In directing the activities of the young, society determines its own
future in determining that of the young. Since the young at a given time
will at some later date compose the society of that period, the latter's
nature will largely turn upon the direction children's activities were
given at an earlier period. This cumulative movement of action toward a
later result is what is meant by growth.
The primary condition of growth is immaturity. This may seem to be a
mere truism--saying that a being can develop only in some point in which
he is undeveloped. But the prefix "im" of the word immaturity means
something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is noteworthy that the
terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one
sense being negative, the other positive. Capacity may denote mere
receptivity, like the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by
potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent state--a capacity to become
something different under external influences. But we also mean by
capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency, force. Now
when we say that immaturity means the possibility of growth, we are
not referring to absence of powers which may exist at a later time; we
express a force positively present--the ability to develop.
Our tendency to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something
which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature is due to
regarding childhood comparatively, instead of intrinsically. We treat
it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a
fixed standard. This fixes attention upon what the child has not, and
will not have till he becomes a man. This comparative standpoint is
legitimate enough for some purposes, but if we make it final, the
question arises whether we are not guilty of an overweening presumption.
Children, if they could express themselves articulately and sincerely,
would tell a different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for
the conviction that for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults
must become as little children. The seriousness of the assumption of the
negative quality of the possibilities of immaturity is apparent when
we reflect that it sets up as an ideal and standard a static end. The
fulfillment of growing is taken to mean an accomplished growth: that is
to say, an Ungrowth, something which is no longer growing. The futility
of the assumption is seen in the fact that every adult resents the
imputation of having no further possibilities of growth; and so far
as he finds that they are closed to him mourns the fact as evidence of
loss, instead of falling back on the achieved as adequate manifestation
of power. Why an unequal measure for child and man?
Taken absolutely, instead of comparatively, immaturity designates a
positive force or ability,--the power to grow. We do not have to draw
out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational
doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager
and impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is
something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility
gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity,
dependence and plasticity.
(1) It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive,
still more absurd as a power. Yet if helplessness were all there were
in dependence, no development could ever take place. A merely impotent
being has to be carried, forever, by others. The fact that dependence is
accompanied by growth in ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into
parasitism, suggests that it is already something constructive. Being
merely sheltered by others would not promote growth. For
(2) it would only build a wall around impotence. With reference to the
physical world, the child is helpless. He lacks at birth and for a
long time thereafter power to make his way physically, to make his own
living. If he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive an
hour. On this side his helplessness is almost complete. The young of
the brutes are immeasurably his superiors. He is physically weak and not
able to turn the strength which he possesses to coping with the physical
environment.
1. The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however,
some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an
early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound
up with the life of those about them. They are compelled, so to speak,
to have physical gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. Human
infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk and think as if they
simply happened to be physically in a social environment; as if social
forces exclusively existed in the adults who take care of them, they
being passive recipients. If it were said that children are themselves
marvelously endowed with power to enlist the cooperative attention of
others, this would be thought to be a backhanded way of saying
that others are marvelously attentive to the needs of children. But
observation shows that children are gifted with an equipment of the
first order for social intercourse. Few grown-up persons retain all
of the flexible and sensitive ability of children to vibrate
sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about them.
Inattention to physical things (going with incapacity to control them)
is accompanied by a corresponding intensification of interest and
attention as to the doings of people. The native mechanism of the child
and his impulses all tend to facile social responsiveness. The statement
that children, before adolescence, are egotistically self-centered, even
if it were true, would not contradict the truth of this statement. It
would simply indicate that their social responsiveness is employed on
their own behalf, not that it does not exist. But the statement is not
true as matter of fact. The facts which are cited in support of the
alleged pure egoism of children really show the intensity and directness
with which they go to their mark. If the ends which form the mark seem
narrow and selfish to adults, it is only because adults (by means of a
similar engrossment in their day) have mastered these ends, which
have consequently ceased to interest them. Most of the remainder of
children's alleged native egoism is simply an egoism which runs counter
to an adult's egoism. To a grown-up person who is too absorbed in
his own affairs to take an interest in children's affairs, children
doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in their own affairs.
