6.
CHAPTER VI
EDUCATION AS CONSERVATIVE AND PROGRESSIVE:
1. Education as Formation.
—We now come to a type of theory which denies the existence of faculties
and emphasizes the unique role of subject matter in the development of
mental and moral disposition. according to it, education is neither a
process of unfolding from within nor is it a training of faculties
resident in mind itself. It is rather the formation of mind by setting
up certain associations or connections of content by means of a subject
matter presented from without. Education proceeds by instruction taken
in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind from without.
That education is formative of mind is not questioned; it is the
conception already propounded. But formation here has a technical
meaning dependent upon the idea of something operating from without.
Herbart is the best historical representative of this type of theory.
He denies absolutely the existence of innate faculties. The mind is simply
endowed with the power of producing various qualities in reaction to the
various realities which act upon it. These qualitatively different reactions
are called presentations (Vorstellungen).
Every presentation once called into being persists; it may be driven below the
"threshold" of consciousness by new and stronger presentations, produced by the
reaction of the soul to new material, but its activity continues by its own
inherent momentum, below the surface of consciousness. What are termed
faculties—attention, memory, thinking, perception, even the sentiments,
are arrangements, associations, and complications, formed by the interaction of
these submerged presentations with one another and with new presentations.
Perception, for example, is the complication of presentations which
result from the rise of old presentations to greet and combine with new
ones; memory is the evoking of an old presentation above the threshold
of consciousness by getting entangled with another presentation, etc.
Pleasure is the result of reënforcement among the independent activities
of presentations; pain of their pulling different ways, etc.
The concrete character of mind consists, then, wholly of the various
arrangements formed by the various presentations in their different
qualities. The "furniture" of the mind is the mind. Mind is
wholly a matter of "contents." The educational implications of this
doctrine are threefold. ( 1 ) This or that kind of mind is formed by
the use of objects which evoke this or that kind of reaction and which
produce this or that arrangement among the reactions called out. The
formation of mind is wholly a matter of the presentation of the proper
educational materials. (2) Since the earlier presentations constitute
the "apperceiving organs" which control the assimilation of new
presentations, their character is all important. The effect of new
presentations is to reënforce groupings previously formed. The business
of the educator is, first, to select the proper material in order to fix
the nature of the original reactions, and, secondly, to arrange the
sequence of subsequent presentations on the basis of the store of ideas
secured by prior transactions. The control is from behind, from the
past, instead of, as in the unfolding conception, in the ultimate goal.
(3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down.
Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the central thing, but
since knowing consists in the way in which this interacts with the
contents already submerged below consciousness, the first thing is the
step of "preparation,"—that is, calling into special activity and
getting above the floor of consciousness those older presentations which
are to assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation, follow the
processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the application of
the newly formed content to the performance of some task. Everything
must go through this course; consequently there is a perfectly uniform
method in instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages.
Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the
region of routine and accident. He brought it into the sphere of
conscious method; it became a conscious business with a definite aim and
procedure, instead of being a compound of casual inspiration and
subservience to tradition. Moreover, everything in teaching and
discipline could be specified, instead of our having to be content with
vague and more or less mystic generalities about ultimate ideals and
speculative spiritual symbols. He abolished the notion of ready-made
faculties, which might be trained by exercise upon any sort of material,
and made attention to concrete subject matter, to the content,
all-important. Herbart undoubtedly has had a greater influence in
bringing to the front questions connected with the material of study
than any other educational philosopher. He stated problems of method
from the standpoint of their connection with subject matter: method
having to do with the manner and sequence of presenting new subject
matter to insure its proper interaction with old.
The fundamental theoretical defect of this view lies in ignoring the
existence in a living being of active and specific functions which are
developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they are
occupied with their environment. The theory represents the Schoolmaster
come to his own. This fact expresses at once its strength and its
weakness. The conception that the mind consists of what has been
taught, and that the importance of what has been taught consists in its
availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue's view of
life. The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in
instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his privilege of
learning. It emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment upon
the mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves a
personal sharing in common experiences. It exaggerates beyond reason
the possibilities of consciously formulated and used methods, and
underestimates the role of vital, unconscious, attitudes. It insists
upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the operation of the
genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It takes, in brief, everything
educational into account save its essence,—vital energy seeking
opportunity for effective exercise. All education forms character,
mental and moral, but formation consists in the selection and
coördination of native activities so that they may utilize the subject
matter of the social environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a
formation of native activities, but it takes place through
them. It is a process of reconstruction, reorganization.
2. Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection.
—A peculiar combination of the ideas of development and formation
from without has given rise to the recapitulation theory of education,
biological and cultural. The individual develops, but his proper
development consists in repeating in orderly stages the past evolution
of animal life and human history. The former recapitulation occurs
physiologically; the latter should be made to occur by means of
education. The alleged biological truth that the individual in his
growth from the simple embryo to maturity repeats the history of the
evolution of animal life in the progress of forms from the simplest to
the most complex ( or expressed technically, that ontogenesis parallels
phylogenesis ) does not concern us, save as it is supposed to afford
scientific foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past. Cultural
recapitulation says, first, that children at a certain age are in the
mental and moral condition of savagery; their instincts are vagrant and
predatory because their ancestors at one time lived such a life.
Consequently (so it is concluded) the proper subject matter of their
education at this time is the material—especially the literary
material of myths, folk-tale, and song—produced by humanity in the
analogous stage. Then the child passes on to something corresponding,
say, to the pastoral stage, and so on till at the time when he is ready
to take part in contemporary life, he arrives at the present epoch of
culture.
In this detailed and consistent form, the theory, outside of a small
school in Germany (followers of Herbart for the most part), has had
little currency. But the idea which underlies it is that education is
essentially retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past and
especially to the literary products of the past, and that mind is
adequately formed in the degree in which it is patterned upon the
spiritual heritage of the past. This idea has had such immense
influence upon higher instruction especially, that it is worth
examination in its extreme formulation.
In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embyronic
growth of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of the traits
of lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict traversing of
past stages. If there were any strict "law" of repetition, evolutionary
development would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation
would simply have repeated its predecessors' existence. Development, in
short, has taken place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in
the prior scheme of growth. And this suggests that the aim of education
is to facilitate such short-circuited growth. The great advantage of
immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to emancipate
the young from the need of dwelling in an outgrown past. The business
of education is rather to liberate the young from reviving and
retraversing the past than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The
social environment of the young is constituted by the presence and
action of the habits of thinking and feeling of civilized men. To
ignore the directive influence of this present environment upon the
young is simply to abdicate the educational function. A biologist has
said: "The history of development in different animals . . . offers
to us . . . a series of ingenious, determined, varied but more or
less unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of
recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral method a more direct
method." Surely it would be foolish if education did not deliberately
attempt to facilitate similar efforts in conscious experience so that
they become increasingly successful.
The two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled
from association with the false context which perverts them. On the
biological side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with
precisely the assortment of impulsive activities with which he does
start, they being blind, and many of them conflicting with one another,
casual, sporadic, and unadapted to their immediate environment. The
other point is that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of
past history so far as they are of help for the future. Since they
represent the results of prior experience, their value for future
experience may, of course, be indefinitely great. Literatures produced
in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and use of them, a
part of the present environment of individuals; but there is an
enormous difference between availing ourselves of them as present
resources and taking them as standards and patterns in their retrospective
character.
( 1 ) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through
misuse of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity means that
past life has somehow predetermined the main traits of an individual,
and that they are so fixed that little serious change can be introduced
into them. Thus taken, the influence of heredity is opposed to that of
the environment, and the efficacy of the latter belittled. But for
educational purposes heredity means neither more nor less than the
original endowment of an individual. Education must take the being as
he is; that a particular individual has just such and such an equipment
of native activities is a basic fact. That they were produced in such
and such a way, or that they are derived from one's ancestry, is not
especially important for the educator, however it may be with the
biologist, as compared with the fact that they now exist. Suppose one
had to advise or direct a person regarding his inheritance of property.
