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The Child and the Curriculum»*
Profound differences in theory are never gratuitous or
invented. They grow out of conflicting elements in a genuine
problem—a problem which is genuine just because the °
elements, taken as they stand, are conflicting. Any significant
problem involves conditions that for the moment contradict
each other. Solution comes only by getting away from the
meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to
see the conditions from another point of view, and hence in
a fresh light. But this reconstruction means travail of
thought. Easier than thinking with surrender of already
formed ideas and detachment from facts already learned, is
just to stick by what is already said, looking about for °
something with which to buttress it against attack.
Thus sects arise; schools of opinion. Each selects that
set of conditions that appeal to it; and then erects them into
a complete and independent truth, instead of treating them
as a factor in a problem, needing adjustment.
The fundamental factors in the educative process are
an immature, undeveloped being; and certain social aims,
meanings, values incarnate in the matured experience of the
adult. The educative process is the due interaction of these
forces. Such a conception of each in relation to the other as
facilitates completest and freest interaction is the essence of
educational theory.
But here comes the effort of thought. It is easier to see
the conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the
expense of the other, to make antagonists of them, than to
discover a reality to which each belongs. The easy thing is to
seize upon something in the nature of the child, or upon
something in the developed consciousness of the adult, and
insist upon that as the key to the whole problem. When this
happens a really serious practical problem—that of °
interaction—is transformed into an unreal, and hence insoluble,
and as a whole, we see conflicting terms. We get the case
of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs.
social culture. Below all other divisions in pedagogic opinion
lies this opposition.
The child lives in a somewhat narrow world of personal
contacts. Things hardly come within his experience unless
they touch, intimately and obviously, his own well-being, or
that of his family and friends. His world is a world of °
persons with their personal interests, rather than a realm of
facts and laws. Not truth, in the sense of conformity to
external fact, but affection and sympathy, is its keynote. As
against this, the course of study met in the school presents
material stretching back indefinitely in time, and extending
outward indefinitely into space. The child is taken out of his
familiar physical environment, hardly more than a square
mile or so in area, into the wide world—yes, and even to the
bounds of the solar system. His little span of personal
memory and tradition is overlaid with the long centuries of
the history of all peoples.
Again, the child's life is an integral, a total one. He
passes quickly and readily from one topic to another, as
from one spot to another, but is not conscious of transition or
break. There is no conscious isolation, hardly conscious °
distinction. The things that occupy him are held together by the
unity of the personal and social interests which his life
carries along. Whatever is uppermost in his mind constitutes
to him, for the time being, the whole universe. That universe
is fluid and fluent; its contents dissolve and re-form with
amazing rapidity. But, after all, it is the child's own world.
It has the unity and completeness of his own life. He goes to
school, and various studies divide and fractionize the world
for him. Geography selects, it abstracts and analyzes one set
of facts, and from one particular point of view. Arithmetic
is another division, grammar another department, and so on
indefinitely.
Again, in school each of these subjects is classified.
Facts are torn away from their original place in experience
and rearranged with reference to some general principle.
Classification is not a matter of child experience; things do
affection, the connecting bonds of activity, hold together the
variety of his personal experiences. The adult mind is so
familiar with the notion of logically ordered facts that it
does not recognize—it cannot realize—the amount of °
separating and reformulating which the facts of direct °
experience have to undergo before they can appear as a "study," or
branch of learning. A principle, for the intellect, has had to
be distinguished and defined; facts have had to be °
interpreted in relation to this principle, not as they are in °
themselves. They have had to be regathered about a new centre
which is wholly abstract and ideal. All this means a °
development of a special intellectual interest. It means ability to
view facts impartially and objectively; that is, without °
reference to their place and meaning in one's own experience. It
means capacity to analyze and to synthesize. It means highly
matured intellectual habits and the command of a definite
technique and apparatus of scientific inquiry. The studies as
classified are the product, in a word, of the science of the
ages, not of the experience of the child.
