside of the school. No one has ever explained why children
are so full of questions outside of the school (so that they pester
grown-up persons if they get any encouragement), and the conspicuous
absence of display of curiosity about the subject matter of school
lessons. Reflection on this striking contrast will throw light upon
the question of how far customary school conditions supply a context
of experience in which problems naturally suggest themselves. No
amount of improvement in the personal technique of the instructor
will wholly remedy this state of things. There must be more actual
material, more stuff, more appliances, and more opportunities for
doing things, before the gap can be overcome. And where children are
engaged in doing things and in discussing what arises in the course
of their doing, it is found, even with comparatively indifferent
modes of instruction, that children's inquiries are spontaneous and
numerous, and the proposals of solution advanced, varied, and
ingenious.
As
a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which
generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his; or, rather,
they are his only as a pupil, not as a human being. Hence the
lamentable waste in carrying over such expertness as is achieved in
dealing with them to the affairs of life beyond the schoolroom. A
pupil has a problem, but it is the problem of meeting the peculiar
requirements set by the teacher. His problem becomes that of finding
out what the teacher wants, what will satisfy the teacher in
recitation and examination and outward deportment. Relationship to
subject matter is no longer direct. The occasions and material of
thought are not found in the arithmetic or the history or geography
itself, but in skillfully adapting that material to the teacher's
requirements. The pupil studies, but unconsciously to himself the
objects of his study are the conventions and standards of the school
system and school authority, not the nominal "studies." The
thinking thus evoked is artificially one-sided at the best. At its
worst, the problem of the pupil is not how to meet the requirements
of school life, but how to seem to meet them -- or, how to come near
enough to meeting them to slide along without an undue amount of
friction. The type of judgment formed by these devices is not a
desirable addition to character. If these statements give too highly
colored a picture of usual school methods, the exaggeration may at
least serve to illustrate the point: the need of active pursuits,
involving the use of material to accomplish purposes, if there are to
be situations which normally generate problems occasioning thoughtful
inquiry.
II.
There must be data at command to supply the considerations required
in dealing with the specific difficulty which has presented itself.
Teachers following a "developing" method sometimes tell
children to think things out for themselves as if they could spin
them out of their own heads. The material of thinking is not
thoughts, but actions, facts, events, and the relations of things. In
other words, to think effectively one must have had, or now have,
experiences which will furnish him resources for coping with the
difficulty at hand. A difficulty is an indispensable stimulus to
thinking, but not all difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they
overwhelm and submerge and discourage. The perplexing situation must
be sufficiently like situations which have already been dealt with so
that pupils will have some control of the meanings of handling it. A
large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of
new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough so
that, in addition to the confusion naturally attending the novel
elements, there shall be luminous familiar spots from which helpful
suggestions may spring.
In
one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what psychological means
the subject matter for reflection is provided. Memory, observation,
reading, communication, are all avenues for supplying data. The
relative proportion to be obtained from each is a matter of the
specific features of the particular problem in hand. It is foolish to
insist upon observation of objects presented to the senses if the
student is so familiar with the objects that he could just as well
recall the facts independently. It is possible to induce undue and
crippling dependence upon sense-presentations. No one can carry
around with him a museum of all the things whose properties will
assist the conduct of thought. A well-trained mind is one that has a
maximum of resources behind it, so to speak, and that is accustomed
to go over its past experiences to see what they yield. On the other
hand, a quality or relation of even a familiar object may previously
have been passed over, and be just the fact that is helpful in
dealing with the question. In this case direct observation is called
for. The same principle applies to the use to be made of observation
on one hand and of reading and "telling" on the other.
Direct observation is naturally more vivid and vital. But it has its
limitations; and in any case it is a necessary part of education that
one should acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his
immediately personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of
others. Excessive reliance upon others for data (whether got from
reading or listening) is to be depreciated. Most objectionable of all
is the probability that others, the book or the teacher, will supply
solutions ready-made, instead of giving material that the student has
to adapt and apply to the question in hand for himself.
There
is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is usually both
too much and too little information supplied by others. The
accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of
reproduction in recitation and examination is made too much of.
