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Booker T. Washington - "An Autobiography"

Johann Wolfgang Goethe - "Italienische Reise Teil 1"

Arthur Conan Doyle - "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"

Charles Dickens - "Dombey and Son"

Democracy and Education

J >> John Dewey >> Democracy and Education




The illustration is intended to apply, of course, to other school
occupations, -- wood-working, cooking, and on through the list.
It is pertinent to note that in the history of the race the
sciences grew gradually out from useful social occupations.
Physics developed slowly out of the use of tools and machines;
the important branch of physics known as mechanics testifies in
its name to its original associations. The lever, wheel,
inclined plane, etc., were among the first great intellectual
discoveries of mankind, and they are none the less intellectual
because they occurred in the course of seeking for means of
accomplishing practical ends. The great advance of electrical
science in the last generation was closely associated, as effect
and as cause, with application of electric agencies to means of
communication, transportation, lighting of cities and houses, and
more economical production of goods. These are social ends,
moreover, and if they are too closely associated with notions of
private profit, it is not because of anything in them, but
because they have been deflected to private uses: -- a fact which
puts upon the school the responsibility of restoring their
connection, in the mind of the coming generation, with public
scientific and social interests. In like ways, chemistry grew
out of processes of dying, bleaching, metal working, etc., and in
recent times has found innumerable new uses in industry.

Mathematics is now a highly abstract science; geometry, however,
means literally earth-measuring: the practical use of number in
counting to keep track of things and in measuring is even more
important to-day than in the times when it was invented for these
purposes. Such considerations (which could be duplicated in the
history of any science) are not arguments for a recapitulation of
the history of the race or for dwelling long in the early rule of
thumb stage. But they indicate the possibilities--greater to-day
than ever before -- of using active occupations as opportunities
for scientific study. The opportunities are just as great on the
social side, whether we look at the life of collective humanity
in its past or in its future. The most direct road for
elementary students into civics and economics is found in
consideration of the place and office of industrial occupations
in social life. Even for older students, the social sciences
would be less abstract and formal if they were dealt with less as
sciences (less as formulated bodies of knowledge) and more in
their direct subject-matter as that is found in the daily life of
the social groups in which the student shares.

Connection of occupations with the method of science is at least
as close as with its subject matter. The ages when scientific
progress was slow were the ages when learned men had contempt for
the material and processes of everyday life, especially for those
concerned with manual pursuits. Consequently they strove to
develop knowledge out of general principles -- almost out of
their heads -- by logical reasons. It seems as absurd that
learning should come from action on and with physical things,
like dropping acid on a stone to see what would happen, as that
it should come from sticking an awl with waxed thread through a
piece of leather. But the rise of experimental methods proved
that, given control of conditions, the latter operation is more
typical of the right way of knowledge than isolated logical
reasonings. Experiment developed in the seventeenth and
succeeding centuries and became the authorized way of knowing
when men's interests were centered in the question of control of
nature for human uses. The active occupations in which
appliances are brought to bear upon physical things with the
intention of effecting useful changes is the most vital
introduction to the experimental method.

3. Work and Play. What has been termed active occupation
includes both play and work. In their intrinsic meaning, play
and industry are by no means so antithetical to one another as is
often assumed, any sharp contrast being due to undesirable social
conditions. Both involve ends consciously entertained and the
selection and adaptations of materials and processes designed to
effect the desired ends. The difference between them is largely
one of time-span, influencing the directness of the connection of
means and ends. In play, the interest is more direct -- a fact
frequently indicated by saying that in play the activity is its
own end, instead of its having an ulterior result. The statement
is correct, but it is falsely taken, if supposed to mean that
play activity is momentary, having no element of looking ahead
and none of pursuit. Hunting, for example, is one of the
commonest forms of adult play, but the existence of foresight and
the direction of present activity by what one is watching for are
obvious. When an activity is its own end in the sense that the
action of the moment is complete in itself, it is purely
physical; it has no meaning (See p. 77). The person is either
going through motions quite blindly, perhaps purely imitatively,
or else is in a state of excitement which is exhausting to mind
and nerves. Both results may be seen in some types of
kindergarten games where the idea of play is so highly symbolic
that only the adult is conscious of it. Unless the children
succeed in reading in some quite different idea of their own,
they move about either as if in a hypnotic daze, or they respond
to a direct excitation.