These apparent deviations and differences between child
and curriculum might be almost indefinitely widened. But
we have here sufficiently fundamental divergences: first, the
narrow but personal world of the child against the °
impersonal but infinitely extended world of space and time;
second, the unity, the single whole-heartedness of the child's
life, and the specializations and divisions of the curriculum;
third, an abstract principle of logical classification and °
arrangement, and the practical and emotional bonds of child
life.
From these elements of conflict grow up different °
educational sects. One school fixes its attention upon the °
importance of the subject-matter of the curriculum as compared
with the contents of the child's own experience. It is as if
they said: Is life petty, narrow, and crude? Then studies
reveal the great, wide universe with all its fullness and
complexity of meaning. Is the life of the child egoistic, self-
centered, impulsive? Then in these studies is found an °
objective universe of truth, law, and order. Is his experience
confused, vague, uncertain, at the mercy of the moment's
arranged on the basis of eternal and general truth; a world
where all is measured and defined. Hence the moral: ignore
and minimize the child's individual peculiarities, whims, and
experiences. They are what we need to get away from. They
are to be obscured or eliminated. As educators our work is
precisely to substitute for these superficial and casual affairs
stable and well-ordered realities; and these are found in
studies and lessons.
Subdivide each topic into studies; each study into °
lessons; each lesson into specific facts and formulae. Let the
child proceed step by step to master each one of these °
separate parts, and at last he will have covered the entire ground.
The road which looks so long when viewed in its entirety, is
easily traveled, considered as a series of particular steps.
Thus emphasis is put upon the logical subdivisions and °
consecutions of the subject-matter. Problems of instruction are
problems of procuring texts giving logical parts and °
sequences, and of presenting these portions in class in a
similar definite and graded way. Subject-matter furnishes
the end, and it determines method. The child is simply the
immature-being who is to be matured; he is the superficial
being who is to be deepened; his is narrow experience which
is to be widened. It is his to receive, to accept. His part is
fulfilled when he is ductile and docile.
Not so, says the other sect. The child is the starting-
point, the centre, and the end. His development, his growth,
is the ideal. It alone furnishes the standard. To the growth
of the child all studies are subservient; they are instruments
valued as they serve the needs of growth. Personality, °
character, is more than subject-matter. Not knowledge or °
information, but self-realization, is the goal. To possess all the
world of knowledge and lose one's own self is as awful a fate
in education as in religion. Moreover, subject-matter never
can be got into the child from without. Learning is active.
It involves reaching out of the mind. It involves organic
assimilation starting from within. Literally, we must take our
stand with the child and our departure from him. It is he
and not the subject-matter which determines both quality
and quantity of learning.
The only significant method is the method of the mind
as it reaches out and assimilates. Subject-matter is but
spiritual food, possible nutritive material. It cannot digest
itself; it cannot of its own accord turn into bone and muscle
and blood. 
The source of whatever is dead 
, mechanical, and
formal in schools is found precisely in the subordination of
the life and experience of the child to the curriculum. It is
because of this that "study" has become a synonym for what
is irksome, and a lesson identical with a task.
This fundamental opposition of child and curriculum
set up by these two modes of doctrine can be duplicated in a
series of other terms. "Discipline" is the watchword of those
who magnify the course of study; "interest" that of those
who blazon "The Child" upon their banner. The standpoint
of the former is logical; that of the latter psychological. The
first emphasizes the necessity of adequate training and
scholarship on the part of the teacher; the latter that of need
of sympathy with the child, and knowledge of his natural
instincts. "Guidance and control" are the catchwords of one
school; "freedom and initiative" of the other. Law is °
asserted here; spontaneity proclaimed there. The old, the °
conservation of what has been achieved in the pain and toil of
the ages, is dear to the one; the new, change, progress, wins
the affection of the other. Inertness and routine, chaos and
anarchism, are accusations bandied back and forth. Neglect
of the sacred authority of duty is charged by one side, only to
be met by counter-charges of suppression of individuality
through tyrannical despotism.
