Summary.
—Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity. Both
of these conditions are at their height in childhood and youth.
Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of
habits. Habits give control over the environment, power to utilize it
for human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or a
general and persistent balance of organic activities with the
surroundings, and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new
conditions. The former furnishes the background of growth; the latter
constitute growing. Active habits involve thought, invention, and
initiative in applying capacities to new aims. They are opposed to
routine which marks an arrest of growth. Since growth is the
characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end
beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the
extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies
means for making the desire effective in fact.
