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THE CHILD
AND
THE CURRICULUM

by

John Dewey

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO & LONDON

The Child and the Curriculum

Profound differences in theory are never gratuitous orinvented. They grow out of conflicting elements in a genuineproblem—a problem which is genuine just because the elements,taken as they stand, are conflicting. Any significant problem involvesconditions that for the moment contradict each other. Solution comesonly by getting away from the meaning of terms that is already fixedupon and coming to see the conditions from another4point of view, and hence in a fresh light. But this reconstructionmeans travail of thought. Easier than thinking with surrender ofalready formed ideas and detachment from facts already learned is justto stick by what is already said, looking about for something withwhich to buttress it against attack.

Thus sects arise: schools of opinion. Each selects that set ofconditions that appeals to it; and then erects them into a completeand independent truth, instead of treating them as a factor in aproblem, needing adjustment.

The fundamental factors in the educative process are an immature,undeveloped being; and certain social aims, meanings, values incarnatein the matured experience of the adult. The educative process is thedue interaction of these forces. Such a conception of each in relationto the other as facilitates completest and freest interaction is theessence of educational theory.

But here comes the effort of thought. It is easier to see theconditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense ofthe other, to make antagonists of them, than to discover a reality towhich each belongs. The easy thing is to seize upon something in thenature of the child, or upon something in the developed consciousnessof the adult, and insist uponthat as the key to the wholeproblem. When this happens a really serious practicalproblem—that of interaction—is transformed into an unreal,and hence insoluble, theoretic problem. Instead of seeing5the educative steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms. Weget the case of the childvs. the curriculum; of the individual naturevs. social culture. Below all other divisions in pedagogic opinionlies this opposition.

The child lives in a somewhat narrow world of personalcontacts. Things hardly come within his experience unless they touch,intimately and obviously, his own well-being, or that of his familyand friends. His world is a world of persons with their personalinterests, rather than a realm of facts and laws. Not truth, in thesense of conformity to external fact, but affection and sympathy, isits keynote. As against this, the course of study met in the schoolpresents material stretching back indefinitely in time, and extendingoutward indefinitely into space. The child is taken out of hisfamiliar physical environment, hardly more than a square mile or so inarea, into the wide world—yes, and even to the bounds of thesolar system. His little span of personal memory and tradition isoverlaid with the long centuries of the history of all peoples.

Again, the child's life is an integral, a total one. He passesquickly and readily from one topic to another, as from one spot toanother, but is not conscious of transition or break. There is noconscious isolation, hardly conscious distinction. The things thatoccupy him are held together by the unity of the personal and socialinterests which his life carries along. Whatever is6uppermost in his mind constitutes to him, for the time being, thewhole universe. That universe is fluid and fluent; its contentsdissolve and re-form with amazing rapidity. But, after all, it is thechild's own world. It has the unity and completeness of his ownlife. He goes to school, and various studies divide and fractionizethe world for him. Geography selects, it abstracts and analyzes oneset of facts, and from one particular point of view. Arithmetic isanother division, grammar another department, and so onindefinitely.

Again, in school each of these subjects is classified. Facts aretorn away from their original place in experience and rearranged withreference to some general principle. Classification is not a matter ofchild experience; things do not come to the individualpigeonholed. The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds ofactivity, hold together the variety of his personal experiences. Theadult mind is so familiar with the notion of logically ordered factsthat it does not recognize—it cannot realize—the amount ofseparating and reformulating which the facts of direct experience haveto undergo before they can appear as a "study," or branch oflearning. A principle, for the intellect, has had to be distinguishedand defined; facts have had to be interpreted in relation to thisprinciple, not as they are in themselves. They have had to beregathered about a new center which is wholly abstract and ideal. Allthis means a development of a special intellectual interest.7It means ability to view facts impartially and objectively; that is,without reference to their place and meaning in one's ownexperience. It means capacity to analyze and to synthesize. It meanshighly matured intellectual habits and the command of a definitetechnique and apparatus of scientific inquiry. The studies asclassified are the product, in a word, of the science of the ages, notof the experience of the child.

