20.
CHAPTER XX
INTELLECTUAL AND PRACTICAL STUDIES:
1. The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge.
—As livelihood and leisure are opposed, so are theory and
practice, intelligence and execution, knowledge and activity.
The latter set of oppositions doubtless springs from the same social
conditions which produce the former conflict; but certain definite
problems of education connected with them make it desirable to discuss
explicitly the matter of the relationship and alleged separation of
knowing and doing.
The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has
a long history. The history so far as conscious statement is concerned
takes us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated
by Plato and Aristotle. Much as these thinkers differed in many
respects, they agreed in identifying experience with purely practical
concerns; and hence with material interests as to its purpose and with
the body as to its organ. Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its
own sake free from practical reference, and found its source and organ
in a purely immaterial mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal
interests. Again, experience always involved lack, need, desire; it was
never self-sufficing. Rational knowing on the other hand, was complete
and comprehensive within itself. Hence the practical life was in a
condition of perpetual flux, while intellectual knowledge concerned
eternal truth.
This sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that Athenian
philosophy began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of
knowledge and conduct. In a search for something to replace them, it
hit upon reason as the only adequate guide of belief and activity.
Since custom and tradition were identified with experience, it followed
at once that reason was superior to experience. Moreover, experience,
not content with its proper position of subordination, was the great foe
to the acknowledgment of the authority of reason. Since custom and
traditionary beliefs held men in bondage, the struggle of reason for its
legitimate supremacy could be won only by showing the inherently
unstable and inadequate nature of experience.
The statement of Plato that philosophers should be kings may best be
understood as a statement that rational intelligence and not habit,
appetite, impulse, and emotion should regulate human affairs. The
former secures unity, order, and law; the latter signify multiplicity
and discord, irrational fluctuations from one estate to another.
The grounds for the identification of experience with the unsatisfactory
condition of things, the state of affairs represented by rule of mere
custom, are not far to seek. Increasing trade and travel,
colonizations, migrations and wars, had broadened the intellectual
horizon. The customs and beliefs of different communities were found to
diverge sharply from one another. Civil disturbance had become a custom
in Athens; the fortunes of the city seemed given over to strife of
factions. The increase of leisure coinciding with the broadening of the
horizon had brought into ken many new facts of nature and had stimulated
curiosity and speculation. The situation tended to raise the question
as to the existence of anything constant and universal in the realm of
nature and society. Reason was the faculty by which the universal
principle and essence is apprehended; while the senses were the organs
of perceiving change,—the unstable and the diverse as against the
permanent and uniform. The results of the work of the senses, preserved
in memory and imagination, and applied in the skill given by habit,
constituted experience.
Experience at its best is thus represented in the various
handicrafts—the arts of peace and war. The cobbler, the flute
player, the soldier, have undergone the discipline of experience to
acquire the skill they have. This means that the bodily organs,
particularly the senses, have had repeated contact with things and that
the result of these contacts has been preserved and consolidated till
ability in foresight and in practice had been secured.
Such was the essential meaning of the term "empirical." It suggested a
knowledge and an ability not based upon insight into principles, but
expressing the result of a large number of separate trials. It
expressed the idea now conveyed by "method of trial and error," with
especial emphasis upon the more or less accidental character of the
trials. So far as ability of control, of management, was concerned, it
amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure, to routine. If new circumstances
resembled the past, it might work well enough; in the degree in which
they deviated, failure was likely. Even to-day to speak of a physician
as an empiricist is to imply that he lacks scientific training, and that
he is proceeding simply on the basis of what he happens to have got out
of the chance medley of his past practice. Just because of the lack of
science or reason in "experience" it is hard to keep it at its poor
best. The empiric easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know
where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond
routine conditions he begins to pretend—to make claims for which
there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose
upon others—to "bluff." Moreover, he assumes that because he has
learned one thing, he knows others—as the history of Athens showed
that the common craftsmen thought they could manage household affairs,
education, and politics, because they had learned to do the specific
things of their trades. Experience is always hovering, then, on the
edge of pretense, of sham, of seeming, and appearance, in distinction
from the reality upon which reason lays hold.
The philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this state of
affairs. The senses are connected with the appetites, with wants and
desires. They lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation
which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of
wants and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the life
of the body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life.
Experience thus has a definitely material character; it has to do with
physical things in relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or
science, lays hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There
is something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as
sensual, carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure reason
and spirit connote something morally praiseworthy. Moreover,
ineradicable connection with the changing, the inexplicably shifting,
and with the manifold, the diverse, clings to experience. Its material
is inherently variable and untrustworthy. It is anarchic, because
unstable. The man who trusts to experience does not know what he
depends upon, since it changes from person to person, from day to day,
to say nothing of from country to country. Its connection with the
"many," with various particulars, has the same effect, and also carries
conflict in its train.
Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. Out of
experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts within the
individual and between individuals. From experience no standard of
belief can issue, because it is the very nature of experience to
instigate all kinds of contrary beliefs, as varieties of local custom
proved. Its logical outcome is that anything is good and true to the
particular individual which his experience leads him to believe true and
good at a particular time and place.
Finally practice falls of necessity within experience. Doing proceeds
from needs and aims at change. To produce or to make is to alter
something; to consume is to alter. All the obnoxious characters of
change and diversity thus attach themselves to doing while knowing is as
permanent as its object. To know, to grasp a thing intellectually or
theoretically, is to be out of the region of vicissitude, chance, and
diversity. Truth has no lack; it is untouched by the perturbations of
the world of sense. It deals with the eternal and the universal. And
the world of experience can be brought under control, can be steadied
and ordered, only through subjection to its law of reason.
It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions persisted
in full technical definiteness. But they all of them profoundly
influenced men's subsequent thinking and their ideas about education.
The contempt for physical as compared with mathematical and logical
science, for the senses and sense observation; the feeling that
knowledge is high and worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal
symbols instead of with the concrete; the scorn of particulars except as
they are deductively brought under a universal; the disregard for the
body; the depreciation of arts and crafts as intellectual
instrumentalities, all sought shelter and found sanction under this
estimate of the respective values of experience and reason—or,
what came to the same thing, of the practical and the intellectual.
Medieval philosophy continued and reënforced the tradition. To know
reality meant to be in relation to the supreme reality, or God, and to
enjoy the eternal bliss of that relation. Contemplation of supreme
reality was the ultimate end of man to which action is subordinate.
Experience had to do with mundane, profane, and secular affairs,
practically necessary indeed, but of little import in comparison with
supernatural objects of knowledge. When we add to this motive the force
derived from the literary character of the Roman education and the Greek
philosophic tradition, and conjoin to them the preference for studies
which obviously demarcated the aristocratic class from the lower
classes, we can readily understand the tremendous power exercised by the
persistent preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not
simply in educational philosophies but in the higher schools.
2. The Modern Theory of Experience and Knowledge.
—As we shall see later, the development of experimentation as a
method of knowledge makes possible and necessitates a radical
transformation of the view just set forth. But before coming to that,
we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge developed in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, it presents us with
an almost complete reversal of the classic doctrine of the relations of
experience and reason. To Plato experience meant habituation, or the
conservation of the net product of a lot of past chance trials. Reason
meant the principle of reform, of progress, of increase of control.
Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking through the limitations
of custom and getting at things as they really were. To the modern
reformers, the situation was the other way around. Reason, universal
principles, a priori notions, meant either blank forms which had to be
filled in by experience, by sense observations, in order to get
significance and validity; or else were mere indurated prejudices,
dogmas imposed by authority, which masqueraded and found protection
under august names. The great need was to break way from captivity to
conceptions which, as Bacon put it, "anticipated nature" and imposed
merely human opinions upon her, and to resort to experience to find out
what nature was like. Appeal to experience marked the breach with
authority. It meant openness to new impressions; eagerness in discovery
and invention instead of absorption in tabulating and systematizing
received ideas and "proving" them by means of the relations they
sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the mind of the
things as they really were, free from the veil cast over them by
preconceived ideas.
The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it
had borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing and
being done to, and became a name for something intellectual and
cognitive. It meant the apprehension of material which should ballast
and check the exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic
empiricist and by his opponent, experience has been looked upon just as
a way of knowing. The only question was how good a way it is. The
result was an even greater "intellectualism" than is found in ancient
philosophy, if that word be used to designate an emphatic and almost
exclusive interest in knowledge in its isolation. Practice was not so
much subordinated to knowledge as treated as a kind of tag-end or
aftermath of knowledge. The educational result was only to confirm the
exclusion of active pursuits from the school, save as they might be
brought in for purely utilitarian ends—the acquisition by drill of
certain habits. In the second place, the interest in experience as a
means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the
mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the more truly
objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a hand,
so to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate
true knowledge—to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a maximum
of receptivity.
Since the impressions made upon the mind by objects were generally
termed sensations, empiricism thus became a doctrine of sensationalism
—that is to say, a doctrine which identified knowledge with the
reception and association of sensory impressions. In John Locke, the
most influential of the empiricists, we find this sensationalism
mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties, like discernment
or discrimination, comparison, abstraction, and generalization which
work up the material of sense into definite and organized forms and
which even evolve new ideas on their own account, such as the
fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics.