"Knowledge," in the sense of information, means the working
capital, the indispensable resources, of further inquiry; of finding
out, or learning, more things. Frequently it is treated as an end
itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and display it when
called for. This static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge is inimical
to educative development. It not only lets occasions for thinking go
unused, but it swamps thinking. No one could construct a house on
ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk. Pupils who have stored
their "minds" with all kinds of material which they have
never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered when they try
to think. They have no practice in selecting what is appropriate, and
no criterion to go by; everything is on the same dead static level.
On the other hand, it is quite open to question whether, if
information actually functioned in experience through use in
application to the student's own purposes, there would not be need of
more varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually
at command.
III.
The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already acquired,
is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings, suppositions,
tentative explanations:--ideas, in short. Careful observation and
recollection determine what is given, what is already there, and
hence assured. They cannot furnish what is lacking. They define,
clarify, and locate the question; they cannot supply its answer.
Projection, invention, ingenuity, devising come in for that purpose.
The data arouse suggestions, and only by reference to the specific
data can we pass upon the appropriateness of the suggestions. But the
suggestions run beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience.
They forecast possible results, things to do, not facts (things
already done). Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap
from the known.
In
this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is
presented) is creative, -- an incursion into the novel. It involves
some inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in
some context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new
light in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When
Newton thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of
his thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many
of them commonplaces -- sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass,
square of numbers. These were not original ideas; they were
established facts. His originality lay in the use to which these
familiar acquaintances were put by introduction into an unfamiliar
context. The same is true of every striking scientific discovery,
every great invention, every admirable artistic production. Only
silly folk identify creative originality with the extraordinary and
fanciful; others recognize that its measure lies in putting everyday
things to uses which had not occurred to others. The operation is
novel, not the materials out of which it is constructed.
The
educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is original
in a projection of considerations which have not been previously
apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be done with
blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five
cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though
everybody else in the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of
experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by
a new quality. The charm which the spontaneity of little children has
for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual
originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the joy
of intellectual constructiveness -- of creativeness, if the word may
be used without misunderstanding. The educational moral I am chiefly
concerned to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own
work less of a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning
in the sense of discovery and not in that of storing away what others
pour into them; nor that it would be possible to give even children
and youth the delights of personal intellectual productiveness --
true and important as are these things. It is that no thought, no
idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another.
When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given
fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person
to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or
it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning
effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only
by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand,
seeking and finding his own way out, does he think. When the parent
or teacher has provided the conditions which stimulate thinking and
has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the activities of the learner
by entering into a common or conjoint experience, all has been done
which a second party can do to instigate learning. The rest lies with
the one directly concerned. If he cannot devise his own solution (not
of course in isolation, but in correspondence with the teacher and
other pupils) and find his own way out he will not learn, not even if
he can recite some correct answer with one hundred per cent accuracy.
We can and do supply ready-made "ideas" by the thousand; we
do not usually take much pains to see that the one learning engages
in significant situations where his own activities generate, support,
and clinch ideas -- that is, perceived meanings or connections. This
does not mean that the teacher is to stand off and look on; the
alternative to furnishing ready-made subject matter and listening to
the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not quiescence, but
participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared activity, the
teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing it, a
teacher -- and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on
either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better.
IV. Ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble guesses or
dignified theories, are anticipations of possible solutions. They are
anticipations of some continuity or connection of an activity and a
consequence which has not as yet shown itself. They are therefore
tested by the operation of acting upon them. They are to guide and
organize further observations, recollections, and experiments. They
are intermediate in learning, not final. All educational reformers,
as we have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the
passivity of traditional education. They have opposed pouring in from
without, and absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked drilling in
material as into hard and resisting rock. But it is not easy to
secure conditions which will make the getting of an idea identical
with having an experience which widens and makes more precise our
contact with the environment. Activity, even self-activity, is too
easily thought of as something merely mental, cooped up within the
head, or finding expression only through the vocal organs.