The fallacy of assuming that the fact it is an inheritance,
predetermines its future use, is obvious. The advisor is concerned with
making the best use of what is there—putting it at work under the
most favorable conditions. Obviously he cannot utilize what is not
there; neither can the educator. In this sense, heredity is a limit of
education. Recognition of this fact prevents the waste of energy and
the irritation that ensue from the too prevalent habit of trying to make
by instruction something out of an individual which he is not naturally
fitted to become. But the doctrine does not determine what use shall be
made of the capacities which exist.
And, except in the case of the imbecile, these original capacities are
much more varied and potential, even in the case of the more stupid,
than we as yet know properly how to utilize. Consequently, while a
careful study of the native aptitudes and deficiencies of an individual
is always a preliminary necessity, the subsequent and important step is
to furnish an environment which will adequately function whatever
activities are present.
The relation of heredity and environment is well expressed in the case
of language. If a being had no vocal organs from which issue articulate
sounds, if he had no auditory or other sense-receptors and no
connections between the two sets of apparatus, it would be a sheer waste
of time to try to teach him to converse. He is born short in that
respect, and education must accept the limitation. But if he has this
native equipment, its possession in no way guarantees that he will ever
talk any language or what language he will talk. The environment in
which his activities occur and by which they are carried into execution
settles these things. If he lived in a dumb unsocial environment where
men refused to talk to one another and used only that minimum of
gestures without which they could not get along, vocal language would be
as unachieved by him as if he had no vocal organs. If the sounds which
he makes occur in a medium of persons speaking the Chinese language, the
activities which make like sounds will be selected and coordinated.
This illustration may be applied to the entire range of the educability
of any individual. It places the heritage from the past in its right
connection with the demands and opportunities of the present.
(2) The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is found in
the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or more
specifically in the particular literatures which were produced in the
culture epoch which is supposed to correspond with the stage of
development of those taught) affords another instance of that divorce
between the process and product of growth which has been criticized. To
keep the process alive, to keep it alive in ways which make it easier to
keep it alive in the future, is the function of educational subject
matter. But an individual can live only in the present. The present is
not just something which comes after the past; much less something
produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind it. The
study of past products will not help us understand the present, because
the present is not due to the products, but to the life of which they
were the products. A knowledge of the past and its heritage is of great
significance when it enters into the present, hut not otherwise. And
the mistake of making the records and remains of the past the main
material of education is that it cuts the vital connection of present
and past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the
present a more or less futile imitation of the past. Under such
circumstances, culture becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge and an
asylum. Men escape from the crudities of the present to live in its
imagined refinements, instead of using what the past offers as an agency
for ripening these crudities.
The present, in short, generates the problems which lead us to search
the past for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when
we search. The past is the past precisely because it does not include
what is characteristic in the present. The moving present includes the
past on condition that it uses the past to direct its own movement. The
past is a great resource for the imagination; it adds a new dimension to
life, but on condition that it be seen as the past of the present,
and not as another and disconnected world. The principle which makes
little of the present act of living and operation of growing, the only
thing always present, naturally looks to the past because the future
goal which it sets up is remote and empty. But having turned its back upon
the present, it has no way of returning to it laden with the spoils of
the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive to the needs and
occasions of the present actuality will have the liveliest of motives
for interest in the background of the present, and will never have to
hunt for a way back because it will never have lost connection.
3. Education as Reconstruction.
—In its contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of latent powers
from within, and of the formation from without, whether by physical
nature or by the cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth
results in the conception that education is a constant reorganizing or
reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an immediate end, and
so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end—the direct
transformation of the quality of experience. Infancy, youth, adult
life,—all stand on the same educative level in the sense that what
is really learned at any and every stage of experience constitutes the
value of that experience, and in the sense that it is the chief business
of life at every point to make living thus contribute to an enrichment
of its own perceptible meaning.
