1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation.
—Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs
which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for
or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war,
to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or
read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect
experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by
their means is "mediated." It stands in contrast with an immediate,
direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first
hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As
we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very
limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for
representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain
almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to
civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the
range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as
wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified
or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the
disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person
—so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or
indirect experience.
At the same time (as we have also had repeated occasion to see) there is
always a danger that symbols will not be truly representative; danger
that instead of really calling up the absent and remote in a way to make
it enter a present experience, the linguistic media of representation
will become an end in themselves. Formal education is peculiarly
exposed to this danger, with the result that when literacy supervenes,
mere bookishness, what is popularly termed the academic, too often comes
with it. In colloquial speech, the phrase a "realizing sense" is used
to express the urgency, warmth, and intimacy of a direct experience in
contrast with the remote, pallid, and coldly detached quality of a
representative experience. The terms "mental realization" and
"appreciation" (or genuine appreciation) are more elaborate names for
the realizing sense of a thing. It is not possible to define these
ideas except by synonyms, like "coming home to one" "really taking it
in," etc., for the only way to appreciate what is meant by a direct
experience of a thing is by having it. But it is the difference between
reading a technical description of a picture, and seeing it; or between
just seeing it and being moved by it; between learning mathematical
equations about light and being carried away by some peculiarly glorious
illumination of a misty landscape.
We are thus met by the danger of the tendency of technique and other
purely representative forms to encroach upon the sphere of direct
appreciations; in other words, the tendency to assume that pupils have a
foundation of direct realization of situations sufficient for the
superstructure of representative experience erected by formulated school
studies. This is not simply a matter of quantity or bulk. Sufficient
direct experience is even more a matter of quality; it must be of a sort
to connect readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of
instruction. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying facts and
ideas through the media of signs, schooling must provide genuine
situations in which personal participation brings home the import of the
material and the problems which it conveys. From the standpoint of the
pupil, the resulting experiences are worth while on their own account;
from the standpoint of the teacher they are also means of supplying
subject matter required for understanding instruction involving signs,
and of evoking attitudes of open-mindedness and concern as to the
material symbolically conveyed.
In the outline given of the theory of educative subject matter, the
demand for this background of realization or appreciation is met by the
provision made for play and active occupations embodying typical
situations. Nothing need be added to what has already been said except
to point out that while the discussion dealt explicitly with the subject
matter of primary education, where the demand for the available
background of direct experience is most obvious, the principle applies
to the primary or elementary phase of every subject. The first and
basic function of laboratory work, for example, in a high school or
college in a new field, is to familiarize the student at first hand with
a certain range of facts and problems—to give him a "feeling" for
them. Getting command of technique and of methods of reaching and
testing generalizations is at first secondary to getting appreciation.
As regards the primary school activities, it is to be borne in mind that
the fundamental intent is not to amuse nor to convey information with a
minimum of vexation nor yet to acquire skill,—though these results
may accrue as by-products,—but to enlarge and enrich the scope of
experience, and to keep alert and effective the interest in intellectual
progress.
The rubric of appreciation supplies an appropriate head for bringing out
three further principles: the nature of effective or real (as distinct
from nominal) standards of value; the place of the imagination in
appreciative realizations; and the place of the fine arts in the course
of study.
1.
The nature of standards of valuation. Every adult has acquired, in the
course of his prior experience and education, certain measures of the
worth of various sorts of experience. He has learned to look upon
qualities like honesty, amiability, perseverance, loyalty, as moral
goods; upon certain classics of literature, painting, music, as
aæsthetic values, and so on. Not only this, but he has learned certain
rules for these values—the golden rule in morals; harmony,
balance, etc., proportionate distribution in aæsthetic goods;
definition, clarity, system in intellectual accomplishments. These
principles are so important as standards of judging the worth of new
experiences that parents and instructors are always tending to teach
them directly to the young. They overlook the danger that standards so
taught will be merely symbolic; that is, largely conventional and
verbal. In reality, working as distinct from professed standards depend
upon what an individual has himself specifically appreciated to be
deeply significant in concrete situations. An individual may have
learned that certain characteristics are conventionally esteemed in
music; he may be able to converse with some correctness about classic
music; he may even honestly believe that these traits constitute his own
musical standards. But if in his own past experience, what he has been
most accustomed to and has most enjoyed is ragtime, his active or
working measures of valuation are fixed on the ragtime level. The
appeal actually made to him in his own personal realization fixes his
attitude much more deeply than what he has been taught as the proper
thing to say; his habitual disposition thus fixed forms his real "norm"
of valuation in subsequent musical experiences.
Probably few would deny this statement as to musical taste. But it
applies equally well in judgments of moral and intellectual worth. A
youth who has had repeated experience of the full meaning of the value
of kindliness toward others built into his disposition has a measure of
the worth of generous treatment of others. Without this vital
appreciation, the duty and virtue of unselfishness impressed upon him by
others as a standard remains purely a matter of symbols which he cannot
adequately translate into realities. His "knowledge" is second-handed;
it is only a knowledge that others prize unselfishness as an excellence,
and esteem him in the degree in which he exhibits it. Thus there grows
up a split between a person's professed standards and his actual ones.