These apparent deviations and differences between child andcurriculum might be almost indefinitely widened. But we have heresufficiently fundamental divergences: first, the narrow but personalworld of the child against the impersonal but infinitely extendedworld of space and time; second, the unity, the singlewholeheartedness of the child's life, and the specializations anddivisions of the curriculum; third, an abstract principle of logicalclassification and arrangement, and the practical and emotional bondsof child life.

From these elements of conflict grow up different educationalsects. One school fixes its attention upon the importance of thesubject-matter of the curriculum as compared with the contents of thechild's own experience. It is as if they said: Is life petty, narrow,and crude? Then studies reveal the great, wide universe with all itsfulness and complexity of meaning. Is the life of the child egoistic,self-centered, impulsive? Then in these studies is found an objectiveuniverse of truth, law, and order. Is his experience8confused, vague, uncertain, at the mercy of the moment's caprice andcircumstance? Then studies introduce a world arranged on the basis ofeternal and general truth; a world where all is measured anddefined. Hence the moral: ignore and minimize the child's individualpeculiarities, whims, and experiences. They are what we need to getaway from. They are to be obscured or eliminated. As educators ourwork is precisely to substitute for these superficial and casualaffairs stable and well-ordered realities; and these are found instudies and lessons.

Subdivide each topic into studies; each study into lessons; eachlesson into specific facts and formulae. Let the child proceed step bystep to master each one of these separate parts, and at last he willhave covered the entire ground. The road which looks so long whenviewed in its entirety is easily traveled, considered as a series ofparticular steps. Thus emphasis is put upon the logical subdivisionsand consecutions of the subject-matter. Problems of instruction areproblems of procuring texts giving logical parts and sequences, and ofpresenting these portions in class in a similar definite and gradedway. Subject-matter furnishes the end, and it determines method. Thechild is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is thesuperficial being who is to be deepened; his is narrow experiencewhich is to be widened. It is his to receive, to accept. His part isfulfilled when he is ductile and docile.

Not so, says the other sect. The child is the starting-point, thecenter, and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. Italone furnishes the standard. To the growth of the child all studiesare subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the needsof growth. Personality, character, is more than subject-matter. Notknowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal. Topossess all the world of knowledge and lose one's own self is as awfula fate in education as in religion. Moreover, subject-matter never canbe got into the child from without. Learning is active. It involvesreaching out of the mind. It involves organic assimilation startingfrom within. Literally, we must take our stand with the child and ourdeparture from him. It is he and not the subject-matter whichdetermines both quality and quantity of learning.

The only significant method is the method of the mind as it reachesout and assimilates. Subject-matter is but spiritual food, possiblenutritive material. It cannot digest itself; it cannot of its ownaccord turn into bone and muscle and blood. The source of whatever isdead, mechanical, and formal in schools is found precisely in thesubordination of the life and experience of the child to thecurriculum. It is because of this that "study" has become a synonymfor what is irksome, and a lesson identical with a task.

This fundamental opposition of child and curriculum set up by thesetwo modes of doctrine can be duplicated in a series of10other terms. "Discipline" is the watchword of those who magnify thecourse of study; "interest" that of those who blazon "The Child" upontheir banner. The standpoint of the former is logical; that of thelatter psychological. The first emphasizes the necessity of adequatetraining and scholarship on the part of the teacher; the latter thatof need of sympathy with the child, and knowledge of his naturalinstincts. "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 hasbeen achieved in the pain and toil of the ages, is dear to the one;the new, change, progress, wins the affection of the other. Inertnessand routine, chaos and anarchism, are accusations bandied back andforth. Neglect of the sacred authority of duty is charged by one side,only to be met by counter-charges of suppression of individualitythrough tyrannical despotism.