The point of these remarks is that play has an end in the sense
of a directing idea which gives point to the successive acts.
Persons who play are not just doing something (pure physical
movement); they are trying to do or effect something, an
attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts which stimulate
their present responses. The anticipated result, however, is
rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific
change in things. Consequently play is free, plastic. Where
some definite external outcome is wanted, the end has to be held
to with some persistence, which increases as the contemplated
result is complex and requires a fairly long series of
intermediate adaptations. When the intended act is another
activity, it is not necessary to look far ahead and it is
possible to alter it easily and frequently. If a child is making
a toy boat, he must hold on to a single end and direct a
considerable number of acts by that one idea. If he is just
"playing boat" he may change the material that serves as a boat
almost at will, and introduce new factors as fancy suggests. The
imagination makes what it will of chairs, blocks, leaves, chips,
if they serve the purpose of carrying activity forward.

From a very early age, however, there is no distinction of
exclusive periods of play activity and work activity, but only
one of emphasis. There are definite results which even young
children desire, and try to bring to pass. Their eager interest
in sharing the occupations of others, if nothing else,
accomplishes this. Children want to "help"; they are anxious to
engage in the pursuits of adults which effect external changes:
setting the table, washing dishes, helping care for animals, etc.
In their plays, they like to construct their own toys and
appliances. With increasing maturity, activity which does not
give back results of tangible and visible achievement loses its
interest. Play then changes to fooling and if habitually
indulged in is demoralizing. Observable results are necessary to
enable persons to get a sense and a measure of their own powers.
When make-believe is recognized to be make-believe, the device of
making objects in fancy alone is too easy to stimulate intense
action. One has only to observe the countenance of children
really playing to note that their attitude is one of serious
absorption; this attitude cannot be maintained when things cease
to afford adequate stimulation.

When fairly remote results of a definite character are foreseen
and enlist persistent effort for their accomplishment, play
passes into work. Like play, it signifies purposeful activity
and differs not in that activity is subordinated to an external
result, but in the fact that a longer course of activity is
occasioned by the idea of a result. The demand for continuous
attention is greater, and more intelligence must be shown in
selecting and shaping means. To extend this account would be to
repeat what has been said under the caption of aim, interest, and
thinking. It is pertinent, however, to inquire why the idea is
so current that work involves subordination of an activity to an
ulterior material result. The extreme form of this
subordination, namely drudgery, offers a clew. Activity carried
on under conditions of external pressure or coercion is not
carried on for any significance attached to the doing. The
course of action is not intrinsically satisfying; it is a mere
means for avoiding some penalty, or for gaining some reward at
its conclusion. What is inherently repulsive is endured for the
sake of averting something still more repulsive or of securing a
gain hitched on by others. Under unfree economic conditions,
this state of affairs is bound to exist. Work or industry offers
little to engage the emotions and the imagination; it is a more
or less mechanical series of strains. Only the hold which the
completion of the work has upon a person will keep him going.
But the end should be intrinsic to the action; it should be its
end -- a part of its own course. Then it affords a stimulus to
effort very different from that arising from the thought of
results which have nothing to do with the intervening action. As
already mentioned, the absence of economic pressure in schools
supplies an opportunity for reproducing industrial situations of
mature life under conditions where the occupation can be carried
on for its own sake. If in some cases, pecuniary recognition is
also a result of an action, though not the chief motive for it,
that fact may well increase the significance of the occupation.
Where something approaching drudgery or the need of fulfilling
externally imposed tasks exists, the demand for play persists,
but tends to be perverted. The ordinary course of action fails
to give adequate stimulus to emotion and imagination. So in
leisure time, there is an imperious demand for their stimulation
by any kind of means; gambling, drink, etc., may be resorted to.
Or, in less extreme cases, there is recourse to idle amusement;
to anything which passes time with immediate agreeableness.
Recreation, as the word indicates, is recuperation of energy. No
demand of human nature is more urgent or less to be escaped. The
idea that the need can be suppressed is absolutely fallacious,
and the Puritanic tradition which disallows the need has entailed
an enormous crop of evils. If education does not afford
opportunity for wholesome recreation and train capacity for
seeking and finding it, the suppressed instincts find all sorts
of illicit outlets, sometimes overt, sometimes confined to
indulgence of the imagination. Education has no more serious
responsibility than making adequate provision for enjoyment of
recreative leisure; not only for the sake of immediate health,
but still more if possible for the sake of its lasting effect
upon habits of mind. Art is again the answer to this demand.

Summary. In the previous chapter we found that the primary
subject matter of knowing is that contained in learning how to do
things of a fairly direct sort. The educational equivalent of
this principle is the consistent use of simple occupations which
appeal to the powers of youth and which typify general modes of
social activity. Skill and information about materials, tools,
and laws of energy are acquired while activities are carried on
for their own sake. The fact that they are socially
representative gives a quality to the skill and knowledge gained
which makes them transferable to out-of-school situations.
It is important not to confuse the psychological distinction
between play and work with the economic distinction.
Psychologically, the defining characteristic of play is not
amusement nor aimlessness. It is the fact that the aim is
thought of as more activity in the same line, without defining
continuity of action in reference to results produced.
Activities as they grow more complicated gain added meaning by
greater attention to specific results achieved. Thus they pass
gradually into work. Both are equally free and intrinsically
motivated, apart from false economic conditions which tend to
make play into idle excitement for the well to do, and work into
uncongenial labor for the poor. Work is psychologically simply
an activity which consciously includes regard for consequences as
a part of itself; it becomes constrained labor when the
consequences are outside of the activity as an end to which
activity is merely a means. Work which remains permeated with
the play attitude is art -- in quality if not in conventional
designation.


