Affairs, are reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain.

Educationally, it
then follows that to attach importance to interest means to attach some feature of
seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and effort by
offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is properly stigmatized as "soft"
pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of education. But the objection is based
upon the fact—or assumption—that the forms of skill to be acquired and the
subject matter to be appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other
words, they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils.
The remedy is not in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any more than it is
to search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to the alien material It is to
discover objects and modes of action, which are connected with present powers.
The function of this material in engaging activity and carrying it on consistently
and continuously is its interest. If the material operates in these ways 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
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. Embryonic 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 retroverting 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 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, nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea of
education; it was to trust to the accidents of circumstance. Not only was some
method required but also some positive organ, some administrative agency for
carrying on the process of instruction. The "complete and harmonious
development of all powers," having as its social counterpart an enlightened and
progressive humanity, required definite organization for its realization. Private
individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the
work. A Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined
persons having wealth and power to follow his example. But even Pestalozzi saw
that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required the support of the
state. The realization of the new education destined to produce a new society was,
after all, dependent upon the activities of existing states, The movement for the
democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and
administered schools.

So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the movement for
a state supported education with the nationalistic movement in political life—a
fact of incalculable significance for subsequent movements. Under the influence
of German thought in particular, education became a civic function and the civic
function was identified with the realization of the 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 worthwhile in its own
immediate having. A truly general aim broadens the outlook; it stimulates one to
take more consequences (connections) into account. This means a wider and more
flexible observation of means. The more interacting forces, for example, the
farmer takes into account, the more varied will be his immediate resources. He
will see a greater number of possible starting places, and a greater number of ways
of getting at what he wants to do,

The 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 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 or running power in the stat

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 fun
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 aim.
The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian" conception suffered both from
vagueness and from lack of definite organs of execution and agencies of
administration. In Europe, in the Continental states particularly; the new idea of
the importance of education for human welfare and progress was captured by
national interests and harnessed to do a work whose social aim was definitely
narrow and exclusive. The social aim of education and its national aim were
identified, and the result was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.
This confusion corresponds to the existing 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 imbeciles 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 that will adequately function whatever activities are presently 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. 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. The experience of each party loses
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 thoughL the 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 materials but its activity continues by its own inherent
momentum, below the surface of consciousness. What are termed faculties—
attention, memory, thinking, indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every
detail It is centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective pursuit of your
occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are concerned to note the existing facts
because and in so far as they are factors in the achievement of the result intended.
You have to find out what your resources are, what conditions are at command
and what the difficulties and obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with
reference to what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not involve such a
forecast of results and such an examination of means and hindrances is either a
matter of habit or else it is blind in neither case is it intelligent. To be vague and
uncertain as to what is intended and careless in observation of conditions of its
realization is to be, in that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.

If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical
manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the case is the
same. There is an activity in process; one is taken up with the development of a
theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph talks, this means intelligence; namely,
alertness in foreseeing the various conclusions to which present data and
considerations are tending, together with continually renewed observation and
recollection to get hold of the subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to
be reached. 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, same 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 ends 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 variety 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, we overlook the fact
that in growth there is ground to be covered between an initial stage of process
and the converting 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 tune 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
ends 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, an 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 that 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 Dhvsical. 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 that 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 preround
on variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain
suppressed as long as the invitations 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 unadopted 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 experiences 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 'INature" 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 close quarters
with the pupil's mind and the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher's
experience is then reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. The
latter receive their aims through a double or treble external imposition, and are
constantly confused by the conflict between the aims which are natural to their
own reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than it does in
persistence and energy in use of means to achieve the end. The really executive
man is a man who ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his
actions as clear and full as possible. The people we called weak-willed or self-
indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts. They
pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances.
When they begin to act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to show
themselves. They are discouraged, or complain of being thwarted in their good
purpose by a hard fate, and shift to some other line of action. That the primary
difference between strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the
degree of persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought
out, cannot be over-emphasized.