Such oppositions are rarely carried to their logical conclusion.Common-sense recoils at the extreme character of these results. Theyare left to theorists, while common-sense vibrates back and forward ina maze of inconsistent compromise. The need of getting theory andpractical common-sense into closer connection suggests a return to ouroriginal thesis: that we have here conditions which are necessarilyrelated to each other in the educative process, since this isprecisely one of interaction and adjustment.

What, then, is the problem? It is just to get rid of theprejudicial notion that there is some gap in kind (as distinct fromdegree) between the child's experience and the various forms ofsubject-matter that make up the course of study. From the side of thechild, it is a question of seeing how his experience already containswithin itself elements—facts and truths—of just the samesort as those entering into the formulated study; and, what is of moreimportance, of how it contains within itself the attitudes, themotives, and the interests which have operated in developing andorganizing the subject-matter to the plane which it now occupies. Fromthe side of the studies, it is a question of interpreting them asoutgrowths of forces operating in the child's life, and of discoveringthe steps that intervene between the child's present experience andtheir richer maturity.

Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed andready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease thinkingof the child's experience as also something hard and fast; see it assomething fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child andthe curriculum are simply two limits which define a singleprocess. Just as two points define a straight line, so the presentstandpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies defineinstruction. It is continuous reconstruction, moving from the child'spresent experience out into that represented by the organized bodiesof truth that we call studies.

On the face of it, the various studies, arithmetic, geography,language, botany, etc., are themselves experience—they are thatof the race. They embody the cumulative outcome of the efforts, thestrivings, and the successes of the human race generation aftergeneration. They present this, not as a mere accumulation, not as amiscellaneous heap of separate bits of experience, but in someorganized and systematized way—that is, as reflectivelyformulated.

Hence, the facts and truths that enter into the child's presentexperience, and those contained in the subject-matter of studies, arethe initial and final terms of one reality. To oppose one to the otheris to oppose the infancy and maturity of the same growing life; it isto set the moving tendency and the final result of the same processover against each other; it is to hold that the nature and the destinyof the child war with each other.

If such be the case, the problem of the relation of the child andthe curriculum presents itself in this guise: Of what use,educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in thebeginning? How does it assist us in dealing with the early stages ofgrowth to be able to anticipate its later phases? The studies, as wehave agreed, represent the possibilities of development inherent inthe child's immediate crude experience. But, after all, they are notparts of that present and immediate life. Why, then, or how, makeaccount of them?

Asking such a question suggests its own answer. To see the outcome is toknow in what direction the present experience is moving, provided itmove normally and soundly. The far-away point, which is of nosignificance to us simply as far away, becomes of huge importance themoment we take it as defining a present direction of movement. Taken inthis way it is no remote and distant result to be achieved, but aguiding method in dealing with the present. The systematized and definedexperience of the adult mind, in other words, is of value to us ininterpreting the child's life as it immediately shows itself, and inpassing on to guidance or direction.

Let us look for a moment at these two ideas: interpretation andguidance. The child's present experience is in no wayself-explanatory. It is not final, but transitional. It is nothingcomplete in itself, but just a sign or index of certaingrowth-tendencies. As long as we confine our gaze to what the childhere and now puts forth, we are confused and misled. We cannot readits meaning. Extreme depreciations of the child morally andintellectually, and sentimental idealizations of him, have their rootin a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth ormovement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see thepromise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves,are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see that eventhe most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but14signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they aretreated as achievements.