A person may be aware of the results of this struggle between his
inclinations and his theoretical opinions; he suffers from the conflict
between doing what is really dear to him and what he has learned will
win the approval of others. But of the split itself he is unaware; the
result is a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, an instability of
disposition. In similar fashion, a pupil who has worked through some
confused intellectual situation and fought his way to clearing up
obscurities in a definite outcome, appreciates the value of clarity and
definition. He has a standard which can be depended upon. He may be
trained externally to go through certain motions of analysis and
division of subject matter and may acquire information about the value
of these processes as standard logical functions, but unless it somehow
comes home to him at some point as an appreciation of his own, the
significance of the logical norms—so-called—remains as much
an external piece of information as, say, the names of rivers in China.
He may be able to recite, but the recital is a mechanical rehearsal.
It is, then, a serious mistake to regard appreciation as if it were
confined to such things as literature and pictures and music. Its scope
is as comprehensive as the work of education itself. The formation of
habits is a purely mechanical thing unless habits are also
tastes—habitual modes of preference and esteem, an effective
sense of excellence. There are adequate grounds for asserting that the
premium so often put in schools upon external "discipline," and upon
marks and rewards, upon promotion and keeping back, are the obverse of
the lack of attention given to life situations in which the meaning of
facts, ideas, principles, and problems is vitally brought home.
2.
Appreciative realizations are to be distinguished from symbolic or
representative experiences. They are not to be distinguished from the
work of the intellect or understanding. Only a personal response
involving imagination can possibly procure realization even of pure
"facts." The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field.
The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any
activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to
identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and
intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation. This leads to an
exaggerated estimate of fairy tales, myths, fanciful symbols, verse, and
something labeled "Fine Art," as agencies for developing imagination and
appreciation; and, by neglecting imaginative vision in other matters,
leads to methods which reduce much instruction to an unimaginative
acquiring of specialized skill and amassing of a load of information.
Theory, and—to some extent—practice, have advanced far
enough to recognize that play-activity is an imaginative enterprise.
But it is still usual to regard this activity as a specially marked-off
stage of childish growth, and to overlook the fact that the difference
between play and what is regarded as serious employment should be not a
difference between the presence and absence of imagination, but a
difference in the materials with which imagination is occupied. The
result is an unwholesome exaggeration of the phantastic and "unreal"
phases of childish play and a deadly reduction of serious occupation to
a routine efficiency prized simply for its external tangible results.
Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned
machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of
education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the
wayside. Meantime mind-wandering and wayward fancy are nothing but the
unsuppressible imagination cut loose from concern with what is done.
An adequate recognition of the play of imagination as the medium of
realization of every kind of thing which lies beyond the scope of direct
physical response is the sole way of escape from mechanical methods in
teaching. The emphasis put in this book, in accord with many tendencies
in contemporary education, upon activity, will be misleading if it is
not recognized that the imagination is as much a normal and integral
part of human activity as is muscular movement. The educative value of
manual activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play,
depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a sensing of
the meaning of what is going on. In effect, if not in name, they are
dramatizations. Their utilitarian value in forming habits of skill to
be used for tangible results is important, but not when isolated from
the appreciative side. Were it not for the accompanying play of
imagination, there would be no road from a direct activity to
representative knowledge; for it is by imagination that symbols are
translated over into a direct meaning and integrated with a narrower
activity so as to expand and enrich it. When the representative
creative imagination is made merely literary and mythological, symbols
are rendered mere means of directing physical reactions of the organs of
speech.
3.
In the account previously given nothing was explicitly said about the
place of literature and the fine arts in the course of study. The
omission at that point was intentional. At the outset, there is no
sharp demarcation of useful, or industrial, arts and fine arts. The
activities mentioned in Chapter XV contain within themselves the factors
later discriminated into fine and useful arts. As engaging the emotions
and the imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts
their quality. As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of tools to
materials with constantly increasing perfection, they involve the
element of technique indispensable to artistic production. From the
standpoint of product, or the work of art, they are naturally defective,
though even in this respect when they comprise genuine appreciation they
often have a rudimentary charm. As experiences they have both an
artistic and an æsthetic quality. When they emerge into activities
which are tested by their product and when the socially serviceable
value of the product is emphasized, they pass into useful or industrial
arts. When they develop in the direction of an enhanced appreciation of
the immediate qualities which appeal to taste, they grow into fine arts.
In one of its meanings, appreciation is opposed to depreciation. It
denotes an enlarged, an intensified prizing, not merely a prizing, much
less—like depreciation—a lowered and degraded prizing. This
enhancement of the qualities which make any ordinary experience
appealing, appropriable—capable of full assimilation—and
enjoyable, constitutes the prime function of literature, music, drawing,
painting, etc., in education. They are not the exclusive agencies of
appreciation in the most general sense of that word; but they are the
chief agencies of an intensified, enhanced appreciation. As such, they
are not only intrinsically and directly enjoyable, but they serve a
purpose beyond themselves. They have the office, in increased degree,
of all appreciation in fixing taste, in forming standards for the worth
of later experiences. They arouse discontent with conditions which fall
below their measure; they create a demand for surroundings coming up to
their own level. They reveal a depth and range of meaning in
experiences which otherwise might be mediocre and trivial. They supply,
that is, organs of vision. Moreover, in their fullness they represent
the concentration and consummation of elements of good which are
otherwise scattered and incomplete. They select and focus the elements
of enjoyable worth which make any experience directly enjoyable. They
are not luxuries of education, but emphatic expressions of that which
makes any education worth while.
