afere, svedene su na puka lična stanja zadovoljstva ili bola.

Iz
ugla obrazovanja, sledi da se pridaje značaj interesu što znači da
materijali treba da sadrže elemente zavodljivosti u suprotnom
ostavljaju ravnodušnim; da privuku pažnju i podstaknu zalaganje
nudeći osećaj zadovoljstva. Ovakav pristup je adekvatno
stigmatizovan kao “blaga” pedagogija; kao teorija obrazovanja
pod nazivom "narodna kuhinja".
But the objection is based upon the fact-or assumption-that the
forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be
appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other
words, they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal
activities of the pupils. The remedy is not in finding fault with
the doctrine of interest, any more than it is to search for some
pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material. It is to
discover objects and modes of action, which relate to present
powers. The function of this material in engaging activity and
carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest. If the
material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for
devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary,
semi-coerced effort.
The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,-
that which connects two things otherwise distant. In education,
the distance covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact
that a process takes time to mature is so obvious a
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
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 ot: 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.
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.
experience at the time and those in which they are taught to
acquiesce. Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic
significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall
be intellectually confused by the demand for adaptation to
external aims.
(3) Educators have to be on their guard against ends that are
alleged to be general and ultimate. Every activity, however
specific, is, of course, general in its ramified connections, for it
leads out indefinitely into other things. So far as a general idea
makes us more alive to these connections, it cannot be too
general. But "general" also means "abstract," or detached from
all specific context. And such abstractness means remoteness,
and throws us back, once more, upon teaching and learning as
mere means of getting ready for an end disconnected from the
means. That education is literally and all the time its own
reward means that no alleged study or discipline is educative
unless it is worth while in its own immediate having. A truly
general aim broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to take
more consequences (connections) into account. This means a
wider and more flexible observation of means. The more
interacting forces, for example, the farmer takes into account,
the more varied will be his immediate resources. He will see a
greater number of possible starting places, and a greater
number of ways of getting at 1what he wants to do.
The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which
will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or
purpose of moment or interest to him, and dealing with things
not as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for the
attainment of ends. The remedy for the evils attending the
doctrine of formal discipline previously spoken of, is not to be
found by substituting a doctrine of specialized disciplines, but
by reforming the notion of mind and its training. Discovery of
typical modes of activity, whether play or useful occupations, in
which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they
recognize they have something at stake, and which cannot be
carried through without reflection and use of judgment to
select material of observation and recollection, is the remedy.
In short, the root of the error long prevalent in the conception
of training of mind consists in leaving out of account
movements of things to future results in which an individual
shares, and in the direction of which observation, imagination,
and memory are enlisted It consists in regarding mind as
complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to a present
material.
In historic practice the error has cut two ways. On one hand, it
has screened and protected traditional studies and methods of
teaching from intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say
that they are "disciplinary" has safeguarded them
coincide with possession of running power in the state.
4. The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In the
eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very
different circle of ideas. "Nature" still means something
antithetical to existing social organization; Plato exercised a
great influence upon Rousseau. But the voice of nature now
speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for the need of
free development of individuality in all its variety. Education in
accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of
instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original
endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or
even as antisocial. Social arrangements were thought of as
mere external expedients by which these nonsocial individuals
might secure a greater amount of private happiness for
themselves. Nevertheless, these statements convey only an
inadequate idea of the true significance of the movement. In
reality its chief interest was in progress and in social progress.
The seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent
mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society-toward
cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was humanity. In
membership in humanity, as distinct from a state, man's
capacities would be liberated; while in existing political
organizations his powers were hampered and distorted to meet
the requirements and selfish interests of the rulers of
that opportunity for development of distinctive capacities be
afforded all. The separation of the two aims in education is fatal
to democracy; the adoption of the narrower meaning of
efficiency deprives it of its essential justification.
The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be
included within the process of experience. When it is measured
by tangible external products, and not by the achieving of a
distinctively valuable experience, it becomes materialistic.
