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<h2> Chapter Five: Preparation, Unfolding, and Formal Discipline </h2>
<p>1. Education as Preparation. We have laid it down that the educative
process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every
stage an added capacity of growth. This conception contrasts sharply with
other ideas which have influenced practice. By making the contrast
explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to
light. The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process of
preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared for is, of course,
the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. Children are not
regarded as social members in full and regular standing. They are looked
upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list. The conception is
only carried a little farther when the life of adults is considered as not
having meaning on its own account, but as a preparatory probation for
"another life." The idea is but another form of the notion of the negative
and privative character of growth already criticized; hence we shall not
repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the evil consequences which flow
from putting education on this basis. In the first place, it involves loss
of impetus. Motive power is not utilized. Children proverbially live in
the present; that is not only a fact not to be evaded, but it is an
excellence. The future just as future lacks urgency and body. To get ready
for something, one knows not what nor why, is to throw away the leverage
that exists, and to seek for motive power in a vague chance. Under such
circumstances, there is, in the second place, a premium put on
shilly-shallying and procrastination. The future prepared for is a long
way off; plenty of time will intervene before it becomes a present. Why be
in a hurry about getting ready for it? The temptation to postpone is much
increased because the present offers so many wonderful opportunities and
proffers such invitations to adventure. Naturally attention and energy go
to them; education accrues naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education
than if the full stress of effort had been put upon making conditions as
educative as possible. A third undesirable result is the substitution of a
conventional average standard of expectation and requirement for a
standard which concerns the specific powers of the individual under
instruction. For a severe and definite judgment based upon the strong and
weak points of the individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion
concerning what youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some
more or less remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions
are to take place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to
enter upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as
the serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the loss
which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point to
a comparatively unproductive point. It fails most just where it thinks it
is succeeding—in getting a preparation for the future.</p>
<p>Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a large
scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The future
having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the
possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make
it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy
work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely
unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is
actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to be
told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future,
rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely systems
of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems which
neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a future. Then,
in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this method, the pendulum
swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of information required
against some later day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be fooled into
taking something which they do not care for.</p>
<p>It is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the
future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present
possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with later
requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd moments;
it is a continuous leading into the future. If the environment, in school
and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the present
capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of the present is
surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching importance to
preparation for future need, but in making it the mainspring of present
effort. Because the need of preparation for a continually developing life
is great, it is imperative that every energy should be bent to making the
present experience as rich and significant as possible. Then as the
present merges insensibly into the future, the future is taken care of.</p>
<p>2. Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education which
professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it takes back with
one hand what it proffers with the other. Development is conceived not as
continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent powers toward a
definite goal. The goal is conceived of as completion,—perfection.
Life at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an unfolding
toward it. Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the preparation
theory. Practically the two differ in that the adherents of the latter
make much of the practical and professional duties for which one is
preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal and
spiritual qualities of the principle which is unfolding.</p>
<p>The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a final
unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its transition from a
static to a dynamic understanding of life. It simulates the style of the
latter. It pays the tribute of speaking much of development, process,
progress. But all of these operations are conceived to be merely
transitional; they lack meaning on their own account. They possess
significance only as movements toward something away from what is now
going on. Since growth is just a movement toward a completed being, the
final ideal is immobile. An abstract and indefinite future is in control
with all which that connotes in depreciation of present power and
opportunity.</p>
<p>Since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is very far
away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is unattainable.