(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of results. Ends
are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of a person. They are something
to look at and for curiosity to play with rather than something to achieve. There is
no such thing as over intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-sided
intellectuality A person "takes it out" as we say in considering the consequences
of proposed lines of action. A certain flabbiness of fiber prevents the
contemplated object from grippmg him and enqueuing 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’s 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 model of
efficiency defeats its own purpose. When the occupation changes its methods,
such individuals are left behind with even less ability to readjust themselves than
if they had a less definite training. But, most of all, the present Industrial
constitution of society is, like every society which has ever existed, full of
inequities. It is the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair
privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them. Wherever social control
means subordination of individual activities to class authority, there is danger
that industrial education will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo.
Differences of economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of
individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the defects of the
Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened method of selection.
(2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary to separate
industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship, But the latter term may
be used to indicate a number of qualifications which are vaguer than vocational
ability These traits run from whatever make an individual a more agreeable
companion to citizenship in the political sense: it denotes ability to judge men and
measures wisely and to take a determining part in making as well as obeying
laws. The aim of civic efficiency has at Mitch 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 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 an 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 its
though by trying to go contrary we may perverts stunt, and corrupt them. But the
notion of a spontaneous normal development of these activities is pure
mythology. The natural or native, powers furnish the initiating and limiting forces
in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims. There is no learning except
from a beginning in unlearned powers, but learning is not a matter of the
spontaneous overflow of the unlearned powers. Rousseau's contrary opinion is
doubtless due to the fact that he identified God with Nature; to him the original
powers are wholly gout 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. 'i Even the subsidy by rulers of
privately conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded, For the rulers' interest
in the welfare of their own nation Instead of in what is best for humanity, will
make them, if they give money for the schools, wish to draw their plans. We have
in this view an express statement of the points characteristic of the eighteenth-
century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full development of private
personality is identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with the idea of
progress. In addition, we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a
state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas.
But in less than two decades after this time, Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte
and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief function 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 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 suppression depends upon their
interaction with other changes. Life activities flourish and fail only m 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
dispositor They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its
internal guardians in peace. But their limit is next by their lack of reason, which is
a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are capable of the
highest Dint 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 recombing 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 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 least the merit of protecting us from the
notion of a training of mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that
power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the things which
most need to be done are things which involve one's relationships with others.

Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too narrowly.
An over definite interpretation would at certain periods have excluded scientific
discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last analysis security of social progress
depends upon them. For scientific men would have been thought to be mere
theoretical dreamers, totally lacking in social efficiency. It must be borne in mind
that ultimately social efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share
in a give and take of experience. It covers all that makes one's own experience
more worthwhile to others, and all that enables one to participate more richly in
the worthwhile experiences of others. Ability to produce and to enjoy art, capacity
for recreation, the significant utilization of leisure, are more important elements in
it than elements conventionally associated oftentimes with citizenship. In the
broadest sense, social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind
which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable; in
breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make individuals
Impervious to the interests of others. When social because after the act is
performed via 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 results in a desirable Increase of
constructive power. Application just for the sake of application, for the sake of
training, is alone disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if the subject matter
presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive (so it is supposed) except the
acknowledgment of duty or the value of discipline. The logical result is expressed
with literal truth in the words of an American humorist: 'Ult 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 waul 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 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 pull 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 encl 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 uses 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
hearings 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 'I
disciplinary" subordination to existing institutions. The extent of the
transformation of educational philosophy which occurred in Germany in the
generation occupied by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence,
may be gathered from Kant, who well expresses the earlier individual
cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in
the later years of the eighteenth century, he defines education as the process by
which man becomes man. Mankind begins its history submerged in nature— not
as Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and
appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which education is to develop and
perfecto 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;
prmces educate perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. Parents and
teachers often complain— and correctly—those 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 '"interests" or bringing about a sense of
connection. In the long runs 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 to talk about the aim of education—
or any other undertaking—where conditions do not permit of foresight of results,
and do not stimulate a person to look ahead to see what the outcome of a given
activity is to be. In the next place the aim as a foreseen end gives direction to the
activity; it is not an idle view of a mere spectator; but influences the steps taken to
reach the end The foresight functions in three ways. In the first place, it involves
careful observation of the given conditions to see what are the means available for
reaching the ends and to discover the hindrances in the way In the second place, it
suggests the proper order or sequence in the use of means. It facilitates an
economical selection and arrangement. In the third place, it makes choice of
alternatives possible. If we can predict the outcome of acting this way or that, we
can then compare the value of the two courses of action; we can pass judgment
upon their relative desirability. If we know that stagnant water breeds mosquitoes
and that they are likely to carry disease, we can, disliking that anticipated result,
take steps to avert it. Since we do not anticipate results as mere intellectual
onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the
process which produces the result We intervene to bring about this result or that.