Results in the way of commodities which may be the outgrowth
of an efficient personality are, in the strictest sense, by-
products of education: by-products which are inevitable and
important, but nevertheless by-products. To set up an external
aim strengthens by reaction the false conception of culture
which identifies it with something purely "inner." And the idea
of perfecting an "inner" personality is a sure sign of social
divisions. What is called inner is simply that which does not
connect with others-which is not capable of free and full
communication. What is termed spiritual culture has usually
been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has
been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally-
and therefore exclusively. What one is as a person is what one is
as associated with others, in a free give and take of intercourse.
This transcends both the efficiency which consists in supplying
products to others and the culture
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
personality with social discipline and political subordination. It
made the national state an intermediary between the
realization of private personality on one side and of humanity
on the other. Consequently, it is equally possible to state its
animating principle with equal truth either in the classic terms
of "harmonious development of all the powers of personality"
or in the more recent terminology of "social efficiency." All this
reinforces the statement which opens this chapter: The
conception of education as a social process and function has no
definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in
mind These considerations pave the way for our second
conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in
and for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a
nationalistic and a wider social ann. The earlier cosmopolitan
and "humanitarian" conception suffered both from vagueness
and from lack of definite organs of execution and agencies of
administration. In Europe, in the Continental states particularly,
the new idea of the importance of education for human welfare
and progress was captured by national interests and harnessed
to do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and
exclusive. The social aim of education and its national aim were
identified, and the result was a marked obscuring of the
meaning of a social aim.
This confusion corresponds to the existing
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
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. Toe more activity is restricted to a
few definite lines-as it is when there are rigid class lines
preventing
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,
inrufferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail. It is
centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective
pursuit of your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are
concerned to note the existing facts because and in so far as
they are factors in the achievement of the result intended. You
have to find out what your resources are, what conditions are at
command, and what the difficulties and obstacles are. This
foresight and this survey with reference to what is foreseen
constitute mind Action that does not involve such a forecast of
results and such an examination of means and hindrances is
either a matter of habit or else it is blind In neither case is it
intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended
and careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to
be, in that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the
physical manipulation of the instruments but with what one
intends to write, the case is the same. There is an activity in
process; one is taken up with the development of a theme.
Unless one writes as a phonograph talks, this means
intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various
conclusions to which present data and considerations are
tending, together with continually renewed observation and
recollection to get hold of the subject matter which bears upon
the conclusions to be reached.
greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual interests as a
factor in social control. The second means not only freer
interaction between social groups (once isolated so far as
intention could keep up a separation) but change in social habit-
its continuous readjustment through meeting the new
situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits
are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted
society.
Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a
form of social life in which interests are mutually
interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an
important consideration, makes a democratic community more
interested than other communities have cause to be in
deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of
democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial
explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage
cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey
their governors are educated Since a democratic society
repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a
substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be
created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A
democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a
mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated
experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals
The fuller one's conception of possible future achievements,
the less his present activity is tied down to a small number of
alternatives. If one knew enough, one could start almost
anywhere and sustain his activities continuously and fruitfully.
Understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim
simply in the sense of a broad survey of the field of present
activities, we shall take up some of the larger ends which have
currency in the educational theories of the day, and consider
what light they throw upon the immediate concrete and
diversified aims which are always the educator's real concern.
We premise (as indeed immediately follows from what has
been said) that there is no need of making a choice among
them or regarding them as competitors. When we come to act
in a tangible way we have to select or choose a particular act at
a particular time, but any number of comprehensive ends may
exist without competition, since they mean simply different
ways of looking at the same scene. One cannot climb a number
of different mountains simultaneously, but the views had when
different mountains are ascended supplement one another:
they do not set up incompatible, competing worlds. Or, putting
the matter in a slightly different way, one statement of an end
may suggest certain questions and observations, and another
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
experiences of life. If he is not trained in the right use of the
products of industry, there is grave danger that he may deprave
himself and injure others in his possession of wealth. No
scheme of education can afford to neglect such basic
considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual
ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not
only neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath
the level of educative concern. With the change from an
oligarchical to a democratic society, it is natural that the
significance of an education which should have as a result
ability to make one's way economically in the world, and to
manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere display
and luxury, should receive emphasis.