What we need is something which will enable us to interpret, toappraise, the elements in the child's present puttings forth andfallings away, his exhibitions of power and weakness, in the light ofsome larger growth-process in which they have their place. Only inthis way can we discriminate. If we isolate the child's presentinclinations, purposes, and experiences from the place they occupy andthe part they have to perform in a developing experience, all standupon the same level; all alike are equally good and equally bad. Butin the movement of life different elements stand upon different planesof 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 partand is passing out of vital use. To give positive attention to suchqualities is to arrest development upon a lower level. It issystematically to maintain a rudimentary phase of growth. Otheractivities are signs of a culminating power and interest; to themapplies 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'swhole career; neglected, an opportunity goes, never to berecalled. Other acts and feelings are prophetic; they represent thedawning of flickering light that will shine steadily only in the farfuture. As15 regards them there is little at present to do but give them fair andfull 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 childand the maturity of the adult, regarding the former as something to begot away from as soon as possible and as much as possible; so it isthe danger of the "new education" that it regard the child's presentpowers and interests as something finally significant inthemselves. In truth, his learnings and achievements are fluid andmoving. They change from day to day and from hour to hour.

It will do harm if child-study leave in the popular mind theimpression that a child of a given age has a positive equipment ofpurposes and interests to be cultivated just as they stand. Interestsin reality are but attitudes toward possible experiences; they are notachievements; their worth is in the leverage they afford, not in theaccomplishment they represent. To take the phenomena presented at agiven age as in any way self-explanatory or self-contained isinevitably to result in indulgence and spoiling. Any power, whether ofchild or adult, is indulged when it is taken on its given and presentlevel in consciousness. Its genuine meaning is in the propulsion itaffords toward a higher level. It is just something to dowith. Appealing to the interest upon the present plane meansexcitation; it means playing with a power so as continually16to stir it up without directing it toward definiteachievement. Continuous initiation, continuous starting of activitiesthat do not arrive, is, for all practical purposes, as bad as thecontinual repression of initiative in conformity with supposedinterests of some more perfect thought or will. It is as if the childwere forever tasting and never eating; always having his palatetickled upon the emotional side, but never getting the organicsatisfaction that comes only with digestion of food and transformationof it into working power.

As against such a view, the subject-matter of science and historyand art serves to reveal the real child to us. We do not know themeaning either of his tendencies or of his performances excepting aswe take them as germinating seed, or opening bud, of some fruit to beborne. The whole world of visual nature is all too small an answer tothe problem of the meaning of the child's instinct for light andform. The entire science of physics is none too much to interpretadequately to us what is involved in some simple demand of the childfor explanation of some casual change that has attracted hisattention. The art of Raphael or of Corot is none too much to enableus to value the impulses stirring in the child when he draws anddaubs.

So much for the use of the subject-matter in interpretation. Itsfurther employment in direction or guidance is but an expansion of thesame thought. To interpret the fact is to see it in its vital17movement, to see it in its relation to growth. But to view it as apart of a normal growth is to secure the basis for guidingit. Guidance is not external imposition.It is freeing thelife-process for its own most adequate fulfilment. What was saidabout disregard of the child's present experience because of itsremoteness from mature experience; and of the sentimental idealizationof the child's naïve caprices and performances, may be repeated herewith slightly altered phrase. There are those who see no alternativebetween forcing the child from without, or leaving him entirelyalone. Seeing no alternative, some choose one mode, some another. Bothfall into the same fundamental error. Both fail to see thatdevelopment is a definite process, having its own law which can befulfilled only when adequate and normal conditions areprovided. Really to interpret the child's present crude impulses incounting, measuring, and arranging things in rhythmic series involvesmathematical scholarship—a knowledge of the mathematicalformulae and relations which have, in the history of the race, grownout of just such crude beginnings. To see the whole history ofdevelopment which intervenes between these two terms is simply to seewhat step the child needs to take just here and now; to what use heneeds to put his blind impulse in order that it may get clarity andgain force.