From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a
weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that
increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of
an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more
self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often
makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to
develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone--an
unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the
remediable suffering of the world.
2. The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different from the
plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a capacity to take on change
of form in accord with external pressure. It lies near the pliable
elasticity by which some persons take on the color of their surroundings
while retaining their own bent. But it is something deeper than this. It
is essentially the ability to learn from experience; the power to retain
from one experience something which is of avail in coping with the
difficulties of a later situation. This means power to modify actions
on the basis of the results of prior experiences, the power to develop
dispositions. Without it, the acquisition of habits is impossible.
It is a familiar fact that the young of the higher animals, and
especially the human young, have to learn to utilize their instinctive
reactions. The human being is born with a greater number of instinctive
tendencies than other animals. But the instincts of the lower animals
perfect themselves for appropriate action at an early period after
birth, while most of those of the human infant are of little account
just as they stand. An original specialized power of adjustment secures
immediate efficiency, but, like a railway ticket, it is good for one
route only. A being who, in order to use his eyes, ears, hands,
and legs, has to experiment in making varied combinations of their
reactions, achieves a control that is flexible and varied. A chick,
for example, pecks accurately at a bit of food in a few hours after
hatching. This means that definite coordinations of activities of the
eyes in seeing and of the body and head in striking are perfected in a
few trials. An infant requires about six months to be able to gauge with
approximate accuracy the action in reaching which will coordinate with
his visual activities; to be able, that is, to tell whether he can reach
a seen object and just how to execute the reaching. As a result, the
chick is limited by the relative perfection of its original endowment.
The infant has the advantage of the multitude of instinctive tentative
reactions and of the experiences that accompany them, even though he is
at a temporary disadvantage because they cross one another. In learning
an action, instead of having it given ready-made, one of necessity
learns to vary its factors, to make varied combinations of them,
according to change of circumstances. A possibility of continuing
progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are
developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the
fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to
learn.
The importance for human life of the two facts of dependence and
variable control has been summed up in the doctrine of the significance
of prolonged infancy. 1 This prolongation is significant from the
standpoint of the adult members of the group as well as from that of the
young. The presence of dependent and learning beings is a stimulus to
nurture and affection. The need for constant continued care was probably
a chief means in transforming temporary cohabitations into permanent
unions. It certainly was a chief influence in forming habits of
affectionate and sympathetic watchfulness; that constructive interest
in the well-being of others which is essential to associated life.
Intellectually, this moral development meant the introduction of many
new objects of attention; it stimulated foresight and planning for the
future. Thus there is a reciprocal influence. Increasing complexity of
social life requires a longer period of infancy in which to acquire the
needed powers; this prolongation of dependence means prolongation of
plasticity, or power of acquiring variable and novel modes of control.
Hence it provides a further push to social progress.
2. Habits as Expressions of Growth. We have already noted that
plasticity is the capacity to retain and carry over from prior
experience factors which modify subsequent activities. This signifies
the capacity to acquire habits, or develop definite dispositions. We
have now to consider the salient features of habits. In the first place,
a habit is a form of executive skill, of efficiency in doing. A habit
means an ability to use natural conditions as means to ends. It is
an active control of the environment through control of the organs of
action. We are perhaps apt to emphasize the control of the body at the
expense of control of the environment. We think of walking, talking,
playing the piano, the specialized skills characteristic of the etcher,
the surgeon, the bridge-builder, as if they were simply ease, deftness,
and accuracy on the part of the organism. They are that, of course; but
the measure of the value of these qualities lies in the economical and
effective control of the environment which they secure. To be able to
walk is to have certain properties of nature at our disposal--and so
with all other habits.
Education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the acquisition
of those habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his
environment. The definition expresses an essential phase of growth. But
it is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense of
control of means for achieving ends. If we think of a habit simply as
a change wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change
consists in ability to effect subsequent changes in the environment, we
shall be led to think of "adjustment" as a conformity to environment as
wax conforms to the seal which impresses it. The environment is thought
of as something fixed, providing in its fixity the end and standard
of changes taking place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting
ourselves to this fixity of external conditions. 2 Habit as
habituation is indeed something relatively passive; we get used to our
surroundings--to our clothing, our shoes, and gloves; to the atmosphere
as long as it is fairly equable; to our daily associates, etc.