We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning
of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of
subsequent experience. (1) The increment of meaning corresponds to the
increased perception of the connections and continuities of the
activities in which we are engaged. The activity begins in an impulsive
form; that is, it is blind. It does not know what it is about; that is
to say, what are its interactions with other activities. An activity
which brings education or instruction with it makes one aware of some of
the connections which had been imperceptible. To recur to our simple example,
a child who reaches for a bright light gets burned. Henceforth he knows
that a certain act of touching in connection with a certain act of vision
(and vice-versa) means heat and pain; or, a certain light means a
source of heat. The acts by which a scientific man in his laboratory
learns more about flame differ no whit in principle. By doing certain
things, he makes perceptible certain connections of heat with other things,
which had been previously ignored. Thus his acts in relation to these things
get more meaning; he knows better what he is doing or "is about" when he has
to do with them; he can intend consequences instead of just letting
them happen—all synonymous ways of saying the same thing. At the same
stroke, the flame has gained in meaning; all that is known about combustion,
oxidation, about light and temperature, may become an intrinsic part of its
intellectual content.
(2) The other side of an educative experience is an added power of
subsequent direction or control. To say that one knows what he is
about, or can intend certain consequences, is to say, of course, that he
can better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can, therefore,
get ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial consequences
and avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative experience, then, one
in which instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is
contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a
capricious activity on the other. (a) In the latter one "does not care
what happens"; one just lets himself go and avoids connecting the
consequences of one's act (the evidences of its connections with other
things) with the act. It is customary to frown upon such aimless random
activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or
lawlessness. But there is a tendency to seek the cause of such aimless
activities in the youth's own disposition, isolated from everything
else. But in fact such activity is explosive, and due to maladjustment
with surroundings. Individuals act capriciously whenever they act under
external dictation, or from being told, without having a purpose of
their own or perceiving the bearing of the deed upon other acts. One
may learn by doing something which he does not understand; even in the
most intelligent action, we do much which we do not mean, because the
largest portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend are
not perceived or anticipated. But we learn only because after the act
is performed we note results which we had not noted before. But much
work in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act
of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to
see the connection between the result—say the answer—and the
method pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a
trick and a kind of miracle. Such action is essentially capricious, and
leads to capricious habits. (b) Routine action, action which is
automatic, may increase skill to do a particular thing. In so far,
it might be said to have an educative effect. But it does not lead to new
perceptions of bearings and connections; it limits rather than widens
the meaning-horizon. And since the environment changes and our way of
acting has to be modified in order successfully to keep a balanced
connection with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes
disastrous at some critical moment. The vaunted "skill" turns out gross
ineptitude.
The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been
criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the
end (the result) and the process. This is verbally self-contradictory,
but only verbally. It means that experience as an active process
occupies time and that its later period completes its earlier portion;
it brings to light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived. The
later outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the
experience as a whole establishes a bent or disposition toward the
things possessing this meaning. Every such continuous experience or
activity is educative, and all education resides in having such
experiences.
It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention
later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as
personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken in the earlier
chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them
with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of
catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult
group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of
established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in
the main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape
the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current
habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society
be an improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of
the extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate
obvious social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not
produce these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may
be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are
doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a
constructive agency of improving society, from realizing that it
represents not only a development of children and youth but also of the
future society of which they will be the constituents.
Summary.
—Education may be conceived either retrospectively or
prospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as process of
accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the past
for a resource in a developing future. The former finds its standards
and patterns in what has gone before. The mind may be regarded as a
group of contents resulting from having certain things presented. In
this case, the earlier presentations constitute the material to which
the later are to be assimilated. Emphasis upon the value of the early
experiences of immature beings is most important, especially because of
the tendency to regard them as of little account. But these experiences
do not consist of externally presented material, but of interaction of
native activities with the environment which progressively modifies both
the activities and the environment. The defect of the Herbartian theory
of formation through presentations consists in slighting this constant
interaction and change.
The same principle of criticism applies to theories which find the
primary subject matter of study in the cultural
products—especially the literary products—of man's history.
Isolated from their connection with the present environment in which
individuals have to act, they become a kind of rival and distracting
environment. Their value lies in their use to increase the meaning of
the things with which we have actively to do at the present time. The
idea of education advanced in these chapters is formally summed up in
the idea of continuous reconstruction of experience, an idea which is
marked off from education as preparation for a remote future, as
unfolding, as external formation, and as recapitulation of the past.