1 The Nature an Aim. in conclusion, we note that the early history Of the idea of
following nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one
another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been inclined to
urge the importance of education by ascribing practically unlimited power to it. All
the differences between peoples and between classes and persons among the same
people were said to be due to differences of training, of exercise, and practice.
Originally, mind, reason, understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in
alL This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and the
possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As a protest against this view, the
doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less formal and abstract view of mind
and its powers. It substituted specific instincts and impulses and physiological
capacities, differing from individual to individual (just as they differ as Rousseau
pointed out, even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment,
memory, and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative accord with
nature has been reinforced by the development of modern biology, physiology, and
psychology. It means, in effect, that great as is the significance of nurtures of
modifications and transformation through direct educational effort, natures or
unlearned capacities, affords the foundation and ultimate resources for such
nurture. On the other hand, the doctrine of the whole attitude is one of concern with
what is to be, and with what is so far as the latter enters into the movement toward
the end Leave out the direction which depends upon foresight of possible future
results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let there be imaginative
forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its attainment depends, and
there is self-deception or idle dreaming—abortive intelligence.
If this illustration is typical, Island is not a name for something complete by itself;
it is a name for a course of action in so far as that is intelligently directed; in so
far, that is to say, as aims, ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the
attainment of aims. Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns;
but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he plays a part have
the qualities mentioned. Nor are the activities in which a person engages, whether
intelligently or not, exclusive properties of himself; they are something in which
he engages and partakes, other things, the independent changes of other things and
persons, cooperate and hinder. The individual's act may be initial in a course of
events, but the outcome depends upon the Interaction of his response with
energies supplied by other agencies. Conceive mind as anything but one factor
partaking along with others in the production of consequences, and it becomes
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 mean none the less an absence of mind, and a
corresponding distortion of emotional life. Il. 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 all 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 suggest improvement, now in any social group whatever, even in a gang
of thieves, we find some interest held in commons 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, says 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, intellectuals 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 mind Only a complete whole is fiddly self-
consistent. A society which rests upon the supremacy of some factor over another
irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads thought astray.
It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over others, and creates a mind
whose seeming unity is forced and distorted Education proceeds ultimately from
the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just state will
these be such as to give the right education; and only those who have rightly
trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle of things.
We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle. However; Plato suggested a way out. A
few men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom—or truth—may by study learn at least
in outline the proper patterns of true existence. If a powerful ruler should form a
state after these patterns, then its regulations could be preserved An education
could be given which would sift individuals, discovering What they were good
for; and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in life for which his
nature fits him. Each doing his own part, and never transgressing, the order and
unity of the whole would be maintained.

It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a more

adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance of social
arrangements and on the others of the activity. Thus, one aims at, say, a rabbit;
what he wants is to shoot straight: a certain kind of activity or; if it is the rabbit he
wants, it is not rabbit apart from his activity, but as a factor in activity; he wants to
eat the rabbit, or to show it as evidence of his marksmanship—he wants to do
something with it. The doing with the thing, not the thing in isolation, is his end.
The object is but a phase of the active end, —continuing the activity successfully.
This is what is meant by the phrase, used above, "freeing activity."
 In contrast with fulfilling some process in order that activity may go on, stands
the static character of an end which is invosed from without the activity It is
always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be attained and possessed. When
one has such a notion, activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else; it
is not significant or important on its own account. As compared with the end it is
but a necessary evil; something which must be gone through before one can reach
the object which is alone worthwhile. In other words, the external idea of the aim
leads to a separation of means from end, while an end which grows up within an
activity as plan for its direction is always both ends and means, the distinction
being only one of convenience. Every means is a temporary end until we have
attained it. Every end becomes a means of carrying activity further as soon as it is
achieved. We call it end connected with one another. We can definitely foresee
results only as we make careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance
of the outcome supplies the motive for observations. The more adequate our
observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that
presents itself, and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice
may be made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the
situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity
possess, and the more flexibly controllable is it. Where only a single outcome has
been thought of, the mind has nothing else to think of; the meaning attaching to
the act is limited. One only steams ahead toward the mark. Sometimes such a
narrow course may be effective. But if unexpected difficulties offer themselves,
one has not as many resources at command as if he had chosen the same line of
action after a broader survey of the possibilities of the field. He cannot make
needed readjustments readily.

The net conclusion is that acting with an aim is all one with acting intelligently.
To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon which to observe, to select,
and to order objects and our own capacities, to do these things means to have a
mind—for mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by
perception of facts and their relationships to one another, To

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
in the fact that we can use it to change conditions. It is a method for dealing with
conditions so as to effect desirable alterations in them, A farmer who should
passively accept things just as he finds them would make as great a mistake as he
who framed his plans in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit One
of the evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very
inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard snatching at
immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present state of experience of
pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in
view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental,
and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action.

