PAGE: 97

involved, but hitherto unperceived. The later outcome thus reveals the
meaning of the earlier, while the experience as a whole established 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

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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

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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 principal
has application on the side of the considerations which concern the
relations of one nation to

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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 principal 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.

4.
PAGE NO: 101

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
indifferent 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

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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 reached 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

6.
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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 heir 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

7.
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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 achievement 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

8.
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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.

9.
PAGE NO: 106

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 people inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea
of national sovereignty has never been 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 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

10.
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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

11.
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because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion 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, our 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

12.
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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 become 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

13.
PAGE NO: 110

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

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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 international
purposeful activity controlled by perception of facts and their
relationships to one another. To

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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 a s 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

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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 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

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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 he 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

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Perfunctory and superficial here 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; is does not enter into their concerns. This is a state of
things that need 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 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 is 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

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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

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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

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PAGE NO. 118

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.

(1) 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

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PAGE NO: 119

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 port of the one who teaches, Even the most
valid aims which can be put in words will, as qwords, 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,

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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 capacity to
grasp the universal. Those who posses this are capable of the highest kind
of education, and become in time the legislators of the state-for laws are
the universal which control the particulars of experience. Thus it is not
true that in intent, Plato subordinates 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

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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
development, 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 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

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PAGE NO.122

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 denoted 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

26.
PAGE NO.123

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 reconstruction of experience. It has all the time an
immediate end, and so far as activity is education, 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 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 which
increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience. (1) The
increment of meaning corresponds to the increased perception of the

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PAGE NO: 124

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 people 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 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

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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

29.
PAGE NO: 126

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

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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

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PAGE NO: 128

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

32.
PAGE NO: 129

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.

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PAGE NO: 130

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

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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
interaction with old. to insure its proper

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

35.
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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

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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

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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.

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

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

(1) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition.

Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps
on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly
thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally declines
(although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to
himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed
himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while.
Stubbornness shows itself even more in

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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coincide with possession or ruing 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

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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 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

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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

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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

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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

50.
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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
number of different mountains a 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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

59.
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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 doctrine of specialized a 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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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"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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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.

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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 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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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 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

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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 purpo0se 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

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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

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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

99.