There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end,
existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as
final. A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to
the point of competency to choose and make its own career.
This principle is violated when the attempt is made to fit
individuals in advance for definite industrial callings, selected
not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the
wealth or social status of parents. As a matter of fact, industry
at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt changes
through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring
up, and old ones are revolutionized.
And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no
aims. Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not
an abstract idea like education. And consequently their
purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different
children, changing as children grow and with the growth of
experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even the most
valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more
harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims,
but rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how
to look ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing the
energies of the concrete situations in which they find
themselves. As a recent writer has said: "To lead this boy to
read Scott's novels instead of old Sleuth's stories; to teach this
girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying from John's make-
up; to prepare this class to study medicine,-these are samples
of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the
concrete work of education." Bearing these qualifications in
mind, we shall proceed to state some of the characteristics
found in all good educational aims. (1) An educational aim must
be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs (including
original instincts and acquired habits) of the given individual to
be educated. The tendency of such an aim as preparation is, as
we have seen, to omit existing powers, and find the aim in some
remote accomplishment or responsibility. In general,
fact that we rarely make it explicit. \/Ve overlook the fact that in
growth there is ground to be covered between an initial stage
of process and the completing period; that there is something
intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are the
initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
Between the two lie means-that is middle conditions:-acts to be
performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used
Only through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial
activities reach a satisfactory consummation.
These intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because
the development of existing activities into the foreseen and
desired end depends upon them. To be means for the achieving
of present tendencies, to be "between" the agent and his end,
to be of interest, are different names for the same thing. When
material has to be made interesting, it signifies that as
presented, it lacks connection with purposes and present
power: or that if the connection be there, it is not perceived To
make it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that
exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous
and artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which
have been applied to the doctrine of interest in education.
So much for the meaning of the term interest.
dependence of those arrangements upon the means used to
educate the young. It would be impossible to find a deeper
sense of the function of education in discovering and
developing personal capacities, and training them so that they
would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society in
which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that
Plato could not work out a solution for the problem whose
terms he clearly saw.
While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the
individual in society should not be determined by birth or
wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as
discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of
the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall by nature into
classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.
Consequently the testing and sifting function of education only
shows to which one of three classes an individual belongs.
There being no recognition that each individual constitutes his
own class, there could be no recognition of the infinite diversity
of active tendencies and combinations of tendencies of which
an individual is capable. There were only three types of faculties
or powers in the individual's constitution. Hence education
would soon reach a static limit in each class, for only diversity
makes change and progress.
conscious or stated aim thus balance each other. At different
times such aims as complete living, better methods of language
study, substitution of things for words, social efficiency,
personal culture, social service, complete development of
personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, a esthetic
contemplation, utility, etc., have served. The following
discussion takes up three statements of recent influence;
certain others have been incidentally discussed in the previous
chapters, and others will be considered later in a discussion of
knowledge and of the values of studies. We begin with a
consideration that education is a process of development in
accordance with nature, taking Rousseau's statement, which
opposed natural to social (See ante, p. 91); and then pass over
to the antithetical conception of social efficiency, which often
opposes social to natural.
(1) Educational reformers disgusted with the
conventionality and artificiality of the scholastic
methods they find about them are prone to resort to
nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the
law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and
conform to her ways. The positive value of this
conception lies in the forcible way in which it calls
attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have
regard to the natural endowment of those educated. Its
weakness is the ease with which natural in the sense of
normal is confused with the physical. The constructive
use
differences of endowment the dynamic values of natural
inequalities of growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity
to the rounding out gained by pruning will most closely follow
that which takes place in the body and thus prove most
effective." 1 Observation of natural tendencies is difficult under
conditions of restraint. They show themselves most readily in a
child's spontaneous sayings and doings,-that is, in those he
engages in when not put at set tasks and when not aware of
being under observation. It does not follow that these
tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but it
does follow that since they are there, they are operative and
must be taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable
ones have an environment which keeps them active, and that
their activity shall control the direction the others take and
thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they lead to
nothing. Many tendencies that trouble parents when they
appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much
direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them
At all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and
wishes as standards, and regard all deviations of children's
impulses as evils to be eliminated. That artificiality against
which the conception of following nature is so largely a protest,
is the outcome of attempts to force children directly into the
mold of grown-up standards.