Conformity to the environment, a change wrought in the organism without
reference to ability to modify surroundings, is a marked trait of such
habituations. Aside from the fact that we are not entitled to carry
over the traits of such adjustments (which might well be called
accommodations, to mark them off from active adjustments) into habits of
active use of our surroundings, two features of habituations are worth
notice. In the first place, we get used to things by first using them.
Consider getting used to a strange city. At first, there is excessive
stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response. Gradually certain
stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are
degraded. We can say either that we do not respond to them any longer,
or more truly that we have effected a persistent response to them--an
equilibrium of adjustment. This means, in the second place, that this
enduring adjustment supplies the background upon which are made specific
adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never interested in changing
the whole environment; there is much that we take for granted and accept
just as it already is. Upon this background our activities focus at
certain points in an endeavor to introduce needed changes. Habituation
is thus our adjustment to an environment which at the time we are not
concerned with modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active
habits. Adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the
environment to our own activities as of our activities to the
environment. A savage tribe manages to live on a desert plain. It adapts
itself. But its adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating,
putting up with things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence,
and a minimum of active control, of subjection to use. A civilized
people enters upon the scene. It also adapts itself. It introduces
irrigation; it searches the world for plants and animals that will
flourish under such conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those
which are growing there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as
a rose. The savage is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits
which transform the environment.
The significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its executive
and motor phase. It means formation of intellectual and emotional
disposition as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency of
action. Any habit marks an inclination--an active preference and choice
for the conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not wait,
Micawber-like, for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy;
it actively seeks for occasions to pass into full operation. If its
expression is unduly blocked, inclination shows itself in uneasiness and
intense craving. A habit also marks an intellectual disposition. Where
there is a habit, there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment
to which action is applied. There is a definite way of understanding the
situations in which the habit operates. Modes of thought, of observation
and reflection, enter as forms of skill and of desire into the habits
that make a man an engineer, an architect, a physician, or a merchant.
In unskilled forms of labor, the intellectual factors are at minimum
precisely because the habits involved are not of a high grade. But there
are habits of judging and reasoning as truly as of handling a tool,
painting a picture, or conducting an experiment. Such statements are,
however, understatements. The habits of mind involved in habits of the
eye and hand supply the latter with their significance. Above all,
the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of the habit to
varied and elastic use, and hence to continued growth. We speak of fixed
habits. Well, the phrase may mean powers so well established that their
possessor always has them as resources when needed. But the phrase
is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with loss of freshness,
open-mindedness, and originality. Fixity of habit may mean that
something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our having a free hold
upon things. This fact explains two points in a common notion about
habits: their identification with mechanical and external modes of
action to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the tendency
to give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad habits." Many
a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his chosen
profession called a habit, and would naturally think of his use of
tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the meaning of habit.
A habit is to him something which has a hold on him, something not
easily thrown off even though judgment condemn it.
Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into
ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which
intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking
habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that they are
opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation and decision. As we
have seen, the acquiring of habits is due to an original plasticity
of our natures: to our ability to vary responses till we find an
appropriate and efficient way of acting. Routine habits, and habits that
possess us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end
to plasticity. They mark the close of power to vary. There can be no
doubt of the tendency of organic plasticity, of the physiological basis,
to lessen with growing years. The instinctively mobile and eagerly
varying action of childhood, the love of new stimuli and new
developments, too easily passes into a "settling down," which means
aversion to change and a resting on past achievements. Only an
environment which secures the full use of intelligence in the process
of forming habits can counteract this tendency. Of course, the same
hardening of the organic conditions affects the physiological structures
which are involved in thinking. But this fact only indicates the need
of persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is
invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted method which falls
back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure external efficiency
of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought, marks a deliberate
closing in of surroundings upon growth.