If, once more, the "old education" tended to ignore the dynamicquality, the developing force inherent in the child's present18experience, and therefore to assume that direction and control werejust matters of arbitrarily putting the child in a given path andcompelling him to walk there, the "new education" is in danger oftaking the idea of development in altogether too formal and empty away. The child is expected to "develop" this or that fact or truth outof his own mind. He is told to think things out, or work things outfor himself, without being supplied any of the environing conditionswhich are requisite to start and guide thought. Nothing can bedeveloped from nothing; nothing but the crude can be developed out ofthe crude—and this is what surely happens when we throw thechild back upon his achieved self as a finality, and invite him tospin new truths of nature or of conduct out of that. It is certainlyas futile to expect a child to evolve a universe out of his own meremind as it is for a philosopher to attempt that task. Development doesnot mean just getting something out of the mind. It is a developmentof experience and into experience that is really wanted. And this isimpossible save as just that educative medium is provided which willenable the powers and interests that have been selected as valuable tofunction. They must operate, and how they operate will depend almostentirely upon the stimuli which surround them and the material uponwhich they exercise themselves. The problem of direction is thus theproblem of selecting appropriate stimuli for instincts and impulseswhich it is desired to employ in the gaining19of new experience. What new experiences are desirable, and thus whatstimuli are needed, it is impossible to tell except as there is somecomprehension of the development which is aimed at; except, in a word,as the adult knowledge is drawn upon as revealing the possible careeropen to the child.

It may be of use to distinguish and to relate to each other thelogical and the psychological aspects of experience—the formerstanding for subject-matter in itself, the latter for it in relationto the child. A psychological statement of experience follows itsactual growth; it is historic; it notes steps actually taken, theuncertain and tortuous, as well as the efficient and successful. Thelogical point of view, on the other hand, assumes that the developmenthas reached a certain positive stage of fulfilment. It neglects theprocess and considers the outcome. It summarizes and arranges, andthus separates the achieved results from the actual steps by whichthey were forthcoming in the first instance. We may compare thedifference between the logical and the psychological to the differencebetween the notes which an explorer makes in a new country, blazing atrail and finding his way along as best he may, and the finished mapthat is constructed after the country has been thoroughlyexplored. The two are mutually dependent. Without the more or lessaccidental and devious paths traced by the explorer there would be nofacts which could be utilized in the making of the complete andrelated chart. But no20one would get the benefit of the explorer's trip if it was notcompared and checked up with similar wanderings undertaken by others;unless the new geographical facts learned, the streams crossed, themountains climbed, etc., were viewed, not as mere incidents in thejourney of the particular traveler, but (quite apart from theindividual explorer's life) in relation to other similar facts alreadyknown. The map orders individual experiences, connecting them with oneanother irrespective of the local and temporal circumstances andaccidents of their original discovery.

Of what use is this formulated statement of experience? Of what useis the map?

Well, we may first tell what the map is not. The map is not asubstitute for a personal experience. The map does not take the placeof an actual journey. The logically formulated material of a scienceor branch of learning, of a study, is no substitute for the having ofindividual experiences. The mathematical formula for a falling bodydoes not take the place of personal contact and immediate individualexperience with the falling thing. But the map, a summary, an arrangedand orderly view of previous experiences, serves as a guide to futureexperience; it gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizeseffort, preventing useless wandering, and pointing out the paths whichlead most quickly and most certainly to a desired result. Through themap every new traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of theresults of21others' explorations without the waste of energy and loss of timeinvolved in their wanderings—wanderings which he himself wouldbe obliged to repeat were it not for just the assistance of theobjective and generalized record of their performances. That which wecall a science or study puts the net product of past experience in theform which makes it most available for the future. It represents acapitalization which may at once be turned to interest. It economizesthe workings of the mind in every way. Memory is less taxed becausethe facts are grouped together about some common principle, instead ofbeing connected solely with the varying incidents of their originaldiscovery. Observation is assisted; we know what to look for andwhere to look. It is the difference between looking for a needle in ahaystack, and searching for a given paper in a well-arrangedcabinet. Reasoning is directed, because there is a certain generalpath or line laid out along which ideas naturally march, instead ofmoving from one chance association to another.

