4. Some Applications to Education.
—Why does a savage group perpetuate savagery, and a civilized
group civilization? Doubtless the first answer to occur to mind is
because savages are savages; being of low-grade intelligence and perhaps
defective moral sense. But careful study has made it doubtful whether
their native capacities are appreciably inferior to those of civilized
man. It has made it certain that native differences are not sufficient
to account for the difference in culture.
In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a
cause, of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such
as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to
limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects
that come within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend
to arrest observation and imagination upon qualities which do not
fructify in the mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a
scant number of natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a
small number of natural resources are utilized and they are not worked
for what they are worth. The advance of civilization means that a
larger number of natural forces and objects have been transformed into
instrumentalities of action, into means for securing ends. We start not
so much with superior capacities as with superior stimuli for evocation
and direction of our capacities. The savage deals largely with crude
stimuli; we have weighted stimuli.
Prior human efforts have made over natural conditions. As they
originally existed they were indifferent to human endeavors. Every
domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every
appliance, every manufactured article, every æsthetic decoration, every
work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile or
indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and
favoring conditions. Because the activities of children today are
controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are able to
traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow, tortured
ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes which
have preceded.
Stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our
system of roads and means of transportation, our ready command of heat,
light, and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every
purpose, do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a
civilization. But the uses to which they are put are civilization, and
without the things the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise
necessarily devoted to wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment
and securing a precarious protection against its inclemencies is freed.
A body of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which is
guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is
incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of nature.
Thus these appliances of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief
protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs,
those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so
much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we
add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used, but
used in the interests of a truly shared or associated life, then the
appliances become the positive resources of civilization. If Greece,
with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a worthy and
noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because Greece operated
for social ends such resources as it had.
But whatever the situation, whether one of barbarism or civilization,
whether one of stinted control of physical forces, or of partial
enslavement to a mechanism not yet made tributary to a shared
experience, things as they enter into action furnish the educative
conditions of daily life and direct the formation of mental and moral
disposition.
Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially
selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials
and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction.
Since language represents the physical conditions that have been
subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life
—physical things which have lost their original quality in
becoming social tools—it is appropriate that language should play
a large part compared with other appliances. By it we are led to share
vicariously in past human experience, thus widening and enriching the
experience of the present. We are enabled, symbolically and
imaginatively, to anticipate situations. In countless ways, language
condenses meanings that record social outcomes and presage social
outlooks. So significant is it of a liberal share in what is worth
while in life that unlettered and uneducated have become almost
synonymous.
The emphasis in school upon this particular tool has, however, its
dangers—dangers which are not theoretical but exhibited in
practice. Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in,
learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they
are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of
"telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a
principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in
theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the
doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is
written about. But its enactment into practice requires that the school
environment be equipped with agencies for doing, with tools and physical
materials, to an extent rarely attained. It requires that methods of
instruction and administration be modified to allow and to secure direct
and continuous occupations with things. Not that the use of language as
an educational resource should lessen; but that its use should be more
vital and fruitful by having its normal connection with shared
activities. "These things ought ye to have done, and not to have left
the others undone." And for the school "these things" mean equipment
with the instrumentalities of coöperative or joint activity.
For when the schools depart from the educational conditions effective in
the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a
pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go
to school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs
most adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When
treating it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social
sense which comes from sharing in an activity of common concern and
value, the effort at isolated intellectual learning contradicts its own
aim. We may secure motor activity and sensory excitation by keeping an
individual by himself, but we cannot thereby get him to understand the
meaning which things have in the life of which he is a part. We may
secure technical specialized ability in algebra, Latin, or botany, but
not the kind of intelligence which directs ability to useful ends. Only
by engaging in a joint activity, where one person's use of material and
tools is consciously referred to the use other persons are making of
their capacities and appliances, is a social direction of disposition
attained.