Such oppositions are rarely carried to their logical °
conclusion. Common sense recoils at the extreme character of
these results. They are left to theorists, while common sense
vibrates back and forward in a maze of inconsistent °
compromise. The need of getting theory and practical common
sense into closer connection suggests a return to our original
thesis: that we have here conditions which are necessarily
related to each other in the educative process, since this is
precisely one of interaction and adjustment.
What, then, is the problem? It is just to get rid of the
prejudicial notion that there is some gap in kind (as distinct
from degree) between the child's experience and the various
From the side of the child, it is a question of seeing how his
experience already contains within itself elements—facts and
truths—of just the same sort as those entering into the
formulated study; and, what is of more importance, of how
it contains within itself the attitudes, the motives, and the
interests which have operated in developing and organizing
the subject-matter to the plane which it now occupies. From
the side of the studies, it is a question of interpreting them as
outgrowths of forces operating in the child's life, and of
discovering the steps that intervene between the child's
present experience and their richer maturity.
Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something
fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience;
cease thinking of the child's experience as also something
hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital;
and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply
two limits which define a single process. Just as two points
define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child
and the facts and truths of studies define instruction. It is
continuous reconstruction, moving from the child's present
experience out into that represented by the organized bodies
of truth that we call studies.
On the face of it, the various studies, arithmetic, °
geography, language, botany, etc., are themselves experience—
they are that of the race. They embody the cumulative °
outcome of the efforts, the strivings, and successes of the
human race generation after generation. They present this,
not as a mere accumulation, not as a miscellaneous heap of
separate bits of experience, but in some organized and
systematized way—that is, as reflectively formulated.
Hence, the facts and truths that enter into the child's
present experience, and those contained in the subject-matter
of studies, are the initial and final terms of one reality. To
oppose one to the other is to oppose the infancy and maturity
of the same growing life; it is to set the moving tendency and
the final result of the same process over against each other;
it is to hold that the nature and the destiny of the child war
with each other.
If such be the case, the problem of the relation of the
child and the curriculum presents itself in this guise: Ofwhat use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the
end in the beginning? How does it assist us in dealing with
the early stages of growth to be able to anticipate its later
phases? The studies, as we have agreed, represent the °
possibilities of development inherent in the child's immediate
crude experience. But, after all, they are not parts of that
present and immediate life. Why, then, or how, make °
account of them?
Asking such a question suggests its own answer. To see
the outcome is to know in what direction the present °
experience is moving, provided it move normally and soundly. The
far-away point, which is of no significance to us simply as
far away, becomes of huge importance the moment we take
it as defining a present direction of movement. Taken in
this way it is no remote and distant result to be achieved,
but a guiding method in dealing with the present. The °
systematized and defined experience of the adult mind, in other
words, is of value to us in interpreting the child's life as it
immediately shows itself, and in passing on to guidance or
direction.
Let us look for a moment at these two ideas: °
interpretation and guidance. The child's present experience is in
no way self-explanatory. It is not final, but transitional. It is
nothing complete in itself, but just a sign or index of certain
growth-tendencies. As long as we confine our gaze to what
the child here and now puts forth, we are confused and °
misled. We cannot read its meaning. Extreme depreciations of
the child morally and intellectually, and sentimental °
idealizations of him, have their root in a common fallacy. Both
spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as °
something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see the promise
contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves,
are unpromising and repellant; the second fails to see that
even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but
signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they
are treated as achievements.
What we need is something which will enable us to
interpret, to appraise, the elements in the child's present
puttings forth and fallings away, his exhibitions of power
which they have their place. Only in this way can we °
discriminate. If we isolate the child's present inclinations, °
purposes, and experiences from the place they occupy and the
part they have to perform in a developing experience, all
stand upon the same level; all alike are equally good and
equally bad. But in the movement of life different elements
stand upon different planes of value. Some of the child's
deeds are symptoms of a waning tendency; they are °
survivals in functioning of an organ which has done its part
and is passing out of vital use. To give positive attention to
such qualities is to arrest development upon a lower level.