While
the need of application of ideas gained in study is acknowledged by
all the more successful methods of instruction, the exercises in
application are sometimes treated as devices for fixing what has
already been learned and for getting greater practical skill in its
manipulation. These results are genuine and not to be despised. But
practice in applying what has been gained in study ought primarily to
have an intellectual quality. As we have already seen, thoughts just
as thoughts are incomplete. At best they are tentative; they are
suggestions, indications. They are standpoints and methods for
dealing with situations of experience. Till they are applied in these
situations they lack full point and reality. Only application tests
them, and only testing confers full meaning and a sense of their
reality. Short of use made of them, they tend to segregate into a
peculiar world of their own. It may be seriously questioned whether
the philosophies (to which reference has been made in section 2 of
chapter X) which isolate mind and set it over against the world did
not have their origin in the fact that the reflective or theoretical
class of men elaborated a large stock of ideas which social
conditions did not allow them to act upon and test. Consequently men
were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends in themselves.
However
this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar artificiality
attaches to much of what is learned in schools. It can hardly be said
that many students consciously think of the subject matter as unreal;
but it assuredly does not possess for them the kind of reality which
the subject matter of their vital experiences possesses. They learn
not to expect that sort of reality of it; they become habituated to
treating it as having reality for the purposes of recitations,
lessons, and examinations. That it should remain inert for the
experiences of daily life is more or less a matter of course. The bad
effects are twofold. Ordinary experience does not receive the
enrichment which it should; it is not fertilized by school learning.
And the attitudes which spring from getting used to and accepting
half-understood and ill-digested material weaken vigor and efficiency
of thought.
If
we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the sake of
suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual development of
thought. Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops, and
gardens, where dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used,
opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life, and for
acquiring and applying information and ideas in the carrying forward
of progressive experiences. Ideas are not segregated, they do not
form an isolated island. They animate and enrich the ordinary course
of life. Information is vitalized by its function; by the place it
occupies in direction of action. The phrase "opportunities
exist" is used purposely. They may not be taken advantage of; it
is possible to employ manual and constructive activities in a
physical way, as means of getting just bodily skill; or they may be
used almost exclusively for "utilitarian," i.e., pecuniary,
ends. But the disposition on the part of upholders of "cultural"
education to assume that such activities are merely physical or
professional in quality, is itself a product of the philosophies
which isolate mind from direction of the course of experience and
hence from action upon and with things. When the "mental"
is regarded as a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart fate
befalls bodily activity and movements. They are regarded as at the
best mere external annexes to mind. They may be necessary for the
satisfaction of bodily needs and the attainment of external decency
and comfort, but they do not occupy a necessary place in mind nor
enact an indispensable role in the completion of thought. Hence they
have no place in a liberal education--i.e., one which is concerned
with the interests of intelligence. If they come in at all, it is as
a concession to the material needs of the masses. That they should be
allowed to invade the education of the elite is unspeakable. This
conclusion follows irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind,
but by the same logic it disappears when we perceive what mind really
is -- namely, the purposive and directive factor in the development
of experience. While it is desirable that all educational
institutions should be equipped so as to give students an opportunity
for acquiring and testing ideas and information in active pursuits
typifying important social situations, it will, doubtless, be a long
time before all of them are thus furnished. But this state of affairs
does not afford instructors an excuse for folding their hands and
persisting in methods which segregate school knowledge. Every
recitation in every subject gives an opportunity for establishing
cross connections between the subject matter of the lesson and the
wider and more direct experiences of everyday life. Classroom
instruction falls into three kinds. The least desirable treats each
lesson as an independent whole. It does not put upon the student the
responsibility of finding points of contact between it and other
lessons in the same subject, or other subjects of study. Wiser
teachers see to it that the student is systematically led to utilize
his earlier lessons to help understand the present one, and also to
use the present to throw additional light upon what has already been
acquired. Results are better, but school subject matter is still
isolated. Save by accident, out-of-school experience is left in its
crude and comparatively irreflective state. It is not subject to the
refining and expanding influences of the more accurate and
comprehensive material of direct instruction. The latter is not
motivated and impregnated with a sense of reality by being
intermingled with the realities of everyday life. The best type of
teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this
interconnection. It puts the student in the habitual attitude of
finding points of contact and mutual bearings.
Summary.
Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which they
center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may
speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing
is that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The
essentials of method are therefore identical with the essentials of
reflection. They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of
experience -- that there be a continuous activity in which he is
interested for its own sake; secondly, that a genuine problem develop
within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third, that he
possess the information and make the observations needed to deal with
it; fourth, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be
responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have
opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make
their meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.