Consequently, in order to be available for present guidance it must be
translated into something which stands for it. Otherwise we should be
compelled to regard any and every manifestation of the child as an
unfolding from within, and hence sacred. Unless we set up some definite
criterion representing the ideal end by which to judge whether a given
attitude or act is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is
to withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere with
proper development. Since that is not practicable, a working substitute is
set up. Usually, of course, this is some idea which an adult would like to
have a child acquire. Consequently, by "suggestive questioning" or some
other pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out" from the
pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that is evidence
that the child is unfolding properly. But as the pupil generally has no
initiative of his own in this direction, the result is a random groping
after what is wanted, and the formation of habits of dependence upon the
cues furnished by others. Just because such methods simulate a true
principle and claim to have its sanction they may do more harm than would
outright "telling," where, at least, it remains with the child how much
will stick.</p>
<p>Within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two typical
attempts to provide a working representative of the absolute goal. Both
start from the conception of a whole—an absolute—which is
"immanent" in human life. The perfect or complete ideal is not a mere
ideal; it is operative here and now. But it is present only implicitly,
"potentially," or in an enfolded condition. What is termed development is
the gradual making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up.
Froebel and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes referred to,
have different ideas of the path by which the progressive realization of
manifestation of the complete principle is effected. According to Hegel,
it is worked out through a series of historical institutions which embody
the different factors in the Absolute. According to Froebel, the actuating
force is the presentation of symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding
to the essential traits of the Absolute. When these are presented to the
child, the Whole, or perfection, sleeping within him, is awakened. A
single example may indicate the method. Every one familiar with the
kindergarten is acquainted with the circle in which the children gather.
It is not enough that the circle is a convenient way of grouping the
children. It must be used "because it is a symbol of the collective life
of mankind in general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the
native capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his
influence in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the most
effective single force in modern educational theory in effecting
widespread acknowledgment of the idea of growth. But his formulation of
the notion of development and his organization of devices for promoting it
were badly hampered by the fact that he conceived development to be the
unfolding of a ready-made latent principle. He failed to see that growing
is growth, developing is development, and consequently placed the emphasis
upon the completed product. Thus he set up a goal which meant the arrest
of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to immediate guidance
of powers, save through translation into abstract and symbolic formulae.</p>
<p>A remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical philosophic
language, transcendental. That is, it is something apart from direct
experience and perception. So far as experience is concerned, it is empty;
it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything which
can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be
compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection
between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of
development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To regard
known things as symbols, according to some arbitrary a priori formula—and
every a priori conception must be arbitrary—is an invitation to
romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal to it and treat
them as laws. After the scheme of symbolism has been settled upon, some
definite technique must be invented by which the inner meaning of the
sensible symbols used may be brought home to children. Adults being the
formulators of the symbolism are naturally the authors and controllers of
the technique. The result was that Froebel's love of abstract symbolism
often got the better of his sympathetic insight; and there was substituted
for development as arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation
as the history of instruction has ever seen.</p>
<p>With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of
the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional, rather than symbolic,
form. His philosophy, like Froebel's, marks in one direction an
indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the process of life.
The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident to
him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical
institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and
nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated the
efforts of a whole series of German writers—Lessing, Herder, Kant,
Schiller, Goethe—to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great
collective institutional products of humanity. For those who learned the
lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive of
institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely—in
idea, not in fact—the psychology that regarded "mind" as a
ready-made possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of
"objective mind"—language, government, art, religion—in the
formation of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the
conception of an absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as
they concretely exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each
in its time and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the
self-realizing process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or
stage, its existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an
integral element in the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as
they are, individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and
nurture, consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing
institutions. Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education.
Institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and fall
of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the great
"heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have no share or
lot in it. In the later nineteenth century, this type of idealism was
amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution.</p>
<p>"Evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end. As against it,
or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of individuals
are impotent. Or, rather, they are but the means by which it works itself
out. Social progress is an "organic growth," not an experimental
selection. Reason is all powerful, but only Absolute Reason has any power.</p>
<p>The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the Greeks)
that great historic institutions are active factors in the intellectual
nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational philosophy. It
indicated a genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had marred his assertion
that education must be a natural development and not something forced or
grafted upon individuals from without, by the notion that social
conditions are not natural. But in its notion of a complete and
all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory swallowed up
concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual in the
abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the claims of the
Whole and of individuality by the conception of society as an organic
whole, or organism. That social organization is presupposed in the
adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted. But the
social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of the body
to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual has a
certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented by the
place and functions of the other organs. As one portion of the bodily
tissue is differentiated so that it can be the hand and the hand only,
another, the eye, and so on, all taken together making the organism, so
one individual is supposed to be differentiated for the exercise of the
mechanical operations of society, another for those of a statesman,
another for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion of "organism" is
thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class distinctions in social
organization—a notion which in its educational application again
means external dictation instead of growth.</p>
<p>3. Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had great vogue
and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much
influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." It has in view a
correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of specific
powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do the chief
things which it is important for him to do better than he could without
training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency, economy,
promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education was indicated in
what was said about habits as the product of educative development. But
the theory in question takes, as it were, a short cut; it regards some
powers (to be presently named) as the direct and conscious aims of
instruction, and not simply as the results of growth. There is a definite
number of powers to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of
strokes which a golfer has to master. Consequently education should get
directly at the business of training them. But this implies that they are
already there in some untrained form; otherwise their creation would have
to be an indirect product of other activities and agencies. Being there
already in some crude form, all that remains is to exercise them in
constant and graded repetitions, and they will inevitably be refined and
perfected. In the phrase "formal discipline" as applied to this
conception, "discipline" refers both to the outcome of trained power and
to the method of training through repeated exercise.</p>
<p>The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of
perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing,
feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise upon
material presented. In its classic form, this theory was expressed by
Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the material or content
of knowledge through passively received sensations. On the other hand, the
mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation, retention,
comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. Knowledge results if the mind
discriminates and combines things as they are united and divided in nature
itself. But the important thing for education is the exercise or practice
of the faculties of the mind till they become thoroughly established
habitudes. The analogy constantly employed is that of a billiard player or
gymnast, who by repeated use of certain muscles in a uniform way at last
secures automatic skill. Even the faculty of thinking was to be formed
into a trained habit by repeated exercises in making and combining simple
distinctions, for which, Locke thought, mathematics affords unrivaled
opportunity.</p>
<p>Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to
do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of
the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which mind
should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which were few in
number and which might be trained by specific exercises. The scheme
appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and yet it
insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception and storage
of information, but the formation of personal powers of attention, memory,
observation, abstraction, and generalization. It was realistic in its
emphatic assertion that all material whatever is received from without; it
was idealistic in that final stress fell upon the formation of
intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal in its assertion that
the individual cannot possess or generate any true ideas on his own
account; it was individualistic in placing the end of education in the
perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset by the individual.
This kind of distribution of values expressed with nicety the state of
opinion in the generations following upon Locke. It became, without
explicit reference to Locke, a common-place of educational theory and of
psychology. Practically, it seemed to provide the educator with definite,
instead of vague, tasks. It made the elaboration of a technique of
instruction relatively easy. All that was necessary was to provide for
sufficient practice of each of the powers. This practice consists in
repeated acts of attending, observing, memorizing, etc. By grading the
difficulty of the acts, making each set of repetitions somewhat more
difficult than the set which preceded it, a complete scheme of instruction
is evolved. There are various ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing
this conception, in both its alleged foundations and in its educational
application. (1) Perhaps the most direct mode of attack consists in
pointing out that the supposed original faculties of observation,
recollection, willing, thinking, etc., are purely mythological. There are
no such ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained.