who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own
action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to
give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the
breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national
territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of
their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of
contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an
individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on
variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which
remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are
partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness
shuts out many interests.
The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation
of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a
democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and
conscious effort. On the contrary, they were caused by the
development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel,
migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the
command of science over natural energy. But after greater
individualization on one hand, and a broader community of
interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of
deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously a
society to which stratification into separate
classes would be fatal, must see to it that.
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 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
"Nature" may be said to utter is that there are conditions of
educational efficiency, and that till we have learned what these
conditions are and have learned to make our practices accord
with them, the noblest and most ideal of our aims are doomed
to suffer-are verbal and sentimental rather than efficacious.
(2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of
respect for physical mobility. In Rousseau's words: "Children are
always in motion; a sedentary life is injurious. When he says
that "Nature's intention is to strengthen the body before
exercising the mind" he hardly states the fact fairly. But if he
had said that nature's "intention" (to adopt his poetical form of
speech) is to develop the mind especially by exercise of the
muscles of the body he would have stated a positive fact. In
other words, the aim of following nature means, in the
concrete, regard for the actual part played by use of the bodily
organs in explorations, in handling of materials, in plays and
games. (3) The general aim translates into the aim of regard for
individual differences among children. Nobody can take the
principle of consideration of native powers into account
without being struck by the fact that these powers differ in
different individuals. The difference applies not merely to their
intensity, but even more to their quality and arrangement. As
Rouseau said: "Each individual is born with a
construction of specific procedures, and unless these
procedures test, correct, and amplify the aim, the latter is
worthless. Instead of helping the specific task of teaching, it
prevents the use of ordinary judgment in observing and sizing
up the situation. It operates to exclude recognition of
everything except what squares up with the fixed end in view.
Every rigid aim just because it is rigidly given seems to render it
unnecessary to give careful attention to concrete conditions.
Since it must apply anyhow, what is the use of noting details
which do not count?
The vice of externally imposed ends has deep roots. Teachers
receive them from superior authorities; these authorities
accept them from what is current in the community. The
teachers impose them upon children. As a first consequence,
the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is confined to
receiving the aims laid down from above. Too rarely is the
individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative
supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study;
etc., that he can let his mind come to dose quarters with the
pupil's mind and the subject matter. This distrust of the
teacher's experience is then reflected in lack of confidence in
the responses of pupils. The latter receive their aims through a
double or treble external imposition, and are constantly
confused by the conflict between the aims which are natural to
their own
reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than it
does in persistence and energy in use of means to achieve the
end. The really executive man is a man who ponders his ends,
who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as dear and full
as possible. The people we called weak-willed or self-indulgent
always deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts.
They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all
attendant circumstances. When they begin to act, the
disagreeable results they ignored begin to show themselves.
They are discouraged, or complain of being thwarted in their
good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of
action. That the primary difference between strong and feeble
volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent
firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought
out, cannot be over-emphasized.
(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out
of results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep
hold of a person. They are something to look at and for curiosity
to play with rather than something to achieve. There is no such
thing as over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-
sided intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as we say in
considering the consequences of proposed lines of action. A
certain flabbiness of fiber prevents the contemplated object
from gripping him and engaging him in action. And most
there is a disposition to take considerations which are dear to
the hearts of adults and set them up as ends irrespective of the
capacities of those educated There is also an inclination to
propound aims which are so uniform as to neglect the specific
powers and requirements of an individual, forgetting that all
learning is something which happens to an individual at a given
time and place. The larger range of perception of the adult is of
great value in observing the abilities and weaknesses of the
young, in deciding what they may amount to. Thus the artistic
capacities of the adult exhibit what certain tendencies of the
child are capable of; if we did not have the adult achievements
we should be without assurance as to the significance of the
drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring activities of childhood
So if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to
see the import of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one
thing to use adult accomplishments as a context in which to
place and survey the doings of childhood and youth; it is quite
another to set them up as a fixed aim without regard to the
concrete activities of those educated.