It is systematically to maintain a rudimentary phase of
growth. Other activities are signs of a culminating power and
interest; to them applies the maxim of striking while the
iron is hot. As regards them, it is perhaps a matter of now or
never. Selected, utilized, emphasized, they may mark a °
turning-point for good in the child's whole career; neglected, an
opportunity goes, never to be recalled. Other acts and feelings
are prophetic; they represent the dawning of flickering light
that will shine steadily only in the far future. As regards
them there is little at present to do but give them fair and
full chance, waiting for the future for definite direction.
Just as, upon the whole, it was the weakness of the
"old education" that it made invidious comparisons between
the immaturity of the child and the maturity of the adult,
regarding the former as something to be got away from as
soon as possible and as much as possible; so it is the danger
of the "new education" that it regard the child's present
powers and interests as something finally significant in °
themselves. In truth, his learnings and achievements are fluid
and moving. They change from day to day and from hour
to hour.
It will do harm if child-study leave in the popular mind
the impression that a child of a given age has a positive
equipment of purposes and interests to be cultivated just as
they stand. Interests in reality are but attitudes toward °
possible experiences; they are not achievements; their worth is
in the leverage they afford, not in the accomplishment they
represent. To take the phenomena presented at a given age
to result in indulgence and spoiling. Any power, whether of
child or adult, is indulged when it is taken on its given and
present level in consciousness. Its genuine meaning is in the
propulsion it affords toward a higher level. It is just °
something to do with. Appealing to the interest upon the present
plane means excitation; it means playing with a power so as
continually to stir it up without directing it toward definite
achievement. Continuous initiation, continuous starting of
activities that do not arrive, is, for all practical purposes, as
bad as the continual repression of initiative in conformity
with supposed interests of some more perfect thought or will.
It is as if the child were forever tasting and never eating;
always having his palate tickled upon the emotional side,
but never getting the organic satisfaction that comes only
with digestion of food and transformation of it into working
power.
As against such a view, the subject-matter of science
and history and art serves to reveal the real child to us. We
do not know the meaning either of his tendencies or of his
performances excepting as we take them as germinating seed,
or opening bud, of some fruit to be borne. The whole world
of visual nature is all too small an answer to the problem of
the meaning of the child's instinct for light and form. The
entire science of physics is none too much to interpret °
adequately to us what is involved in some simple demand of the
child for explanation of some casual change that has °
attracted his attention. The art of Rafael or of Corot is none
too much to enable us to value the impulses stirring in the
child when he draws and daubs.
So much for the use of the subject-matter in °
interpretation. Its further employment in direction or guidance
is but an expansion of the same thought. To interpret the
fact is to see it in its vital movement, to see it in its relation
to growth. But to view it as a part of a normal growth is to
secure the basis for guiding it. Guidance is not external °
imposition. It is freeing the life-process for its own most °
adequate fulfillment. What was said about disregard of the
child's present experience because of its remoteness from
mature experience; and of the sentimental idealization of
repeated here with slightly altered phrase. There are those who
see no alternative between forcing the child from without, or
leaving him entirely alone. Seeing no alternative, some
choose one mode, some another. Both fall into the same
fundamental error. Both fail to see that development is a
definite process, having its own law which can be fulfilled
only when adequate and normal conditions are provided.
Really to interpret the child's present crude impulses in
counting, measuring, and arranging things in rhythmic
series, involves mathematical scholarship—a knowledge of
the mathematical formulae and relations which have, in the
history of the race, grown out of just such crude beginnings.
To see the whole history of development which intervenes °
between these two terms is simply to see what step the child
needs to take just here and now; to what use he needs to put
his blind impulse in order that it may get clarity and gain
force.