There is, then, nothing final about a logical rendering ofexperience. Its value is not contained in itself; its significance isthat of standpoint, outlook, method. It intervenes between the morecasual, tentative, and roundabout experiences of the past, and morecontrolled and orderly experiences of the future. It gives pastexperience in that net form which renders it most available and mostsignificant, most fecund for future experience. The abstractions,22generalizations, and classifications which it introduces all haveprospective meaning.

The formulated result is then not to be opposed to the process ofgrowth. The logical is not set over against the psychological. Thesurveyed and arranged result occupies a critical position in theprocess of growth. It marks a turning-point. It shows how we may getthe benefit of past effort in controlling future endeavor. In thelargest sense the logical standpoint is itself psychological; it hasits meaning as a point in the development of experience, and itsjustification is in its functioning in the future growth which itinsures.

Hence the need of reinstating into experience the subject-matter ofthe studies, or branches of learning. It must be restored to theexperience from which it has been abstracted. It needs to bepsychologized; turned over, translated into the immediate andindividual experiencing within which it has its origin andsignificance.

Every study or subject thus has two aspects: one for the scientistas a scientist; the other for the teacher as a teacher. These twoaspects are in no sense opposed or conflicting. But neither are theyimmediately identical. For the scientist, the subject-matterrepresents simply a given body of truth to be employed in locating newproblems, instituting new researches, and carrying them through to averified outcome. To him the subject-matter23of the science is self-contained. He refers various portions of it toeach 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 isonly to get more facts of the same general sort. The problem of theteacher is a different one. As a teacher he is not concerned withadding new facts to the science he teaches; in propounding newhypotheses or in verifying them. He is concerned with thesubject-matter of the science asrepresenting a given stage andphase of the development of experience. His problem is that ofinducing a vital and personal experiencing. Hence, what concerns him,as teacher, is the ways in which that subject may become a part ofexperience; what there is in the child's present that is usable withreference to it; how such elements are to be used; how his ownknowledge of the subject-matter may assist in interpreting the child'sneeds and doings, and determine the medium in which the child shouldbe placed in order that his growth may be properly directed. He isconcerned, not with the subject-matter as such, but with thesubject-matter as a related factor in a total and growingexperience. Thus to see it is to psychologize it.

It is the failure to keep in mind the double aspect ofsubject-matter which causes the curriculum and child to be set overagainst each other as described in our early pages. Thesubject-matter, just as it is for the scientist, has no directrelationship to24the child's present experience. It stands outside of it. The dangerhere is not a merely theoretical one. We are practically threatened onall sides. Textbook and teacher vie with each other in presenting tothe child the subject-matter as it stands to the specialist. Suchmodification and revision as it undergoes are a mere elimination ofcertain scientific difficulties, and the general reduction to a lowerintellectual 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 anyorganic connection with what the child has already seen and felt andloved makes the material purely formal and symbolic. There is a sensein which it is impossible to value too highly the formal and thesymbolic. The genuine form, the real symbol, serve as methods in theholding and discovery of truth. They are tools by which the individualpushes out most surely and widely into unexplored areas. They aremeans by which he brings to bear whatever of reality he has succeededin gaining in past searchings. But this happens only when the symbolreally symbolizes—when it stands for and sums up in shorthandactual experiences which the individual has already gone through. Asymbol which is induced from without, which has not been led up to inpreliminary activities, is, as we say, abare ormere symbol; it is dead and barren. Now, any fact, whether ofarithmetic, or geography, or grammar,25which is not led up to and into out of something which has previouslyoccupied 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 signof a reality whichmight be experienced if certain conditionswere fulfilled. But the abrupt presentation of the fact as somethingknown by others, and requiring only to be studied and learned by thechild, rules out such conditions of fulfilment. It condemns the factto be a hieroglyph: it would mean something if one only had thekey. The clue being lacking, it remains an idle curiosity, to fret andobstruct the mind, a dead weight to burden it.

