1. Education as Preparation. We have laid it down that the educative
process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every
stage an added capacity of growth. This conception contrasts sharply
with other ideas which have influenced practice. By making the contrast
explicit, the meaning of the conception will be brought more clearly to
light. The first contrast is with the idea that education is a process
of preparation or getting ready. What is to be prepared for is, of
course, the responsibilities and privileges of adult life. Children are
not regarded as social members in full and regular standing. They are
looked upon as candidates; they are placed on the waiting list. The
conception is only carried a little farther when the life of adults
is considered as not having meaning on its own account, but as a
preparatory probation for "another life." The idea is but another form
of the notion of the negative and privative character of growth already
criticized; hence we shall not repeat the criticisms, but pass on to the
evil consequences which flow from putting education on this basis.
In the first place, it involves loss of impetus. Motive power is not
utilized. Children proverbially live in the present; that is not only
a fact not to be evaded, but it is an excellence. The future just as
future lacks urgency and body. To get ready for something, one knows not
what nor why, is to throw away the leverage that exists, and to seek for
motive power in a vague chance. Under such circumstances, there is, in
the second place, a premium put on shilly-shallying and procrastination.
The future prepared for is a long way off; plenty of time will intervene
before it becomes a present. Why be in a hurry about getting ready for
it? The temptation to postpone is much increased because the present
offers so many wonderful opportunities and proffers such invitations to
adventure. Naturally attention and energy go to them; education accrues
naturally as an outcome, but a lesser education than if the full stress
of effort had been put upon making conditions as educative as possible.
A third undesirable result is the substitution of a conventional average
standard of expectation and requirement for a standard which concerns
the specific powers of the individual under instruction. For a severe
and definite judgment based upon the strong and weak points of the
individual is substituted a vague and wavering opinion concerning what
youth may be expected, upon the average, to become in some more or less
remote future; say, at the end of the year, when promotions are to take
place, or by the time they are ready to go to college or to enter
upon what, in contrast with the probationary stage, is regarded as the
serious business of life. It is impossible to overestimate the loss
which results from the deflection of attention from the strategic point
to a comparatively unproductive point. It fails most just where it
thinks it is succeeding--in getting a preparation for the future.
Finally, the principle of preparation makes necessary recourse on a
large scale to the use of adventitious motives of pleasure and pain. The
future having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the
possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make
it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy
work, done for present reasons and as a factor in living, is largely
unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is
actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to
be told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will
accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future,
rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely
systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems
which neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for a
future. Then, in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this
method, the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of
information required against some later day is sugar-coated, so that
pupils may be fooled into taking something which they do not care for.
It is not of course a question whether education should prepare for the
future. If education is growth, it must progressively realize present
possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with
later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd
moments; it is a continuous leading into the future. If the environment,
in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the
present capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of
the present is surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching
importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the
mainspring of present effort. Because the need of preparation for a
continually developing life is great, it is imperative that every energy
should be bent to making the present experience as rich and significant
as possible. Then as the present merges insensibly into the future, the
future is taken care of.
2. Education as Unfolding. There is a conception of education which
professes to be based upon the idea of development. But it takes back
with one hand what it proffers with the other. Development is conceived
not as continuous growing, but as the unfolding of latent powers toward
a definite goal. The goal is conceived of as completion,--perfection.
Life at any stage short of attainment of this goal is merely an
unfolding toward it. Logically the doctrine is only a variant of the
preparation theory. Practically the two differ in that the adherents of
the latter make much of the practical and professional duties for which
one is preparing, while the developmental doctrine speaks of the ideal
and spiritual qualities of the principle which is unfolding.
The conception that growth and progress are just approximations to
a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its
transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life. It
simulates the style of the latter. It pays the tribute of speaking
much of development, process, progress. But all of these operations
are conceived to be merely transitional; they lack meaning on their own
account. They possess significance only as movements toward something
away from what is now going on. Since growth is just a movement toward a
completed being, the final ideal is immobile. An abstract and indefinite
future is in control with all which that connotes in depreciation of
present power and opportunity.
Since the goal of perfection, the standard of development, is very far
away, it is so beyond us that, strictly speaking, it is unattainable.
Consequently, in order to be available for present guidance it must be
translated into something which stands for it. Otherwise we should
be compelled to regard any and every manifestation of the child as an
unfolding from within, and hence sacred. Unless we set up some definite
criterion representing the ideal end by which to judge whether a given
attitude or act is approximating or moving away, our sole alternative is
to withdraw all influences of the environment lest they interfere with
proper development. Since that is not practicable, a working substitute
is set up. Usually, of course, this is some idea which an adult would
like to have a child acquire. Consequently, by "suggestive questioning"
or some other pedagogical device, the teacher proceeds to "draw out"
from the pupil what is desired. If what is desired is obtained, that
is evidence that the child is unfolding properly. But as the pupil
generally has no initiative of his own in this direction, the result is
a random groping after what is wanted, and the formation of habits of
dependence upon the cues furnished by others. Just because such methods
simulate a true principle and claim to have its sanction they may do
more harm than would outright "telling," where, at least, it remains
with the child how much will stick.
Within the sphere of philosophic thought there have been two typical
attempts to provide a working representative of the absolute goal. Both
start from the conception of a whole--an absolute--which is "immanent"
in human life. The perfect or complete ideal is not a mere ideal; it
is operative here and now. But it is present only implicitly,
"potentially," or in an enfolded condition. What is termed development
is the gradual making explicit and outward of what is thus wrapped up.
Froebel and Hegel, the authors of the two philosophic schemes
referred to, have different ideas of the path by which the progressive
realization of manifestation of the complete principle is effected.
