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.