The second evil in this external presentation is lack ofmotivation. There are not only no facts or truths which have beenpreviously felt as such with which to appropriate and assimilate thenew, but there is no craving, no need, no demand. When thesubject-matter has been psychologized, that is, viewed as anout-growth of present tendencies and activities, it is easy to locatein the present some obstacle, intellectual, practical, or ethical,which can be handled more adequately if the truth in question bemastered. This need supplies motive for the learning. An end which isthe child's own carries him on to possess the means of itsaccomplishment. But when material is directly supplied in the form ofa lesson to be learned as a lesson, the connecting links of need andaim are conspicuous for their absence. What we mean26by the mechanical and dead in instruction is a result of this lack ofmotivation. The organic and vital mean interaction—they meanplay of mental demand and material supply.

The third evil is that even the most scientific matter, arranged inmost logical fashion, loses this quality, when presented in external,ready-made fashion, by the time it gets to the child. It has toundergo some modification in order to shut out some phases too hard tograsp, and to reduce some of the attendant difficulties. What happens?Those things which are most significant to the scientific man, andmost valuable in the logic of actual inquiry and classification, dropout. The really thought-provoking character is obscured, and theorganizing function disappears. Or, as we commonly say, the child'sreasoning powers, the faculty of abstraction and generalization, arenot adequately developed. So the subject-matter is evacuated of itslogical value, and, though it is what it is only from the logicalstandpoint, is presented as stuff only for "memory." This is thecontradiction: the child gets the advantage neither of the adultlogical formulation, nor of his own native competencies ofapprehension and response. Hence the logic of the child is hamperedand mortified, and we are almost fortunate if he does not get actualnon-science, flat and common-place residua of what was gainingscientific vitality a generation or two ago—degeneratereminiscence of what someone else once formulated on the basis of theexperience that some further person had, once upon a time,experienced.

The train of evils does not cease. It is all too common for opposederroneous theories to play straight into each other's hands.Psychological considerations may be slurred or shoved one side; theycannot be crowded out. Put out of the door, they come back through thewindow. Somehow and somewhere motive must be appealed to, connectionmust be established between the mind and its material. There is noquestion of getting along without this bond of connection; the onlyquestion is whether it be such as grows out of the material itself inrelation to the mind, or be imported and hitched on from some outsidesource. If the subject-matter of the lessons be such as to have anappropriate place within the expanding consciousness of the child, ifit grows out of his own past doings, thinkings, and sufferings, andgrows into application in further achievements and receptivities, thenno device or trick of method has to be resorted to in order to enlist"interest." The psychologizedis of interest—that is, itis placed in the whole of conscious life so that it shares the worthof that life. But the externally presented material, conceived andgenerated in standpoints and attitudes remote from the child, anddeveloped in motives alien to him, has no such place of its own. Hencethe recourse to adventitious leverage to push it in, to factitiousdrill to drive it in, to artificial bribe to lure it in.

Three aspects of this recourse to outside ways for giving thesubject-matter some psychological meaning may be worth mentioning.Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds something28like affection. We get used to the chains we wear, and we miss themwhen removed. 'Tis an old story that through custom we finally embracewhat at first wore a hideous mien. Unpleasant, because meaningless,activities may get agreeable if long enough persisted in.It ispossible for the mind to develop interest in a routine or mechanicalprocedure if conditions are continually supplied which demand thatmode of operation and preclude any other sort. I frequently heardulling devices and empty exercises defended and extolled because "thechildren take such an 'interest' in them." Yes, that is the worst ofit; the mind, shut out from worthy employ and missing the taste ofadequate performance, comes down to the level of that which is left toit to know and do, and perforce takes an interest in a cabined andcramped experience. To find satisfaction in its own exercise is thenormal law of mind, and if large and meaningful business for the mindbe denied, it tries to content itself with the formal movements thatremain to it—and too often succeeds, save in those cases of moreintense activity which cannot accommodate themselves, and that make upthe unruly anddeclassé of our school product. An interest inthe formal apprehension of symbols and in their memorized reproductionbecomes in many pupils a substitute for the original and vitalinterest in reality; and all because, the subject-matter of the courseof study being out of relation to the concrete mind of the individual,some substitute bond to hold it in29some kind of working relation to the mind must be discovered andelaborated.