(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of
cooperating with the activities of those undergoing
instruction. It must suggest the kind of environment
needed to liberate and to organize their capacities.
Unless it lends itself to the
Consequently, an attempt to train for too specific a mode of
efficiency defeats its own purpose. When the occupation
changes its methods, such individuals are left behind with even
less ability to readjust themselves than if they had a less
definite training. But, most of all, the present industrial
constitution of society is, like every society which has ever
existed, full of inequities. It is the aim of progressive education
to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation,
not to perpetuate them. Wherever social control means
subordination of individual activities to class authority, there is
danger that industrial education will be dominated by
acceptance of the status quo. Differences of economic
opportunity then dictate what the future callings of individuals
are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the defects of the
Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened method of
selection.
(3) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course,
arbitrary to separate industrial competency from
capacity in good citizenship. But the latter term may be
used to indicate a number of qualifications which are
vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from
whatever make an individual a more agreeable
companion to citizenship in the political sense: it
denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and
to take a determining part in making as well as obeying
laws. The aim of civic efficiency has at
Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato
first consciously taught the world. But conditions which he
could not intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in
their application. He never got any conception of the indefinite
plurality of activities which may characterize an individual and a
social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited
number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements.
Plato's starting point is that the organization of society depends
ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not
know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice.
Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion
for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should
be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered.
We shall have no conception of the proper limits and
distribution of activities-what he called justice-as a trait of both
individual and social organization. But how is the knowledge of
the final and permanent good to be achieved? In dealing with
this question, we come upon the seemingly insuperable
obstacle that such knowledge is not possible save in a just and
harmonious social order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted
and misled by false valuations and false perspectives. A
disorganized and factional society sets up a number of different
models and standards. Under such conditions it is impossible
for the individual to attain consistency
Education. Interest represents the moving force of objects-
whether perceived or presented in imagination-in any
experience having a purpose. In the concrete, the value of
recognizing the dynamic place of interest in an educative
development is that it leads to considering individual children in
their specific capabilities, needs, and preferences. One who
recognizes the importance of interest will not assume that all
minds work in the same way because they happen to have the
same teacher and textbook. Attitudes and methods of approach
and response vary with the specific appeal the same material
makes, this appeal itself varying with difference of natural
aptitude, of past experience, of plan of life, and so on. But the
facts of interest also supply considerations of general value to
the philosophy of education. Rightly understood, they put us on
our guard against certain conceptions of mind and of subject
matter which have had great vogue in philosophic thought in
the past, and which exercise a serious hampering influence
upon the conduct of instruction and discipline. Too frequently
the mind is set over the world of things and facts to be known;
it is regarded as something existing in isolation, with mental
states and operations that exist independently. Knowledge is
then regarded as an external application of purely mental
existences to the things to be known, or else as a result of the
impressions which this outside subject matter makes on mind,
or as a
instinctive activities may be called, metaphorically,
spontaneous, in the sense that the organs give a strong bias for
a certain sort of operation, -a bias so strong that we cannot go
contrary to it, though by trying to go contrary we may pervert,
stunt, and corrupt them. But the notion of a spontaneous
normal development of these activities is pure mythology. The
natural, or native, powers furnish the initiating and limiting
forces in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims.
There is no learning except from the beginning in unlearned
powers, but learning is not a matter of the spontaneous
overflow of the unlearned powers. Rousseau's contrary opinion
is doubtless due to the fact that he identified God with Nature;
to him the original powers are wholly good, coming directly
from a wise and good creator. To paraphrase the old saying
about the country and the town, God made the original human
organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put.