Chapter Sixteen: The Significance of Geography and History

1. Extension of Meaning of Primary Activities. Nothing is more
striking than the difference between an activity as merely
physical and the wealth of meanings which the same activity
may assume. From the outside, an astronomer gazing through a
telescope is like a small boy looking through the same tube. In
each case, there is an arrangement of glass and metal, an eye,
and a little speck of light in the distance. Yet at a critical
moment, the activity of an astronomer might be concerned with the
birth of a world, and have whatever is known about the starry
heavens as its significant content. Physically speaking, what
man has effected on this globe in his progress from savagery is a
mere scratch on its surface, not perceptible at a distance which
is slight in comparison with the reaches even of the solar
system. Yet in meaning what has been accomplished measures just
the difference of civilization from savagery. Although the
activities, physically viewed, have changed somewhat, this change
is slight in comparison with the development of the meanings
attaching to the activities. There is no limit to the meaning
which an action may come to possess. It all depends upon the
context of perceived connections in which it is placed; the reach
of imagination in realizing connections is inexhaustible.
The advantage which the activity of man has in appropriating and
finding meanings makes his education something else than the
manufacture of a tool or the training of an animal. The latter
increase efficiency; they do not develop significance. The final
educational importance of such occupations in play and work as
were considered in the last chapter is that they afford the most
direct instrumentalities for such extension of meaning. Set
going under adequate conditions they are magnets for gathering
and retaining an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual
considerations. They provide vital centers for the reception and
assimilation of information. When information is purveyed in
chunks simply as information to be retained for its own sake, it
tends to stratify over vital experience. Entering as a factor
into an activity pursued for its own sake--whether as a means or
as a widening of the content of the aim--it is informing. The
insight directly gained fuses with what is told. Individual
experience is then capable of taking up and holding in solution
the net results of the experience of the group to which he
belongs--including the results of sufferings and trials over long
stretches of time. And such media have no fixed saturation point
where further absorption is impossible. The more that is taken
in, the greater capacity there is for further assimilation. New
receptiveness follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon
information gained.

The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature
and man. This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning
when translated into educational equivalents. So translated, it
signifies that geography and history supply subject matter which
gives background and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what
might otherwise be narrow personal actions or mere forms of
technical skill. With every increase of ability to place our own
doings in their time and space connections, our doings gain in
significant content. We realize that we are citizens of no mean
city in discovering the scene in space of which we are denizens,
and the continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which we
are heirs and continuers. Thus our ordinary daily experiences
cease to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance.
Of course if geography and history are taught as ready-made
studies which a person studies simply because he is sent to
school, it easily happens that a large number of statements about
things remote and alien to everyday experience are learned.
Activity is divided, and two separate worlds are built up,
occupying activity at divided periods. No transmutation takes
place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in meaning by getting
its connections; what is studied is not animated and made real by
entering into immediate activity. Ordinary experience is not
even left as it was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses
something of its mobility and sensitiveness to suggestions. It
is weighed down and pushed into a corner by a load of
unassimilated information. It parts with its flexible
responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning. Mere
amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life
makes mind wooden; elasticity disappears.

Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out
beyond its immediate self. It does not passively wait for
information to be bestowed which will increase its meaning; it
seeks it out. Curiosity is not an accidental isolated
possession; it is a necessary consequence of the fact that an
experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all kinds of
connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency to
make these conditions perceptible. It is the business of
educators to supply an environment so that this reaching out of
an experience may be fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously
active. Within a certain kind of environment, an activity may be
checked so that the only meaning which accrues is of its direct
and tangible isolated outcome. One may cook, or hammer, or walk,
and the resulting consequences may not take the mind any farther
than the consequences of cooking, hammering, and walking in the
literal -- or physical -- sense. But nevertheless the
consequences of the act remain far-reaching. To walk involves a
displacement and reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is
felt wherever there is matter. It involves the structure of the
limbs and the nervous system; the principles of mechanics. To
cook is to utilize heat and moisture to change the chemical
relations of food materials; it has a bearing upon the
assimilation of food and the growth of the body. The utmost that
the most learned men of science know in physics, chemistry,
physiology is not enough to make all these consequences and
connections perceptible. The task of education, once more, is to
see to it that such activities are performed in such ways and
under such conditions as render these conditions as perceptible
as possible. To "learn geography" is to gain in power to
perceive the spatial, the natural, connections of an ordinary
act; to "learn history" is essentially to gain in power to
recognize its human connections. For what is called geography as
a formulated study is simply the body of facts and principles
which have been discovered in other men's experience about the
natural medium in which we live, and in connection with which the
particular acts of our life have an explanation. So history as a
formulated study is but the body of known facts about the
activities and sufferings of the social groups with which our own
lives are continuous, and through reference to which our own
customs and institutions are illuminated.