If, once more, the "old education" tended to ignore the
dynamic quality, the developing force inherent in the child's
present experience, and therefore to assume that direction
and control were just matters of arbitrarily putting the child
in a given path and compelling him to walk there, the "new
education" is in danger of taking the idea of development in
altogether too formal and empty a way. The child is °
expected to "develop" this or that fact or truth out of his own
mind. He is told to think things out, or work things out for
himself, without being supplied any of the environing °
conditions which are requisite to start and guide thought.
Nothing can be developed from nothing; nothing but the
crude can be developed out of the crude—and this is what
surely happens when we throw the child back upon his
achieved self as a finality, and invite him to spin new truths
of nature or of conduct out of that. It is certainly as futile
to expect a child to evolve a universe out of his own mere
mind as it is for a philosopher to attempt that task. °
Development does not mean just getting something out of the
mind. It is a development of experience and into experience
that is really wanted. And this is impossible save as just
that educative medium is provided which will enable the
function. They must operate, and how they operate will
depend almost entirely upon the stimuli which surround
them, and the material upon which they exercise themselves.
The problem of direction is thus the problem of selecting °
appropriate stimuli for instincts and impulses which it is °
desired to employ in the gaining of new experience. What new
experiences are desirable, and thus what stimuli are needed,
it is impossible to tell except as there is some comprehension
of the development which is aimed at; except, in a word, as
the adult knowledge is drawn upon as revealing the possible
career open to the child.
It may be of use to distinguish and to relate to each
other the logical and the psychological aspects of experience
—the former standing for subject-matter in itself, the latter
for it in relation to the child. A psychological statement of
experience follows its actual growth; it is historic; it notes
steps actually taken, the uncertain and tortuous, as well as
the efficient and successful. The logical point of view, on
the other hand, assumes that the development has reached a
certain positive stage of fulfillment. It neglects the process
and considers the outcome. It summarizes and arranges, and
thus separates the achieved results from the actual steps by
which they were forthcoming in the first instance. We may
compare the difference between the logical and the °
psychological to the difference between the notes which an explorer
makes in a new country, blazing a trail and finding his way
along as best he may, and the finished map that is °
constructed after the country has been thoroughly explored. The
two are mutually dependent. Without the more or less °
accidental and devious paths traced by the explorer there
would be no facts which could be utilized in the making of
the complete and related chart. But no one would get the
benefit of the explorer's trip if it was not compared and
checked up with similar wanderings undertaken by others;
unless the new geographical facts learned, the streams
crossed, the mountains climbed, etc., were viewed, not as
mere incidents in the journey of the particular traveler, but
(quite apart from the individual explorer's life) in relation
to other similar facts already known. The map orders °
irrespective of the local and temporal circumstances and
accidents of their original discovery.
Of what use is this formulated statement of experience?
Of what use is the map?
Well, we may first tell what the map is not. The map is
not a substitute for a personal experience. The map does not
take the place of an actual journey. The logically formulated
material of a science or branch of learning, of a study, is no
substitute for the having of individual experiences. The
mathematical formula for a falling body does not take the
place of personal contact and immediate individual °
experience with the falling thing. But the map, a summary, an
arranged and orderly view of previous experiences, serves as
a guide to future experience; it gives direction; it facilitates
control; it economizes effort, preventing useless wandering,
and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and most
certainly to a desired result. Through the map every new
traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the
results of others' explorations without the waste of energy
and loss of time involved in their wanderings—wanderings
which he himself would be obliged to repeat were it not for
just the assistance of the objective and generalized record
of their performances. That which we call a science or study
puts the net product of past experience in the form which
makes it most available for the future. It represents a °
capitalization which may at once be turned to interest. It °
economizes the workings of the mind in every way. Memory is
less taxed because the facts are grouped together about some
common principle, instead of being connected solely with
the varying incidents of their original discovery. Observation
is assisted; we know what to look for and where to look. It is
the difference between looking for a needle in a haystack,
and searching for a given paper in a well-arranged cabinet.
Reasoning is directed, because there is a certain general
path or line laid out along which ideas naturally march, °
instead of moving from one chance association to another.