(3) The aim must always represent a freeing of activities. The term end in view is
suggestive, for it puts before the mind the termination or conclusion of some
process. The only way in which we can define an activity is by putting before
ourselves the objects in which it terminates—as one's aim in shooting is the target.
But we must remember that the object is only a mark or sign by which the mind
specifies the activity one desires to carry out. Strictly speaking, not the target but
hitting the target is the end in view; one takes aim by means of the target, but also
by the sight on the gun. The different objects which are thought of are means of
directing the external; they are shifting things about. No ideal reward, no
enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them. Others contribute to the
maintenance of life, and to its external adornment and display. Many of our
existing social activities, industrial and political, fall in these two classes, Neither
the people who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by them, are
capable of full and free interest in their work. Because of the lack of any purpose
in the work for the one doing it, or because of the restricted character of its aim,
intelligence is not adequately engaged. The same conditions force many people
back upon themselves, they take refuge in an inner play of sentiment and fancies.
They are aesthetic but not artistic, since their feelings and ideas are turned upon
themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify conditions. Their
mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an inner landscape, Even the pursuit of
science may become an asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life— not a
temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification in future dealings
with the world. The very word art may become associated not with specific
transformation of things, making them more significant for mind, but with
stimulations of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The separation
and mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of theory or culture, the
divorce of fine and industrial arts, are indications of this situation. persons are
naturally diverted from a proposed course of action by unusual, unforeseen
obstacles, or by presentation of inducements to an action that is directly more
agreeable.

A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately,

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

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

(i) Even the more purely intellectual phase of trained power—apprehension of

what one is doing as exhibited in consequences—is not possible without interest.
Deliberation will be only get rid of the artificial man-imposed coercive
restrictions.

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

5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm for

freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the constructive side became
obvious. Merely to leave everything to 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 strokes 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 fail to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the form of a
doctrine that the business of education is to supply precisely what nature fails to
secure; namely, habituation of an individual to social control; subordination of
natural powers to social rules. It is not surprising to find that the value in the idea
of social efficiency resides largely in its protest against the points at which the
doctrine of natural development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is
employed to slur over the truth in that conception. It is a fact that we must look to
the activities and achievements of associated life to find what the development of
power—that is to say, efficiency— means. The error is in imply that we must
adopt measures of subordination rather than of utilization to secure efficiency.
The doctrine is rendered adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is
attained not by negative constraint but by positive use of native individual
capacities in occupations having a social meaning. (1) Translated into specific
aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial competency. Persons
cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways in which these means are
employed and consumed have a profound influence upon all the relationships of
persons to one another. If an individual is not able to earn his own living and that
of the children dependent upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of
others. He misses for himself one of the most educative individuals and their
original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us those
original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side
of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic,
social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of
individuals, not stratification by classes. Although his educational philosophy was
revolutionary, it was none the less in bondage to static ideals. He thought that
change or alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true reality was
unchangeable. Hence while he would radically change the existing state of
society, his aim was to construct a state in which change would subsequently
have no place. The final end of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in
view, not even minor details are to be altered Though they might not be
inherently important, yet if permitted they would ensure the minds of men to the
idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic. The breakdown of his
philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual
improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then
improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into
existence until an ideal state existent and after that education would be devoted
simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state, he was obliged to trust
to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to 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 ground that life and
instinct are a kind of miraculous thing anyway. Thus, we fail to note what the
essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the significance of the temporal
place and order of each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor
while the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage,
until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the
process. Since aims relate always to results, the first thing to look to when it is a
question of aims, is whether the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity, or is
it a mere serial aggregate of acts, first doing one thing and then another? To talk
about an educational aim when approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by
the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes
from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another, is to talk
nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or discontinuous action
in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim implies an orderly and
ordered activity, one in which the order consists in the progressive completing of
a process. Given an activity having a time span and cumulative growth within the
time succession, an aim means foresight in advance of the end or possible
termination. If bees anticipated the consequences of their activity, if they
perceived their end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary element
in an aim. Hence it is nonsense