Consequently the development of the former furnishes the
standard to which the latter must be subordinated when men
attempt to determine the uses to which the original activities
shall be put, they interfere with a divine plan. The interference
by social arrangements with Nature, God's work, is the primary
source of corruption in individuals.
Rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all
natural tendencies was a reaction
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.
journalism, or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting
Japanese prints, or banking.
(ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object
touches or engages a man; the point where it influences him. In
some legal transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order
to have a standing at court. He has to show that some proposed
step concerns his affairs. A silent partner has an interest in a
business, although he takes no active part in its conduct
because its prosperity or decline affects his profits and
liabilities.
(iii) When we speak of a man as interested in this or that the
emphasis falls directly upon his personal attitude. To be
interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by,
some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care
about, to be attentive. We say of an interested person both that
he has lost himself in some affair and that he has found himself
in it. Both terms express the engrossment of the self in an
object.
When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a
depreciatory way, it will be found that the second of the
meanings mentioned is first exaggerated and then isolated
Interest is taken to mean merely the effect of an object upon
personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure.
Separated from any objective development of
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
their subjects as instruments of their own purposes.
Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may
improve? We must depend upon the efforts of enlightened men
in their private capacity. "All culture begins with private men
and spreads outward from them. Simply through the efforts of
persons of enlarged inclinations, who are capable of grasping
the ideal of a future better condition, is the gradual
approximation of human nature to its end possible. Rulers are
simply interested in such training as will make their subjects
better tools for their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers
of privately conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded.
For the rulers interest in the welfare of their own nation instead
of in what is best for humanity; will make them, if they give
money for the schools, wish to draw their plans. We have in this
view an express statement of the points characteristic of the
eighteenth-century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full
development of a private personality is identified with the aims
of humanity as a whole and with the idea of progress. In
addition, we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of
a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the
attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after
this time, Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel,
elaborated the idea that the chief function
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
Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran
their course in a world by themselves. But they are always
responses to what is going on in the situation of which they are
a part, and their successful or unsuccessful expression depends
upon their interaction with other changes. Life activities flourish
and fail only in connection with changes of the environment.
They are literally bound up with these changes; our desires,
emotions, and affections are but various ways in which our
doings are tied up with the doings of things and persons about
us. Instead of marking a purely personal or subjective realm,
separated from the objective and impersonal, they indicate the
non-existence of such a separate world They afford convincing
evidence that changes in things are not alien to the activities of
a self, and that the career and welfare of the self are bound up
with the movement of persons and things. Interest, concern,
mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a
developing situation.
The word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole
state of active development, (ii) the objective results that are
foreseen and wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional
inclination.
(I) An occupation, employment, pursuit, business is
often referred to as an interest. Thus we say that a
man's interest is politics, or
In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are
assigned to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and
supplies human wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over
and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing,
assertively courageous disposition. They become the citizen-
subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians
in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is
a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are
capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time
the legislators of the state-for laws are the universals which
control the particulars of experience. Thus, it is not true that in
intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole.
But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of
every individual, his incommensurability with others, and
consequently not recognizing that a society might change and
yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in
net effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality. We
cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is happy and
society well organized when each individual engages in those
activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his
conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover
this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective
use. But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the
superficiality of Plato's lumping of
perception, even the sentiments, are arrangements,
associations, and complications, formed by the interaction of
these submerged presentations with one another and '1/Vith
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
least the merit of protecting us from the notion or a training of
mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that power
must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the
things which most need to be done are things which involve
one's relationships with others.
Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the
aim too narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at
certain periods have excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of
the fact that in the last analysis security of social progress
depends upon them. For scientific men would have been
thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally lacking in
social efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately social
efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share in
a give and take of experience. It covers all that makes one's own
experience more worthwhile to others, and all that enables one
to participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of
others. The ability to produce and to enjoy art, capacity for
recreation, the significant utilization of leisure, are more
important elements in it than elements conventionally
associated oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest sense,
social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind
which is actively concerned in making experiences more
communicable; in breaking down the barriers of social
stratification which make individuals impervious to the interests
of others. When social
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
effort, with mere strain, results when a mind is set up, endowed
with powers that are only to be applied to existing material. A
person just either will or will not apply himself to the matter in
hand The more indifferent the subject matter, the less concern
it has for the habits and preferences of the individual, the more
demand there is for an effort to bring the mind to bear upon it-
and hence the more discipline of will. To attend to material
because there is something to be done in which the person is
concerned is not disciplinary in this view; not even if it rest1lts
in a desirable increase of constructive power. Application just
for the sake of application, for the sake of training, is alone
disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if the subject matter
presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive (so it is
supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of
discipline. The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the
words of an American humorist: "It makes no difference what
you teach a boy so long as he doesn't like it."
The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing
with objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject
matter to be learned In the traditional schemes of education,
subject matter means so much material to be studied Various
branches of study represent so many independent branches,
each having its principles of arrangement complete within itself.
History is
The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
education in a democratic community. For it assumed that the
aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their
education-or that the object and reward of learning is
continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied
to all the members of a society except where intercourse of
man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate
provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions
by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed
interests. And this means a democratic society. In our search for
aims in education, we are not concerned, therefore, with
finding an end outside of the educative process to which
education is subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are
rather concerned with the contrast which exists when aims
belong within the process in which they operate and when they
are set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must
obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced For
in that case, some portions of the whole social group will find
their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will
not arise from the free growth of their own experience, and
their nominal aims will be means to more ulterior ends of
others rather than truly their own.
better what is said in the first sentences. The three factors of
educative development are (a) the native structure of our
bodily organs and their functional activities; (b) the uses to
which the activities of these organs are put under the influence
of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with the
environment. This statement certainly covers the ground His
other two propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only
when the three factors of education are consonant and
cooperative does adequate development of the individual
occur, and (b) that the native activities of the organs, being
original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But it requires but
little reading between the lines, supplemented by other
statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding
these three things as factors which must work together to some
extent in order that any one of them may proceed educatively,
he regards them as separate and independent operations.
Especially does he believe that there is an independent and, as
he says, "spontaneous" development of the native organs and
faculties. He thinks that this development can go on irrespective
of the use to which they are put. And it is to this separate
development that education coming from social contact is to be
subordinated. Now there is an immense difference between a
use of native activities in accord with those activities
themselves-as distinct from forcing them and
when it marks off the future direction of the activity in which
we are engaged; means when it marks off the present direction.
Every divorce of end from means diminishes by that much the
significance of the activity and tends to reduce it to a drudgery
from which one would escape if he could A farmer has to use
plants and animals to carry on his farming activities. It certainly
makes a great difference to his life whether he is fond of them,
or whether he regards them merely as means which he has to
employ to get something else in which alone he is interested In
the former case, his entire course of activity is significant; each
phase of it has its own value. He has the experience of realizing
his end at every stage; the postponed aim, or end in view, being
merely a sight ahead by which to keep his activity going fully
and freely. For if he does not look ahead, he is more likely to
find himself blocked. The aim is as definitely a means of action
as is any other portion of an activity.
3. Applications in Education. There is nothing peculiar about
educational aims. They are just like aims in any directed
occupation. The educator, like the farmer, has certain things to
do, certain resources with which to do, and certain obstacles
with which to contend. The conditions with which the farmer
deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own
structure and operation independently of any purpose of his.
Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it
falls within an activity, instead of being furnished from without.
We approach the definition by a contrast of mere results with
ends. Any exhibition of energy has results. The wind blows
about the sands of the desert; the position of the grains is
changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not an end. For there is
nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills what went
before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One state of
affairs is just as good as any other. Consequently, there is no
basis upon which to select an earlier state of affairs as a
beginning, a later as an end, and to consider what intervenes as
a process of transformation and realization.
Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the
changes in the sands when the wind blows them about. The
results of the bees' actions may be called ends not because they
are designed or consciously intended, but because they are true
terminations or completions of what has preceded When the
bees gather pollen and make wax and build cells, each step
prepares the way for the next. When cells are built, the queen
lays eggs in them; when eggs are laid, they are sealed and bees
brood them and keep them at a temperature required to hatch
them when they are hatched, bees feed the young till they can
take care of themselves. Now we are so familiar with such facts,
that we are apt to dismiss them on the
what we are about; conscious signifies the deliberate,
observant, planning traits of activity. Consciousness is nothing
which we have which gazes idly on the scene around one or
which has impressions made upon it by physical things; it is a
name for the purposeful quality of an activity; for the fact that
it is directed by an aim. Put the other way about, to have an aim
is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to
mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in
the light of that intent.
2. The Criteria of Good Aims. We may apply the results of our
discussion to a consideration of the criteria involved in a
correct establishing of aims. (1) The aim set up must be an
outgrowth of existing conditions. It must be based upon a
consideration of what is already going on; upon the
resources and difficulties of the situation. Theories about
the proper end of our activities-educational and moral
theories-often violate this principle. They assume ends
lying outside our activities; ends foreign to the concrete
makeup of the situation; ends which issue from some
outside source. Then the problem is to bring our activities
to bear upon the realization of these externally supplied
ends. They are something for which we ought to act. In any
case such "aims" limit intelligence; they are not the
expression of mind in foresight, observation, and choice of
the better among alternative possibilities. They limit
perverting them-and supposing that they have a normal
development apart from any use, which development furnishes
the standard and norm of all learning by use. To recur to our
previous illustration, the process of acquiring language is a
practically perfect model of proper educative growth. The start
is from native activities of the vocal apparatus, organs of
hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose that these have an
independent growth of their own, which left to itself would
evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle
would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings
and noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the
development of articulate speech-which they are-but as
furnishing language itself-the standard for all teaching of
language.
The point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was
right, introducing a much-needed reform into education, in
holding that the structure and activities of the organs furnish
the conditions of all teaching of the use of the organs; but
profoundly wrong in intimating that they supply not only the
conditions but also the ends of their development. As matter of
fact, the native activities develop, in contrast with random and
capricious exercise, through the uses to which they are put. And
the office of the social medium is, as we have seen, to direct
growth through putting powers to the best possible use. The
thoroughgoing "disciplinary" subordination to existing
institutions. Toe extent of the transformation of educational
philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation
occupied by the struggle against Napoleon for national
independence, may be gathered from Kant, who well expresses
the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on
Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later years of the
eighteenth century, he defines education as the process by
which man becomes man. Mankind begins its history
submerged in nature-not as Man who is a creature of reason,
while nature furnishes only instinct and appetite. Nature offers
simply the germs which education is to develop and perfect.
The peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create
himself by his own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a
truly moral, rational, and free being. This creative effort is
carried on by the educational activities of slow generations. Its
acceleration depends upon men consciously striving to educate
their successors not for the existing state of affairs but so as to
make possible a future better humanity. But there is the great
difficulty. Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as
to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the
proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible
realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their
children so that they may get on; princes educate
perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. Parents
and teachers often complain-and correctly-that children "do not
want to hear, or want to understand." Their minds are not upon
the subject precisely because it does not touch them; it does
not enter into their concerns. This is a state of things that needs
to be remedied, but the remedy is not in the use of methods
which increase indifference and aversion. Even punishing a child
for inattention is one way of trying to make him realize that the
matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one way of
arousing "interest," or bringing about a sense of connection. In
the long run, its value is measured by whether it supplies a
mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by the adult
or whether it leads the child "to think"-that is, to reflect upon
his acts and impregnate them with aims.
(ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even
more obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who
are not interested in what they are doing. If one were engaging
a lawyer or a doctor, it would never occur to one to reason that
the person engaged would stick to his work more
conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he did it
merely from a sense of obligation. Interest measures-or rather
is-the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one,
moving one to act for its realization.
2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in