There are, indeed, a great number of original native tendencies,
instinctive modes of action, based on the original connections of neurones
in the central nervous system. There are impulsive tendencies of the eyes
to follow and fixate light; of the neck muscles to turn toward light and
sound; of the hands to reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of
the vocal apparatus to make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant
substances; to gag and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite
number. But these tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply
marked off from one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving
with one another in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent
intellectual powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they
are tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment so
as to bring about other changes. Something in the throat makes one cough;
the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus modify the
subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a hot thing; it is impulsively,
wholly unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal alters the
stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with the needs of
the organism. It is by such specific changes of organic activities in
response to specific changes in the medium that that control of the
environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is effected. Now all
of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and smellings and tastings
are of this kind. In any legitimate sense of the words mental or
intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these qualities, and no
amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any intellectual properties of
observation, judgment, or intentional action (volition) upon them.</p>
<p>(2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is not
a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one might strengthen
a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in selecting from the
diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which are
especially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to say,
among the reactions of the body in general occur upon stimulation of the
eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to reaching,
grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are gradually eliminated—or
else no training occurs. As we have already noted, the primary reactions,
with a very few exceptions are too diffused and general to be practically
of much use in the case of the human infant. Hence the identity of
training with selective response. (Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important
is the specific coordination of different factors of response which takes
place. There is not merely a selection of the hand reactions which effect
grasping, but of the particular visual stimuli which call out just these
reactions and no others, and an establishment of connection between the
two. But the coordinating does not stop here. Characteristic temperature
reactions may take place when the object is grasped. These will also be
brought in; later, the temperature reaction may be connected directly with
the optical stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed—as a bright
flame, independent of close contact, may steer one away. Or the child in
handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues.
The ear response is then brought into the system of response. If a certain
sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies the
activity, response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected with
auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the complex
response.</p>
<p>(3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each
other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the stimuli
are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the more rigid
and the less generally available is the training secured. In equivalent
language, less intellectual or educative quality attaches to the training.
The usual way of stating this fact is that the more specialized the
reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing and perfecting it
transferable to other modes of behavior. According to the orthodox theory
of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his spelling lesson acquires,
besides ability to spell those particular words, an increase of power of
observation, attention, and recollection which may be employed whenever
these powers are needed. As matter of fact, the more he confines himself
to noticing and fixating the forms of words, irrespective of connection
with other things (such as the meaning of the words, the context in which
they are habitually used, the derivation and classification of the verbal
form, etc.) the less likely is he to acquire an ability which can be used
for anything except the mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not
even be increasing his ability to make accurate distinctions among
geometrical forms, to say nothing of ability to observe in general. He is
merely selecting the stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the
motor reactions of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination
(to use our prior terminology) is extremely limited. The connections which
are employed in other observations and recollections (or reproductions)
are deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon forms
of letters and words. Having been excluded, they cannot be restored when
needed. The ability secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is not
available for perceiving and recalling other things. In the ordinary
phraseology, it is not transferable. But the wider the context—that
is to say, the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated—the
more the ability acquired is available for the effective performance of
other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any "transfer," but
because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is
equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to a
narrow and rigid, coordination. (4) Going to the root of the matter, the
fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its
separation of activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no
such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there is
only the ability to see or hear or remember something. To talk about
training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject
matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. Exercise may react upon
circulation, breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigor or strength,
but this reservoir is available for specific ends only by use in
connection with the material means which accomplish them. Vigor will
enable a man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he would
if he were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and club,
sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one of
them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far as
it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordinations or as the
same kind of coordination is involved in all of them. Moreover, the
difference between the training of ability to spell which comes from
taking visual forms in a narrow context and one which takes them in
connection with the activities required to grasp meaning, such as context,
affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the difference between
exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to "develop" certain
muscles, and a game or sport. The former is uniform and mechanical; it is
rigidly specialized. The latter is varied from moment to moment; no two
acts are quite alike; novel emergencies have to be met; the coordinations
forming have to be kept flexible and elastic. Consequently, the training
is much more "general"; that is to say, it covers a wider territory and
includes more factors. Exactly the same thing holds of special and general
education of the mind.</p>
<p>A monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one
special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping or
calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. One may be an
authority in a particular field and yet of more than usually poor judgment
in matters not closely allied, unless the training in the special field
has been of a kind to ramify into the subject matter of the other fields.