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

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

(I) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition. Obstinacy may be

mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps on doing a thing just
because he has got started, not because of any clearly thought-out purpose. In
facts the obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of
his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling
that if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be
worthwhile. Stubbornness shows itself even more in 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 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 from all inquiry. It
has not been enough to show that they were of no use in life or that they did not
really contribute to the cultivation of the self. That they were "disciplinary"
stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed the subject from the
realm of rational discussion. By its natures the allegation could not be checked up
Even when discipline did not accrue as matter of fact, when the pupil even grew
in laxity Of application and lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay
with him, not with the study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof
that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the old
methods. The responsibility was transferred from the educator to the pupil
because the material did not have to meet specific tests; it did not have to be
shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served any specific end. It was
designed to discipline in general, and if it failed, it was because the individual
was unwilling to be disciplined In the other direction, the tendency was towards a
negative conception of discipline, instead of an identification of it with growth in
constructive power of achievement As we have already seen, will means an
attitude toward the future, toward the production of possible consequences, an
attitude involving effort to foresee clearly and comprehensively the probable
results of ways of acting, and an active identification with some anticipated
consequences. Identification of will, or distinctive temperament. We
indiscriminately employ children of different bents on the same exercises; their
education destroys the special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore, after
you have wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the short-
lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while the natural
abilities we have crushed do not revive."
Lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origins the waxing, and
waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and bloom irregularly; there
is no even four-abreast development. We must strike while the iron is hot.
Especially precious are the first dawning of power. More than we imagine the
ways in which the tendencies of early childhood are treated fix fundamental
dispositions and condition the turn taken by powers that show themselves later.
Educational concern with the early years of life— as distinct from inculcation of
useful arts—dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi and
Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth. The irregularity of
growth and its significance is indicated in the following passage of a student of
the growth of the nervous system "While growth continues, things bodily and
mental are lopsided, for growth is never general, but is accentuated now at one
spot now at another. The methods which shall recognize in the presence of these
enormous accomplishment of our purposes depends. Stated thus broadly, the
formula may appear abstract. Translated into details, it means that the act of
learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which pupils are
merely presented with a lesson to be learned. Study is effectual in the degree in
which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with in
carrying to fruition activities in which he is concerned. This connection of an
object and a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first
and the last word of a genuine theory of interest in education.

3. Some Social Aspects of the Question. While the theoretical errors of which we
have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of schools, they are
themselves the outcome of conditions of social life. A change confined to the
theoretical conviction of educators will not remove the difficulties, though it
should render more effective efforts to modify social conditions, Men's
fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the
activities in which they partake. The ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic
attitude. Art is neither merely internal nor merely external; merely mental nor
merely physical. Like every mode of action, it brings about changes in the world
The changes made by some actions (those which by contrast may be called
mechanical) are
following nature was a political dogma. It meant a rebellion against existing
social institutions, customs, and ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau's statement that
everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification
only in its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence: "Everything
degenerates in the hands of man." And again he says: "Natural man has an
absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a complete Integer and has no relation save
to himself and to his fellow man. Civilized man is only a relative unit, the
numerator of a fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its relation to the
integral body of society Good political institutions is those which make a man
unnatural." It is upon this conception of the artificial and harmful character of
organized social life as it now exists 2 that he rested the notion that nature not
merely furnishes prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan and goal.
That evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a wrong
education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is true enough; but the
conclusion is not to education apart from the environment, but to provide an
environment in which native powers will be put to better uses.

2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature

supply the end of a true education and society the end of an evil one, could hardly
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 ba
Ck 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’s—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 surrounded by other
competing and more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret
social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism. Since the
maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required subordination of
individuals to the superior interests of the state both in military defense and in
struggles for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was
understood to imply a like subordination. The educational process was taken to be
one of disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since, however,
the ideal of culture as complete development of personality persisted, educational
philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. The reconciliation took
the form of the conception of the "organic" character of the state. The individual
in his isolation is nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and
meaning of organized institutions does he attain true personality. What appears to
be his subordination to political authority and the demand for sacrifice of himself
to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective
reason manifested in the state—the only way in which he can become truly
rational. The notion of development which we have seen to be characteristic of
institutional idealism (as in the Hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate
effort to combine the two ideas of complete realization of personality and Seeds
sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, the seasons
change. His aim is simply to utilize these various conditions; to make his
activities and their energies work together, instead of against one another. It
would be absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any reference
to these conditions of soil, climate, characteristic of plant growth, etc. His
purpose is simply a foresight of the consequences of his energies connected with
those of the things about him a foresight used to direct his movements from day-
to-day Foresight of possible consequences leads to more careful and extensive
observation of the nature and performances of the things he had to do withs and
to laying out a plan—that is, of a certain order in the acts to be performed