(See ante, p. 71.)
But some of his successors, especially in France in the latter part of
the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the limit; they regarded
discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations made in us by the
conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held that the mind is
a blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing engraved on it at
birth (a tabula rasa) so far as any
contents of ideas were concerned, but had endowed it with activities to
be exercised upon the material received. His French successors razed
away the powers and derived them also from impressions received.
As we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new interest
in education as method of social reform.
(See ante, p. 108.)
The emptier the mind to begin with, the more it may be made anything we
wish by bringing the right influences to bear upon it. Thus Helvetius,
perhaps the most extreme and consistent sensationalist, proclaimed that
education could do anything—that it was omnipotent. Within the
sphere of school instruction, empiricism found its directly beneficial
office in protesting against mere book learning. If knowledge comes
from the impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible
to procure knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind.
Words, all kinds of linguistic symbols, in the lack of prior
presentations of objects with which they may be associated, convey
nothing but sensations of their own shape and color—certainly not
a very instructive kind of knowledge. Sensationalism was an extremely
handy weapon with which to combat doctrines and opinions resting wholly
upon tradition and authority. With respect to all of them, it set up a
test: Where are the real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are
received? If such objects could not be produced, ideas were explained as
the result of false associations and combinations. Empiricism also
insisted upon a first-hand element. The impression must be made upon
me, upon my mind. The further we get away from this direct, first-hand
source of knowledge, the more numerous the sources of error, and the
vaguer the resulting idea.
As might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the positive
side. Of course, the value of natural objects and firsthand
acquaintance was not dependent upon the truth of the theory. Introduced
into the schools they would do their work, even if the sensational
theory about the way in which they did it was quite wrong. So far,
there is nothing to complain of. But the emphasis upon sensationalism
also operated to influence the way in which natural objects were
employed, and to prevent full good being got from them. "Object
lessons" tended to isolate the mere sense-activity and make it an end in
itself. The more isolated the object, the more isolated the sensory
quality, the more distinct the sense-impression as a unit of knowledge.
The theory worked not only in the direction of this mechanical
isolation, which tended to reduce instruction to a kind of physical
gymnastic of the sense-organs (good like any gymnastic of bodily organs,
but not more so), but also to the neglect of thinking. According to the
theory there was no need of thinking in connection with
sense-observation; in fact, in strict theory such thinking would be
impossible till afterwards, for thinking consisted simply in combining
and separating sensory units which had been received without any
participation of judgment.
As a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education
upon a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least
after the early years of infancy. Its obvious deficiencies have caused
it to be resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge
(that is to say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and
modes of application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for
lending greater "interest" to barren symbols. There are at least three
serious defects of sensationalistic empiricism as an educational
philosophy of knowledge. (a) the historical value of the theory was
critical; it was a dissolvent of current beliefs about the world and
political institutions. It was a destructive organ of criticism of hard
and fast dogmas. But the work of education is constructive, not
critical. It assumes not old beliefs to be eliminated and revised, but
the need of building up new experience into intellectual habitudes as
correct as possible from the start. Sensationalism is highly unfitted
for this constructive task. Mind, understanding, denotes responsiveness
to meanings
(Ante, p. 35),
not response to direct physical stimuli. And meaning exists only with
reference to a context, which is excluded by any scheme which identifies
knowledge with a combination of sense-impressions. The theory, so far as
educationally applied, led either to a magnification of mere physical
excitations or else to a mere heaping up of isolated objects and qualities.
(b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it
also has the disadvantage of being limited in range. Direct
acquaintance with the natural surroundings of the home environment so as
to give reality to ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of
the senses, and as a means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one
thing. As an end-all and be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally
restricted. In precisely analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and
counters may be helpful aids to a realization of numerical relations,
but when employed except as aids to thought—the apprehension of
meaning—they become an obstacle to the growth of arithmetical
understanding. They arrest growth on a low plane, the plane of specific
physical symbols. Just as the race developed especial symbols as tools
of calculation and mathematical reasonings, because the use of the
fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the individual must
progress from concrete to abstract symbols—that is, symbols whose
meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. And undue
absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers this
growth.
(c) A thoroughly false psychology of mental development underlay
sensationalistic empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter of
activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with
things. What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received
quality impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of
handling, throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the
consequent effect of the object upon the direction of activities.
(See ante, p. 164.)
Fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the ancient notion of
experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that the modern notion
of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The neglect of the
deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a fatal defect of
the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more uninteresting and
mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which ignores and as far as
may be excludes the natural tendency to learn about the qualities of
objects by the uses to which they are put through trying to do something
with them.
It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience
represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical
assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished a
satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. Its educational
influence was confined to injecting a new factor into the older
curriculum, with incidental modifications of the older studies and
methods. It introduced greater regard for observation of things
directly and through pictures and graphic descriptions, and it reduced
the importance attached to verbal symbolization. But its own scope was
so meager that it required supplementation by information concerning
matters outside of sense-perception and by matters which appealed more
directly to thought.
Consequently it left unimpaired the scope of informational and
abstract, or "rationalistic" studies.
3. Experience as Experimentation.
—It has already been intimated that sensational empiricism
represents neither the idea of experience justified by modern psychology
nor the idea of knowledge suggested by modern scientific procedure.
With respect to the former, it omits the primary position of active
response which puts things to use and which learns about them through
discovering the consequences that result from use. It would seem as if
five minutes' unprejudiced observation of the way an infant gains
knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the notion that he is
passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated ready-made
qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it would be seen that the
infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling, reaching, etc., in
order to see what results follow upon motor response to a sensory
stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not isolated
qualities, but the behavior which may be expected from a thing, and the
changes in things and persons which an activity may be expected to
produce. In other words, what he learns are connections. Even such
qualities as red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated
and identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
consequences these activities effect. We learn what things are hard and
what are soft by finding out through active experimentation what they
respectively will do and what can be done and what cannot be done with
them. In like fashion, children learn about persons by finding out what
responsive activities these persons exact and what these persons will do
in reply to the children's activities. And the combination of what
things do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind) in
modifying our actions, furthering some of them and resisting and
checking others, and what we can do to them in producing new changes
constitutes experience.
The methods of science by which the
revolution in our knowledge of the world dating from the seventeenth
century, was brought about, teach the same lesson. For these methods
are nothing but experimentation carried out under conditions of
deliberate control. To the Greek, it seemed absurd that such an
activity as, say, the cobbler punching holes in leather, or using wax
and needle and thread, could give an adequate knowledge of the world.
It seemed almost axiomatic that for true knowledge we must have recourse
to concepts coming from a reason above experience. But the introduction
of the experimental method signified precisely that such operations,
carried on under conditions of control, are just the ways in which
fruitful ideas about nature are obtained and tested. In other words, it
is only needed to conduct such an operation as the pouring of an acid on
a metal for the purpose of getting knowledge instead of for the purpose
of getting a trade result, in order to lay hold of the principle upon
which the science of nature was henceforth to depend. Sense perceptions
were indeed indispensable, but there was less reliance upon sense
perceptions in their natural or customary form than in the older
science. They were no longer regarded as containing within themselves
some "form" or "species" of universal kind in a disguised mask of sense
which could be stripped off by rational thought. On the contrary, the
first thing was to alter and extend the data of sense perception: to act
upon the given objects of sense by the lens of the telescope and
microscope, and by all sorts of experimental devices. To accomplish
this in a way which would arouse new ideas (hypotheses, theories)
required even more general ideas (like those of mathematics) than were
at the command of ancient science. But these general conceptions were
no longer taken to give knowledge in themselves. They were implements
for instituting, conducting, interpreting experimental inquiries and
formulating their results.
The logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and knowledge, a
philosophy which no longer puts experience in opposition to rational
knowledge and explanation. Experience is no longer a mere summarizing
of what has been done in a more or less chance way in the past; it is a
deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens
to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions (of
suggested meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the
suggestions. When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by
impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure
and method, it becomes reasonable—rational. When what we suffer from
things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance
circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior
purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant—enlightening
and instructive. The antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses the
support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and relative
justification.
The bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely practical and
purely intellectual studies is self-evident. The distinction is not
intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions, and upon conditions which
can be regulated. Practical activities may be intellectually narrow
and trivial; they will be so in so far as they are routine, carried
on under the dictates of authority, and having in view merely some
external result. But childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just
the time when it is possible to carry them on in a different spirit. It is
inexpedient to repeat the discussions of our previous chapters on
thinking and on the evolution of educative subject matter from childlike
work and play to logically organized subject matter. The discussions of
this chapter and the prior one should, however, give an added meaning to
those results.