There is, then, nothing final about a logical rendering
of experience. Its value is not contained in itself; its °
significance is that of standpoint, outlook, method. It intervenes
experiences of the past, and more controlled and orderly °
experiences of the future. It gives past experience in that net
form which renders it most available and most significant,
most fecund for future experience. The abstractions, °
generalizations, and classifications which it introduces all have
prospective meaning.
The formulated result is then not to be opposed to the
process of growth. The logical is not set over against the
psychological. The surveyed and arranged result occupies a
critical position in the process of growth. It marks a turning-
point. It shows how we may get the benefit of past effort in
controlling future endeavor. In the largest sense the logical
standpoint is itself psychological; it has its meaning as a
point in the development of experience, and its justification
is in its functioning in the future growth which it insures.
Hence the need of reinstating into experience the °
subject-matter of the studies, or branches of learning. It must
be restored to the experience from which it has been °
abstracted. It needs to be psychologized; turned over, °
translated into the immediate and individual experiencing within
which it has its origin and significance.
Every study or subject thus has two aspects: one for the
scientist as a scientist; the other for the teacher as a teacher.
These two aspects are in no sense opposed or conflicting.
But neither are they immediately identical. For the scientist,
the subject-matter represents simply a given body of truth
to be employed in locating new problems, instituting new
researches, and carrying them through to a verified outcome.
To him the subject-matter of the science is self-contained.
He refers various portions of it to each other; he connects
new facts with it. He is not, as a scientist, called upon to
travel outside its particular bounds; if he does, it is only to
get more facts of the same general sort. The problem of the
teacher is a different one. As a teacher he is not concerned
with adding new facts to the science he teaches; in °
propounding new hypotheses or in verifying them. He is °
concerned with the subject-matter of the science as representing
a given stage and phase of the development of experience.
His problem is that of inducing a vital and personal °
in which that subject may become a part of experience; what
there is in the child's present that is usable with reference
to it; how such elements are to be used; how his own °
knowledge of the subject-matter may assist in interpreting the
child's needs and doings, and determine the medium in
which the child should be placed in order that his growth
may be properly directed. He is concerned, not with the
subject-matter as such, but with the subject-matter as a
related factor in a total and growing experience. Thus to see
it is to psychologize it.
It is the failure to keep in mind the double aspect of
subject-matter which causes the curriculum and child to be
set over against each other as described in our early pages.
The subject-matter, just as it is for the scientist, has no
direct relationship to the child's present experience. It stands
outside of it. The danger here is not a merely theoretical one.
We are practically threatened on all sides. Text-book and
teacher vie with each other in presenting to the child the
subject-matter as it stands to the specialist. Such °
modification and revision as it undergoes are a mere elimination of
certain scientific difficulties, and the general reduction to a
lower intellectual level. The material is not translated into
life-terms, but is directly offered as a substitute for, or
an external annex to, the child's present life.
Three typical evils result: In the first place, the lack of
any organic connection with what the child has already seen
and felt and loved makes the material purely formal and
symbolic. There is a sense in which it is impossible to value
too highly the formal and the symbolic. The genuine form,
the real symbol, serve as methods in the holding and °
discovery of truth. They are tools by which the individual
pushes out most surely and widely into unexplored areas.
They are means by which he brings to bear whatever of
reality he has succeeded in gaining in past searchings. But
this happens only when the symbol really symbolizes—
when it stands for and sums up in shorthand actual °
experiences which the individual has already gone through. A
symbol which is induced from without, which has not been
led up to in preliminary activities, is, as we say, a bare or
of arithmetic, or geography, or grammar, which is not led
up to and into out of something which has previously °
occupied a significant position in the child's life for its own
sake, is forced into this position. It is not a reality, but just
the sign of a reality which might be experienced if certain
conditions were fulfilled. But the abrupt presentation of the
fact as something known by others, and requiring only to be
studied and learned by the child, rules out such conditions
of fulfillment. It condemns the fact to be a hieroglyph: it
would mean something if one only had the key. The clue
being lacking, it remains an idle curiosity, to fret and °
obstruct the mind, a dead weight to burden it.