It is the same with the educator, whether parent or teacher. It is as absurd for the
latter to set up his "own" aims as the proper objects of the growth of the children
as it would be for the farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of
conditions. Aims mean acceptance of responsibility for the observations,
anticipations, and arrangements required in carrying on a function—whether
farming or educating. Any aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice,
and planning in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if
it gets in the way of the individual's own common sense (as it will surely do if
imposed from without or 1. The Meaning of the Terms, we have already noticed
the difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant. The
former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another,
since each is just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what is going
on; its outcome makes a difference to him. His fortunes are more or less at stake
in the issue of events. Consequently, he does whatever he can to influence the
direction present occurrences take. One is like a man in a prison cell watching the
rain out of the window; it is all the same to him. The other is like a man who has
planned an outing for the next day which continuing rain will frustrate. He
cannot, to be sure, by his present reactions affect to-morrow's weather, but he
may take some steps which will influence future happenings, if only to postpone
the proposed picnic. If a man sees a carriage coming which may run over him, if
he cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the way if he foresees the
consequence in time. In many instances, he can intervene even more directly. The
attitude of a participant in the course of affairs is thus a double one: there is
solicitude, anxiety concerning future consequences, and a tendency to act to
assure better, and avert worse, consequences. There are words which denote this
attitude: concern, interest. These words suggest that a person is bound up with the
possibilities inhering in objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout for what

efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its chief constituent
(because its only guarantee) is omitted, —intelligent sympathy or good will for
sympathy as a desirable quality is something more than mere feeling; it is a
cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever
unnecessarily divides them. What is sometimes called a benevolent interest in
others may be but an unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their
good shall best instead of an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find
the good of their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service, are hard and
metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgment of the diversity of
goods which life may afford to different persons, and from faith in the social
utility of encouraging every individual to make his own choice intelligent.

3. Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is consistent

with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means at least something
cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw and crude. When the
"natural" is identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is called
natural development. Culture is also something personal; it is cultivation with
respect to appreciation of ideas and art and broad human interests. When
efficiency is identified with a narrow range of acts, 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 one such group of facts; algebra another; geography another, and
so on till we have run through the entire curriculum. Having a readymade
existence on their own account, their relation to mind is exhausted in What they
furnish it to acquire. This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which
the program of school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists of
"studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be complete by
itself—for educational purposes at least.
Later on, a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the meaning of the
subject matter of instruction. At this point, we need only to say that, in contrast
with the traditional theory, anything which intelligence studies represents things
in the part which they play in the carrying forward of active lines of interest. Just
as one "studies" his typewriter as part of the operation of putting it to use to effect
results, so with any fact or truth. It becomes an object of study—that ist of inquiry
and reflection—when it figures as a factor to be reckoned with in the completion
of a course of events in which one is engaged and by whose outcome one is
affected Numbers are not objects of study just because they are numbers already
constituting a branch of learning called mathematics, but because they represent
qualities and relations of the world in which our action goes on, because they are
factors upon which the intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable
and easy terms. A society marked off into classes need he especially attentive only
to the education of its ruling elements. A society which is mobile, which is fun of
channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that
its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability Otherwise, they
will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose
significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be a confusion in
which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of the blind and externally
directed activities of others.

3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy Subsequent chapters will be devoted to

making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas in education. In the
remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider the educational theories
which have been evolved in three epochs when the social import of education was
especially conspicuous. The first one to be considered is that of Plato. No one
could better express than did he the fact that a society is stably organized when
each individual is doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as
to be useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs); and that
it is the business of education to discover these aptitudes and progressively to
train them for social use. of intelligence in foresight, and contriving, is then
discounted; we are just to get out of the way and allow nature to do the work.
Since no one has stated in the doctrine both its truth and falsity better than
Rousseau, we shall turn to him
"Educations" he says, "we receive from three sources—Nature, men, and things.
The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities constitutes the
education of Nature. The use to which we are taught to put this development
constitutes that education given us by Men. The acquirement of personal
experience from surrounding objects constitutes that of things. Only when these
three of education are consonant and make for the same end, does a man tend
towards his true goal. If we are asked what is this end, the answer is that of
Nature. For since the concurrence of the three of education is necessary to their
completeness, the which is entirely independent of our control must necessarily
regulate us in determining the other two." Then he defines Nature to mean the
capacities and dispositions which are inborn, "as they exist prior to the
modification due to constraining habits and the influence of the opinion of
others."

The wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as fundamental

truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction with a curious twist. It
would be impossible to say 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 a hesitance, 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 instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is
opposed to efficiency. Whether called culture or complete development of
personality, the outcome is identical with the true meaning of social efficiency
whenever attention is given to what is unique in an individual—and he would not
be an individual if there were not something incommensurable about him. Its
opposite is the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed,
distinction of personality results, and with-it greater promise for a social service
which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material commodities. For how can
there be a society really worth serving unless it is constituted of individuals of
significant personal qualities?

The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social efficiency is a
product of a feudally organized society with its rigid division of inferior and
superior. The latter are supposed to have time and opportunity to develop
themselves as human beings; the former is confined to providing external
products. When social efficiency as measured by product or output is urged as an
ideal in a would-be democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of
the masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and carried
over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning; it is that a social return be
demanded from all and education, and the narrowly disciplinary or cultural
character of higher education. It accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual
matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and professionally technical, and
for the widespread conviction that liberal education is opposed to the
requirements of an education which shall count in the vocations of life. But it also
helps define the peculiar problem of present education. The school cannot
immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social conditions. But it should
contribute through the type of intellectual and emotional disposition which it
forms to the improvement of those conditions. And just here the true conceptions
of interest and discipline are full of significance. Persons whose interests have
been enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with things and facts in active
occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those most likely
to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof knowledge and a hard, narrow,
and merely "practical" practice. To organize education so that natural active
tendencies shall be fully enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the
doing requires observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of a
constructive Imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve social
conditions. To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in
outward doing without the use of intelligence. and

1. Nature as Supplying the Aim. We have Just pointed out the futility of trying to
establish the aim of education—some one final aim which subordinates all others
to itself. We have indicated that since general aims are but prospective points of
view from which to survey the existing conditions and estimate their possibilities,
we might have any number of them, all consistent with one another. As matter of
fact, a large number have been stated at different times, all having great local
value. For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time. And we do
not emphasize things which do not require emphasis—that is, such things as are
taking care of themselves fairly well, we tend rather to frame our statement on the
basis of the defects and needs of the contemporary situation; we take for granted,
without explicit statement which would be of no use, whatever is right or
approximately so. We frame our explicit aims in terms of some alteration to be
brought about. It is, then, DO paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or
generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just the things which it
has least of in actual fact. A time of domination by authority will call out as
response the desirability of great individual freedom; one of disorganized
individual activities the need of social control as an educational aim. The actual
and implicit practice and the situation of human intercourse. On the one whole
sciences commerce, and art transcend national boundaries. They are largely
international in quality and method. They involve interdependencies and
cooperation among the peoples inhabiting different countries. At the same time,
the idea of national sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is at
the present time. Each nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and incipient
war with its neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme judge of its own
interests, and it is assumed as matter of course that each has interests which are
exclusively its own. To question this is to question the very idea of national
sovereignty which is assumed to be basic to political practice and political
science. This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere of
associated and mutually helpful social life and the narrower sphere of exclusive
and hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational theory a
clearer conception of the meaning of '"social" as a function and test of education
than has yet been attained Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted
by a national state and yet the fun social ends of the educative process not be
restricted, constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to face the
tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split society into classes
some of which are made merely tools for the higher against the prevalent notion
of the total depravity of innate human nature, and has had a powerful influence in
modifying the attitude towards children's interests. But it is hardly necessary to
say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good nor evils but become
one or the other according to the objects for which they are employed. That
neglect, suppressions and premature forcing of some instincts at the expense of
others, are responsible for many avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the
moral is not to leave them alone to follow their own "spontaneous developments"
but to provide an environment which shall organize them.

Returning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's statements, we find

that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point the means of correcting
many evils in current practices, and to indicate a number of desirable specific
aims. (1) Natural development as an aim fixes attention upon the bodily organs
and the need of health and vigor: The aim of natural development says to parents
and teachers: Make health an aim; normal development cannot be had without
regard to the vigor of the body—an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due
recognition in practice would almost automatically revolutionize many of our
educational practices. "Nature" is indeed a vague and metaphorical term, but one
thing that 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 conyplex (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. Thus,
interest and mind are either narrowed, or else made perverse. Compare what was
said in an earlier chapter about the one-sided meanings which have come to
attach to the ideas of efficiency and of culture.
This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a basis of division
between laboring classes and leisure classes. The intelligence of those who do
things becomes hard in the unremitting struggle with things; that of those freed
from the discipline of occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate. Moreover,
the majority of human beings still lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are
fixed by accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal
expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and resources of the
environment. Our economic conditions still relegate many men to a servile status.
As a consequence, the intelligence of those in control of the practical situation is
not liberal Instead of playing freely upon the subjugation of the world for human
ends, it is devoted to the manipulation of other men for ends that are non-human
in so far as they are exclusive.

