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Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

by John Dewey · English · Gutenberg #852 · 849,042 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

Author: John Dewey


        
Release date: March 1, 1997 [eBook #852]
                Most recently updated: June 16, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/852

Credits: Produced by David Reed and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION ***




DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

by John Dewey




Transcriber's Note: I have tried to make this the most accurate text
possible but I am sure that there are still mistakes. Please feel free
to email me any errors or mistakes that you find. Citing the Chapter
and paragraph. Haradda@aol.com and davidr@inconnect.com are my email
addresses for now. David Reed

I would like to dedicate this etext to my mother who was a elementary
school teacher for more years than I can remember. Thanks.




Contents:

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




Chapter One: Education as a Necessity of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication,
but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community,
and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which
they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to
possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to
form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge--a
common understanding--like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such
things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks;
they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into
physical pieces. The communication which insures participation in a
common understanding is one which secures similar emotional and
intellectual dispositions--like ways of responding to expectations and
requirements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Two: Education as a Social Function

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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




Chapter Three: Education as Direction

1. The Environment as Directive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter Four: Education as Growth

1. The Conditions of Growth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter Six: Education as Conservative and Progressive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point
to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more
varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon
the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The
second means not only freer interaction between social groups (once
isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change
in social habit--its continuous 

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