The second evil in this external presentation is lack of
motivation. There are not only no facts or truths which have
been previously felt as such with which to appropriate and
assimilate the new, but there is no craving, no need, no
demand. When the subject-matter has been psychologized,
that is, viewed as an outgrowth of present tendencies and
activities, it is easy to locate in the present some obstacle,
intellectual, practical, or ethical, which can be handled more
adequately if the truth in question be mastered. This need
supplies motive for the learning. An end which is the child's
own carries him on to possess the means of its °
accomplishment. But when material is directly supplied in the form of
a lesson to be learned as a lesson, the connecting links of
need and aim are conspicuous for their absence. What we
mean by the mechanical and dead in instruction is a result
of this lack of motivation. The organic and vital mean °
interaction—they mean play of mental demand and material
supply.
The third evil is that even the most scientific matter,
arranged in most logical fashion, loses this quality, when
presented in external, ready-made fashion, by the time it
gets to the child. It has to undergo some modification in
order to shut out some phases too hard to grasp, and to °
reduce some of the attendant difficulties. What happens? Those
things which are most significant to the scientific man, and
most valuable in the logic of actual inquiry and classification,
drop out. The really thought-provoking character is obscured,
say, the child's reasoning powers, the faculty of abstraction
and generalization, are not adequately developed. So the
subject-matter is evacuated of its logical value, and, though
it is what it is only from the logical standpoint, is presented
as stuff only for "memory." This is the contradiction: the
child gets the advantage neither of the adult logical °
formulation, nor of his own native competencies of apprehension
and response. Hence the logic of the child is hampered and
mortified, and we are almost fortunate if he does not get
actual non-science, flat and commonplace residua of what
was gaining scientific vitality a generation or two ago—
degenerate reminiscence of what someone else once °
formulated on the basis of the experience that some further person
had, once upon a time, experienced.
The train of evils does not cease. It is all too common
for opposed erroneous theories to play straight into each
other's hands. Psychological considerations may be slurred
or shoved one side; they cannot be crowded out. Put out of
the door, they come back through the window. Somehow and
somewhere motive must be appealed to, connection must be
established between the mind and its material. There is no
question of getting along without this bond of connection;
the only question is whether it be such as grows out of the
material itself in relation to the mind, or be imported and
hitched on from some outside source. If the subject-matter
of the lessons be such as to have an appropriate place within
the expanding consciousness of the child, if it grows out of
his own past doings, thinkings, and sufferings, and grows
into application in further achievements and receptivities,
then no device or trick of method has to be resorted to in
order to enlist "interest." The psychologized is of interest—
that is, it is placed in the whole of conscious life so that it
shares the worth of that life. But the externally presented
material, that, conceived and generated in standpoints and
attitudes remote from the child, and developed in motives
alien to him, has no such place of its own. Hence the °
recourse to adventitious leverage to push it in, to factitious drill
to drive it in, to artificial bribe to lure it in.
Three aspects of this recourse to outside ways for giving
the subject-matter some psychological meaning may be worthmentioning. Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds
something like affection. We get used to the chains we wear,
and we miss them when removed. 'Tis an old story that
through custom we finally embrace what at first wore a
hideous mien. Unpleasant, because meaningless, activities
may get agreeable if long enough persisted in. It is possible
for the mind to develop interest in a routine or mechanical
procedure, if conditions are continually supplied which °
demand that mode of operation and preclude any other sort.