(5) Consequently, such powers as observation, recollection, judgment,
esthetic taste, represent organized results of the occupation of native
active tendencies with certain subject matters. A man does not observe
closely and fully by pressing a button for the observing faculty to get to
work (in other words by "willing" to observe); but if he has something to
do which can be accomplished successfully only through intensive and
extensive use of eye and hand, he naturally observes. Observation is an
outcome, a consequence, of the interaction of sense organ and subject
matter. It will vary, accordingly, with the subject matter employed.</p>
<p>It is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of
faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first determined
what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become expert in
observing and recalling and for what purpose. And it is only repeating in
another form what has already been said, to declare that the criterion
here must be social. We want the person to note and recall and judge those
things which make him an effective competent member of the group in which
he is associated with others. Otherwise we might as well set the pupil to
observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to memorizing
meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue—which is about what
we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of formal discipline. If
the observing habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer are better
habits than those which are thus formed, it is because they deal with
subject matter which is more significant in life. In concluding this
portion of the discussion, we note that the distinction between special
and general education has nothing to do with the transferability of
function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer is miraculous and
impossible. But some activities are broad; they involve a coordination of
many factors. Their development demands continuous alternation and
readjustment. As conditions change, certain factors are subordinated, and
others which had been of minor importance come to the front. There is
constant redistribution of the focus of the action, as is seen in the
illustration of a game as over against pulling a fixed weight by a series
of uniform motions. Thus there is practice in prompt making of new
combinations with the focus of activity shifted to meet change in subject
matter. Wherever an activity is broad in scope (that is, involves the
coordinating of a large variety of sub-activities), and is constantly and
unexpectedly obliged to change direction in its progressive development,
general education is bound to result. For this is what "general" means;
broad and flexible. In practice, education meets these conditions, and
hence is general, in the degree in which it takes account of social
relationships. A person may become expert in technical philosophy, or
philology, or mathematics or engineering or financiering, and be inept and
ill-advised in his action and judgment outside of his specialty. If
however his concern with these technical subject matters has been
connected with human activities having social breadth, the range of active
responses called into play and flexibly integrated is much wider.
Isolation of subject matter from a social context is the chief obstruction
in current practice to securing a general training of mind. Literature,
art, religion, when thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the
technical things which the professional upholders of general education
strenuously oppose.</p>
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<h2> Summary. The conception that the result of the educative process is </h2>
<p>capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other ideas
which have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting
conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some
future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which
result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher and
taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully directed—namely,
taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the immediate present.
Consequently it defeats its own professed purpose. The notion that
education is an unfolding from within appears to have more likeness to the
conception of growth which has been set forth. But as worked out in the
theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves ignoring the interaction of
present organic tendencies with the present environment, just as much as
the notion of preparation. Some implicit whole is regarded as given
ready-made and the significance of growth is merely transitory; it is not
an end in itself, but simply a means of making explicit what is already
implicit. Since that which is not explicit cannot be made definite use of,
something has to be found to represent it. According to Froebel, the
mystic symbolic value of certain objects and acts (largely mathematical)
stand for the Absolute Whole which is in process of unfolding. According
to Hegel, existing institutions are its effective actual representatives.
Emphasis upon symbols and institutions tends to divert perception from the
direct growth of experience in richness of meaning. Another influential
but defective theory is that which conceives that mind has, at birth,
certain mental faculties or powers, such as perceiving, remembering,
willing, judging, generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is the
training of these faculties through repeated exercise. This theory treats
subject matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its value
residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of the general
powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of the alleged powers
from one another and from the material upon which they act. The outcome of
the theory in practice was shown to be an undue emphasis upon the training
of narrow specialized modes of skill at the expense of initiative,
inventiveness, and readaptability—qualities which depend upon the
broad and consecutive interaction of specific activities with one another.
1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is so great, there are so many
paths of construction, that every stimulus brings about some change in all
of the organs of response. We are accustomed however to ignore most of
these modifications of the total organic activity, concentrating upon that
one which is most specifically adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the
moment. 2 This statement should be compared with what was said earlier
about the sequential ordering of responses (p. 25). It is merely a more
explicit statement of the way in which that consecutive arrangement
occurs.</p>
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