2. The Complementary Nature of History and Geography. History
and geography -- including in the latter, for reasons about to be
mentioned, nature study -- are the information studies par
excellence of the schools. Examination of the materials and the
method of their use will make clear that the difference between
penetration of this information into living experience and its
mere piling up in isolated heaps depends upon whether these
studies are faithful to the interdependence of man and nature
which affords these studies their justification. Nowhere,
however, is there greater danger that subject matter will be
accepted as appropriate educational material simply because it
has become customary to teach and learn it. The idea of a
philosophic reason for it, because of the function of the
material in a worthy transformation of experience, is looked upon
as a vain fancy, or as supplying a high-sounding phraseology in
support of what is already done. The words "history" and
"geography" suggest simply the matter which has been
traditionally sanctioned in the schools. The mass and variety of
this matter discourage an attempt to see what it really stands
for, and how it can be so taught as to fulfill its mission in the
experience of pupils. But unless the idea that there is a
unifying and social direction in education is a farcical
pretense, subjects that bulk as large in the curriculum as
history and geography, must represent a general function in the
development of a truly socialized and intellectualized
experience. The discovery of this function must be employed as a
criterion for trying and sifting the facts taught and the methods
used.

The function of historical and geographical subject matter has
been stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and
personal contacts of life by furnishing their context, their
background and outlook. While geography emphasizes the physical
side and history the social, these are only emphases in a common
topic, namely, the associated life of men. For this associated
life, with its experiments, its ways and means, its achievements
and failures, does not go on in the sky nor yet in a vacuum. It
takes place on the earth. This setting of nature does not bear
to social activities the relation that the scenery of a
theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation; it
enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form
history. Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It
furnishes original stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources.
Civilization is the progressive mastery of its varied energies.
When this interdependence of the study of history, representing
the human emphasis, with the study of geography, representing the
natural, is ignored, history sinks to a listing of dates with an
appended inventory of events, labeled "important"; or else it
becomes a literary phantasy -- for in purely literary history the
natural environment is but stage scenery.

Geography, of course, has its educative influence in a
counterpart connection of natural facts with social events and
their consequences. The classic definition of geography as an
account of the earth as the home of man expresses the educational
reality. But it is easier to give this definition than it is to
present specific geographical subject matter in its vital human
bearings. The residence, pursuits, successes, and failures of
men are the things that give the geographic data their reason for
inclusion in the material of instruction. But to hold the two
together requires an informed and cultivated imagination. When
the ties are broken, geography presents itself as that
hodge-podge of unrelated fragments too often found. It appears
as a veritable rag-bag of intellectual odds and ends: the height
of a mountain here, the course of a river there, the quantity of
shingles produced in this town, the tonnage of the shipping in
that, the boundary of a county, the capital of a state. The
earth as the home of man is humanizing and unified; the earth
viewed as a miscellany of facts is scattering and imaginatively
inert. Geography is a topic that originally appeals to
imagination -- even to the romantic imagination. It shares in
the wonder and glory that attach to adventure, travel, and
exploration. The variety of peoples and environments, their
contrast with familiar scenes, furnishes infinite stimulation.
The mind is moved from the monotony of the customary. And while
local or home geography is the natural starting point in the
reconstructive development of the natural environment, it is an
intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown, not
an end in itself. When not treated as a basis for getting at the
large world beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as
deadly as do object lessons which simply summarize the properties
of familiar objects. The reason is the same. The imagination is
not fed, but is held down to recapitulating, cataloguing, and
refining what is already known. But when the familiar fences
that mark the limits of the village proprietors are signs that
introduce an understanding of the boundaries of great nations,
even fences are lighted with meaning. Sunlight, air, running
water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil
officers and their duties -- all these things are found in the
local environment. Treated as if their meaning began and ended
in those confines, they are curious facts to be laboriously
learned. As instruments for extending the limits of experience,
bringing within its scope peoples and things otherwise strange
and unknown, they are transfigured by the use to which they are
put. Sunlight, wind, stream, commerce, political relations come
from afar and lead the thoughts afar. To follow their course is
to enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with additional
information, but by remaking the meaning of what was previously a
matter of course.

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