(i) Experience itself primarily consists of the active
relations subsisting between a human being and his natural and social
surroundings. In some cases, the initiative in activity is on the side
of the environment; the human being undergoes or suffers certain
checkings and deflections of endeavors. In other cases, the behavior of
surrounding things and persons carries to a successful issue the active
tendencies of the individual, so that in the end what the individual
undergoes are consequences which he has himself tried to produce. In
just the degree in which connections are established between what
happens to a person and what he does in response, and between what he
does to his environment and what it does in response to him, his acts
and the things about him acquire meaning. He learns to understand both
himself and the world of men and things. Purposive education or
schooling should present such an environment that this interaction will
effect acquisition of those meanings which are so important that they
become, in turn, instruments of further learnings. (Ante, Ch. XI.)
As has been repeatedly pointed out, activity out of school is carried on
under conditions which have not been deliberately adapted to promoting
the function of understanding and formation of effective intellectual
dispositions. The results are vital and genuine as far as they go, but
they are limited by all kinds of circumstances. Some powers are left
quite undeveloped and undirected; others get only occasional and
whimsical stimulations; others are formed into habits of a routine skill
at the expense of aims and resourceful initiative and inventiveness. It
is not the business of the school to transport youth from an environment
of activity into one of cramped study of the records of other men's
learning; but to transport them from an environment of relatively chance
activities (accidental in the relation they bear to insight and thought)
into one of activities selected with reference to guidance of learning.
A slight inspection of the improved methods which have already shown
themselves effective in education will reveal that they have laid hold,
more or less consciously, upon the fact that "intellectual" studies
instead of being opposed to active pursuits represent an
intellectualizing of practical pursuits. It remains to grasp the
principle with greater firmness.
(ii) The changes which are taking place in the content of social
life tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which
will intellectualize the play and work of the school. When one bears in
mind the social environment of the Greeks and the people of the Middle
Ages, where such practical activities as could be successfully carried
on were mostly of a routine and external sort and even servile in
nature, one is not surprised that educators turned their backs upon them
as unfitted to cultivate intelligence. But now that even the
occupations of the household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as
transportation and intercourse are instinct with applied science, the
case stands otherwise. It is true that many of those who now engage in
them are not aware of the intellectual content upon which their personal
actions depend. But this fact only gives an added reason why schooling
should use these pursuits so as to enable the coming generation to
acquire a comprehension now too generally lacking, and thus enable
persons to carry on their pursuits intelligently instead of blindly.
(iii) The most direct blow at the traditional separation of doing
and knowing and at the traditional prestige of purely "intellectual"
studies, however, has been given by the progress of experimental
science. If this progress has demonstrated anything, it is that there
is no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding except
as the offspring of doing. The analysis and rearrangement of facts
which is indispensable to the growth of knowledge and power of
explanation and right classification cannot be attained purely mentally
—just inside the head. Men have to do something to the things
when they wish to find out something; they have to alter conditions.
This is the lesson of the laboratory method, and the lesson which all
education has to learn. The laboratory is a discovery of the condition
under which labor may become intellectually fruitful and not merely
externally productive. If, in too many cases at present, it results
only in the acquisition of an additional mode of technical skill, that
is because it still remains too largely but an isolated resource, not
resorted to until pupils are mostly too old to get the full advantage of
it, and even then is surrounded by other studies where traditional
methods isolate intellect from activity.
Summary.
—The Greeks were induced to philosophize by the increasing failure
of their traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. Thus they
were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other source
of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational standard
for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs which had
proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat opposition of
reason and experience. The more the former was exalted, the more the
latter was depreciated. Since experience was identified with what men
do and suffer in particular and changing situations of life, doing
shared in the philosophic depreciation. This influence fell in with
many others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods and topics
which involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily activity.
The modern age began with a revolt against this point of view, with an
appeal to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely rational
concepts on the ground that they either needed to be ballasted by the
results of concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions of
prejudice and institutionalized class interest, calling themselves
rational for protection. But various circumstances led to considering
experience as pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic
active and emotional phases, and to identifying it with a passive
reception of isolated "sensations." Hence the education reform effected
by the new theory was confined mainly to doing away with some of the
bookishness of prior methods; it did not accomplish a consistent
reorganization.
Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the
experimental method in science makes another conception of experience
explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of
the ancients that experience is primarily practical, not
cognitive—a matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of
doing. But the ancient theory is transformed by realizing that doing
may be directed so as to take up into its own content all which thought
suggests, and so as to result in securely tested knowledge.
"Experience" then ceases to be empirical and becomes experimental.
Reason ceases to be a remote and ideal faculty, and signifies all the
resources by which activity is made fruitful in meaning. Educationally,
this change denotes such a plan for the studies and method of
instruction as has been developed in the previous chapters.