3. The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development. We have
had so far but little to say in this chapter about education. We have
been occupied with the conditions and implications of growth. If our
conclusions are justified, they carry with them, however, definite
educational consequences. When it is said that education is development,
everything depends upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion
is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is life.
Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (i) that the
educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end; and
that (ii) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing,
reconstructing, transforming.
1. Development when it is interpreted in comparative terms, that is,
with respect to the special traits of child and adult life, means
the direction of power into special channels: the formation of habits
involving executive skill, definiteness of interest, and specific
objects of observation and thought. But the comparative view is not
final. The child has specific powers; to ignore that fact is to stunt
or distort the organs upon which his growth depends. The adult uses his
powers to transform his environment, thereby occasioning new stimuli
which redirect his powers and keep them developing. Ignoring this fact
means arrested development, a passive accommodation. Normal child
and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growing. The
difference between them is not the difference between growth and
no growth, but between the modes of growth appropriate to different
conditions. With respect to the development of powers devoted to coping
with specific scientific and economic problems we may say the child
should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity,
unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult
should be growing in childlikeness. One statement is as true as the
other.
Three ideas which have been criticized, namely, the merely privative
nature of immaturity, static adjustment to a fixed environment, and
rigidity of habit, are all connected with a false idea of growth or
development,--that it is a movement toward a fixed goal. Growth is
regarded as having an end, instead of being an end. The educational
counterparts of the three fallacious ideas are first, failure to take
account of the instinctive or native powers of the young; secondly,
failure to develop initiative in coping with novel situations; thirdly,
an undue emphasis upon drill and other devices which secure automatic
skill at the expense of personal perception. In all cases, the adult
environment is accepted as a standard for the child. He is to be brought
up to it.
Natural instincts are either disregarded or treated as nuisances--as
obnoxious traits to be suppressed, or at all events to be brought into
conformity with external standards. Since conformity is the aim, what is
distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or regarded
as a source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to
uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the
novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown.
Since the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process of growing,
external agents have to be resorted to to induce movement toward it.
Whenever a method of education is stigmatized as mechanical, we may be
sure that external pressure is brought to bear to reach an external end.
2. Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save
more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save
more education. It is a commonplace to say that education should not
cease when one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that the
purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by
organizing the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from
life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn
in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.
When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed
comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up
thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. Abandoning this
notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of
instruction as a method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge into
a mental and moral hole which awaits filling. Since life means growth,
a living creature lives as truly and positively at one stage as at
another, with the same intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims.
Hence education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which
insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age. We first look
with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as something to be got
over as rapidly as possible. Then the adult formed by such educative
methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood and youth as a
scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers. This ironical situation
will endure till it is recognized that living has its own intrinsic
quality and that the business of education is with that quality.
Realization that life is growth protects us from that so-called
idealizing of childhood which in effect is nothing but lazy indulgence.
Life is not to be identified with every superficial act and interest.
Even though it is not always easy to tell whether what appears to be
mere surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained power,
we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as ends in
themselves. They are signs of possible growth. They are to be turned
into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or
cultivated for their own sake. Excessive attention to surface phenomena
(even in the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to
their fixation and thus to arrested development. What impulses are
moving toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for
parent and teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity cannot
be better put than in the words of Emerson: "Respect the child. Be not
too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry
which replies to this suggestion: Would you verily throw up the reins
of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to
the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy
a respect for the child's nature? I answer,--Respect the child, respect
him to the end, but also respect yourself.... The two points in a boy's
training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that; to keep
his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling, and horseplay; keep
his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it
points." And as Emerson goes on to show this reverence for childhood
and youth instead of opening up an easy and easy-going path to the
instructors, "involves at once, immense claims on the time, the thought,
on the life of the teacher. It requires time, use, insight, event, all
the great lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it
implies character and profoundness."
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.
1 Intimations of its significance are found in a number of writers, but
John Fiske, in his Excursions of an Evolutionist, is accredited with its
first systematic exposition.
2 This conception is, of course, a logical correlate of the conceptions
of the external relation of stimulus and response, considered in
the last chapter, and of the negative conceptions of immaturity and
plasticity noted in this chapter.