The second substitute for living motivation in the subject-matteris that of contrast-effects; the material of the lesson is renderedinteresting, if not in itself, at least in contrast with somealternative experience. To learn the lesson is more interesting thanto take a scolding, be held up to general ridicule, stay after school,receive degradingly low marks, or fail to be promoted. And very muchof what goes by the name of "discipline," and prides itself uponopposing the doctrines of a soft pedagogy and upon upholding thebanner of effort and duty, is nothing more or less than just thisappeal to "interest" in its obverse aspect—to fear, to dislikeof various kinds of physical, social, and personal pain. Thesubject-matter does not appeal; it cannot appeal; it lacks origin andbearing in a growing experience. So the appeal is to the thousand andone outside and irrelevant agencies which may serve to throw, by sheerrebuff and rebound, the mind back upon the material from which it isconstantly wandering.

Human nature being what it is, however, it tends to seek itsmotivation in the agreeable rather than in the disagreeable, in directpleasure rather than in alternative pain. And so has come up themodern theory and practice of the "interesting," in the false sense ofthat term. The material is still left; so far as its owncharacteristics are concerned, just material externally selected and30formulated. It is still just so much geography and arithmetic andgrammar study; not so much potentiality of child-experience withregard to language, earth, and numbered and measured reality. Hencethe difficulty of bringing the mind to bear upon it; hence itsrepulsiveness; the tendency for attention to wander; for other actsand images to crowd in and expel the lesson. The legitimate way out isto transform the material; to psychologize it—that is, oncemore, to take it and to develop it within the range and scope of thechild's life. But it is easier and simpler to leave it as it is, andthen by trick of method toarouse interest, tomake itinteresting; to cover it with sugar-coating; to conceal itsbarrenness by intermediate and unrelated material; and finally, as itwere, to get the child to swallow and digest the unpalatable morselwhile he is enjoying tasting something quite different. But alas forthe analogy! Mental assimilation is a matter of consciousness; and ifthe attention has not been playing upon the actual material, that hasnot been apprehended, nor worked into faculty.

How, then, stands the case of Childvs. Curriculum? Whatshall the verdict be? The radical fallacy in the original pleadingswith which we set out is the supposition that we have no choice saveeither to leave the child to his own unguided spontaneity or toinspire direction upon him from without. Action is response; it isadaptation, adjustment. There is no such thing as sheer self-activitypossible—because all activity takes place in a medium, in31a situation, and with reference to its conditions. But, again, no suchthing as imposition of truth from without, as insertion of truth fromwithout, is possible. All depends upon the activity which the minditself undergoes in responding to what is presented from without. Now,the value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that makes up thecourse of study is that it may enable the educator todetermine theenvironment of the child, and thus by indirection to direct. Itsprimary value, its primary indication, is for the teacher, not for thechild. It says to the teacher: Such and such are the capacities, thefulfilments, in truth and beauty and behavior, open to thesechildren. Now see to it that day by day the conditions are such thattheir own activities move inevitably in this direction, towardsuch culmination of themselves. Let the child's nature fulfil its owndestiny, revealed to you in whatever of science and art and industrythe world now holds as its own.

The case is of Child. It is his present powers which are to assertthemselves; his present capacities which are to be exercised; hispresent attitudes which are to be realized. But save as the teacherknows, knows wisely and thoroughly, the race-expression which isembodied in that thing we call the Curriculum, the teacher knowsneither what the present power, capacity, or attitude is, nor yet howit is to be asserted, exercised, and realized.