I frequently hear dulling devices and empty exercises °
defended and extolled because "the children take such an
'interest' in them." Yes, that is the worst of it; the mind,
shut out from worthy employ and missing the taste of
adequate performance, comes down to the level of that which
is left to it to know and do, and perforce takes an interest in
a cabined and cramped experience. To find satisfaction in
its own exercise is the normal law of mind, and if large and
meaningful business for the mind be denied, it tries to °
content itself with the formal movements that remain to it—and
too often succeeds, save in those cases of more intense
activity which cannot accommodate themselves, and that
make up the unruly and declassé of our school product. An
interest in the formal apprehension of symbols and in their
memorized reproduction becomes in many pupils a substitute
for the original and vital interest in reality; and all because,
the subject-matter of the course of study being out of °
relation to the concrete mind of the individual, some substitute
bond to hold it in some kind of working relation to the mind
must be discovered and elaborated.
The second substitute for living motivation in the °
subject-matter is that of contrast-effects; the material of the
lesson is rendered interesting, if not in itself, at least in
contrast with some alternative experience. To learn the °
lesson is more interesting than to take a scolding, be held up
to general ridicule, stay after school, receive degradingly low
marks, or fail to be promoted. And very much of what goes
by the name of "discipline," and prides itself upon opposing
the doctrines of a soft pedagogy and upon upholding the °
banner of effort and duty, is nothing more or less than just this
of various kinds of physical, social, and personal pain. The
subject-matter does not appeal; it cannot appeal; it lacks
origin and bearing in a growing experience. So the appeal is
to the thousand and one outside and irrelevant agencies
which may serve to throw, by sheer rebuff and rebound, the
mind back upon the material from which it is constantly
wandering.
Human nature being what it is, however, it tends to
seek its motivation in the agreeable rather than in the °
disagreeable, in direct pleasure rather than in alternative pain.
And so has come up the modern theory and practice of the
"interesting," in the false sense of that term. The material is
still left; so far as its own characteristics are concerned, just
material externally selected and formulated. It is still just so
much geography and arithmetic and grammar study; not so
much potentiality of child-experience with regard to °
language, earth, and numbered and measured reality. Hence
the difficulty of bringing the mind to bear upon it; hence
its repulsiveness; the tendency for attention to wander; for
other acts and images to crowd in and expel the lesson. The
legitimate way out is to transform the material; to °
psychologize it—that is, once more, to take it and to develop it
within the range and scope of the child's life. But it is
easier and simpler to leave it as it is, and then by trick of
method to arouse interest, to make it interesting; to cover it
with sugar-coating; to conceal its barrenness by intermediate
and unrelated material; and finally, as it were, to get the
child to swallow and digest the unpalatable morsel while he
is enjoying tasting something quite different. But alas for
the analogy! Mental assimilation is a matter of °
consciousness; and if the attention has not been playing upon the
actual material, that has not been apprehended, nor worked
into faculty.
How, then, stands the case of Child vs. Curriculum?
What shall the verdict be? The radical fallacy in the original
pleadings with which we set out is the supposition that we
have no choice save either to leave the child to his own °
unguided spontaneity or to inspire direction upon him from
without. Action is response; it is adaptation, adjustment.
because all activity takes place in a medium, in a situation, and
with reference to its conditions. But, again, no such thing as
imposition of truth from without, as insertion of truth from
without, is possible. All depends upon the activity which the
mind itself undergoes in responding to what is presented
from without. Now, the value of the formulated wealth of
knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may
enable the educator to determine the environment of the
child, and thus by indirection to direct. Its primary value, its
primary indication, is for the teacher, not for the child. It
says to the teacher: Such and such are the capacities, the
fulfillments, in truth and beauty and behavior, open to these
children. Now see to it that day by day the conditions are
such that their own activities move inevitably in this °
direction, toward such culmination of themselves. Let the child's
nature fulfill its own destiny, revealed to you in whatever of
science and art and industry the world now holds as its own.
The case is of Child. It is his present powers which are
to assert themselves; his present capacities which are to be
exercised; his present attitudes which are to be realized. But
save as the teacher knows, knows wisely and thoroughly,
the race-experience which is embodied in that thing we call
the Curriculum, the teacher knows neither what the present
power, capacity, or attitude is, nor yet how it is to be °
asserted, exercised, and realized.