This state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational traditions.
It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in different portions of the
school system; the narrowly utilitarian character of most elementary intelligence
because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external to
intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a mechanical choice of means.

(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the attempt to
realize them. This impression must now be qualified. The aim as it first emerges
is a mere tentative sketch The act of striving to realize it tests its worth. If it
suffices to direct activity successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole
function is to set a mark in advance; and at times a mere hint may suffice. But
usually—at least in complicated situations—acting upon it brings to light
conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision of the original aim;
it has to be added to and subtracted from. An aim must then, be flexible; it must
be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to
the process of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from without, it is
not supposed to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the
situation. What happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor
alters it. Such an end can only be insisted upon. The failure that results from its
lack of adaptation is attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions, not to the
fact that the end is not reasonable under the circumstances.
The value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary; lies of the state is educational; that
in particular the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education
carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private individual is of
necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to his appetites and to
circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the educative discipline of state
institutions and laws. In this spirit, Germany was the first country to undertake a
public, universal, and compulsory system of education extending from the
primary school through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation
and supervision all private educational enterprises. Two results should stand out
from this brief historical survey. The first is that such terms as the individual and
the social conceptions of education are quite meaningless taken at large, or apart
from their context. Plato had the ideal of an education which should equate
individual realization and social coherency and stability. His situation forced his
ideal into the notion of a society organized in stratified classes, losing the
individual in the class. The eighteenth century educational philosophy was highly
individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a noble and generous social
ideal: that of a society organized to include humanity, and providing for the
indefinite perfectibility of mankind The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the
early nineteenth century endeavored again to equate the ideals of a free and
complete development of cultured combination of the two, Subject matter is then
regarded as something complete in itself; it is just something to be learned or
known, either by the voluntary application of mind to it or through the
impressions it makes on mind

The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind appears in
experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the basis of anticipation of
future possible consequences, and with a view to controlling the kind of
consequences that are to take place. The things, the subject matter known, consist
of whatever is recognized as having a bearing upon the anticipated course of
events, whether assisting or retarding it. These statements are too formal to be
very intelligible. An illustration may clear up their significance. You are engaged
in a certain occupation, say writing with a typewriter, if you are an expert, your
formed habits take care of the physical movements and leave your thoughts free to
consider your topic. Suppose, however, you are not skilled, or that, even if you
are, the machine does not work well. You then have to use intelligence. you do
not wish to strike the keys at random and let the consequences be what they may;
you wish to record certain words in a given order so as to make sense. You attend
to the keys, to what you have written, to your movements, to the ribbon or the
mechanism of the machine. Your attention is not distributed He brought it into the
sphere of conscious method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim
and procedure, masthead 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 culture of others. Externally, the
question is concerned with the reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism,
with superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends,
irrespective of national political boundaries, neither phase of the problem can be
worked out by merely negative means. It is not enough to see to it that education
is not actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one class
by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and efficiency as
will in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of economic inequalities,
and secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future
careers. Accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate administrative
provision of school facilities, and such supplementation of family resources as
will enable youth to take advantage of them, but also such modification of
traditional ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and traditional methods
of teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth under educational influences
until they are equipped to be masters of their own economic and social careers.
The ideal may seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is
a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our
public system of education. The same principle has application on the side of the
considerations which concern the relations of one nation to 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 welfares 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 they are likely to do to him;
and that, on the basis of his expectation or foresights he is eager to act so as to
give things one turn rather than another, Interest and aims, concern and purpose,
are necessarily connected. Such words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the results
which are wanted and striven for; they take for granted the personal attitude of
solicitude and attentive eagerness. Such words as interests’ affections concerns
motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is foreseen upon the individual's
fortunes, and his active desire to act to secure a possible result. They take for
granted the objective changes. But the difference is but one of emphasis; the
meaning that is shaded in one set of words is illuminated in the other. What is
anticipated is objective and impersonal; to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being
run over. But for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences
instead of standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response.
The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference, which finds
expression in solicitude and effort While such words as affection, concerns and
motive indicate an attitude of personal preference, they are always attitudes
toward objects—toward what is foreseen. We may call the phase of objective
foresight intellectuals and the phase of personal concern emotional and volitional,
but there is no separation in the facts of the situation.