According to Hegel, it is worked out through a series of historical
institutions which embody the different factors in the Absolute.
According to Froebel, the actuating force is the presentation of
symbols, largely mathematical, corresponding to the essential traits
of the Absolute. When these are presented to the child, the Whole,
or perfection, sleeping within him, is awakened. A single example
may indicate the method. Every one familiar with the kindergarten is
acquainted with the circle in which the children gather. It is not
enough that the circle is a convenient way of grouping the children. It
must be used "because it is a symbol of the collective life of mankind
in general." Froebel's recognition of the significance of the native
capacities of children, his loving attention to them, and his influence
in inducing others to study them, represent perhaps the most effective
single force in modern educational theory in effecting widespread
acknowledgment of the idea of growth. But his formulation of the notion
of development and his organization of devices for promoting it were
badly hampered by the fact that he conceived development to be the
unfolding of a ready-made latent principle. He failed to see that
growing is growth, developing is development, and consequently placed
the emphasis upon the completed product. Thus he set up a goal which
meant the arrest of growth, and a criterion which is not applicable to
immediate guidance of powers, save through translation into abstract and
symbolic formulae.
A remote goal of complete unfoldedness is, in technical philosophic
language, transcendental. That is, it is something apart from direct
experience and perception. So far as experience is concerned, it is
empty; it represents a vague sentimental aspiration rather than anything
which can be intelligently grasped and stated. This vagueness must be
compensated for by some a priori formula. Froebel made the connection
between the concrete facts of experience and the transcendental ideal of
development by regarding the former as symbols of the latter. To
regard known things as symbols, according to some arbitrary a priori
formula--and every a priori conception must be arbitrary--is an
invitation to romantic fancy to seize upon any analogies which appeal
to it and treat them as laws. After the scheme of symbolism has been
settled upon, some definite technique must be invented by which the
inner meaning of the sensible symbols used may be brought home to
children. Adults being the formulators of the symbolism are naturally
the authors and controllers of the technique. The result was that
Froebel's love of abstract symbolism often got the better of his
sympathetic insight; and there was substituted for development as
arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation as the history of
instruction has ever seen.
With Hegel the necessity of finding some working concrete counterpart of
the inaccessible Absolute took an institutional, rather than symbolic,
form. His philosophy, like Froebel's, marks in one direction an
indispensable contribution to a valid conception of the process of life.
The weaknesses of an abstract individualistic philosophy were evident
to him; he saw the impossibility of making a clean sweep of historical
institutions, of treating them as despotisms begot in artifice and
nurtured in fraud. In his philosophy of history and society culminated
the efforts of a whole series of German writers--Lessing, Herder, Kant,
Schiller, Goethe--to appreciate the nurturing influence of the great
collective institutional products of humanity. For those who learned
the lesson of this movement, it was henceforth impossible to conceive
of institutions or of culture as artificial. It destroyed completely--in
idea, not in fact--the psychology that regarded "mind" as a ready-made
possession of a naked individual by showing the significance of
"objective mind"--language, government, art, religion--in the formation
of individual minds. But since Hegel was haunted by the conception of an
absolute goal, he was obliged to arrange institutions as they concretely
exist, on a stepladder of ascending approximations. Each in its time
and place is absolutely necessary, because a stage in the self-realizing
process of the absolute mind. Taken as such a step or stage, its
existence is proof of its complete rationality, for it is an integral
element in the total, which is Reason. Against institutions as they are,
individuals have no spiritual rights; personal development, and nurture,
consist in obedient assimilation of the spirit of existing institutions.
Conformity, not transformation, is the essence of education.
Institutions change as history shows; but their change, the rise and
fall of states, is the work of the "world-spirit." Individuals, save the
great "heroes" who are the chosen organs of the world-spirit, have
no share or lot in it. In the later nineteenth century, this type of
idealism was amalgamated with the doctrine of biological evolution.
"Evolution" was a force working itself out to its own end. As against
it, or as compared with it, the conscious ideas and preference of
individuals are impotent. Or, rather, they are but the means by which
it works itself out. Social progress is an "organic growth," not an
experimental selection. Reason is all powerful, but only Absolute Reason
has any power.
The recognition (or rediscovery, for the idea was familiar to the
Greeks) that great historic institutions are active factors in the
intellectual nurture of mind was a great contribution to educational
philosophy. It indicated a genuine advance beyond Rousseau, who had
marred his assertion that education must be a natural development and
not something forced or grafted upon individuals from without, by the
notion that social conditions are not natural. But in its notion of
a complete and all-inclusive end of development, the Hegelian theory
swallowed up concrete individualities, though magnifying The Individual
in the abstract. Some of Hegel's followers sought to reconcile the
claims of the Whole and of individuality by the conception of society as
an organic whole, or organism. That social organization is presupposed
in the adequate exercise of individual capacity is not to be doubted.
But the social organism, interpreted after the relation of the organs of
the body to each other and to the whole body, means that each individual
has a certain limited place and function, requiring to be supplemented
by the place and functions of the other organs. As one portion of the
bodily tissue is differentiated so that it can be the hand and the
hand only, another, the eye, and so on, all taken together making the
organism, so one individual is supposed to be differentiated for the
exercise of the mechanical operations of society, another for those of
a statesman, another for those of a scholar, and so on. The notion
of "organism" is thus used to give a philosophic sanction to class
distinctions in social organization--a notion which in its educational
application again means external dictation instead of growth.
3. Education as Training of Faculties. A theory which has had great
vogue and which came into existence before the notion of growth had much
influence is known as the theory of "formal discipline." It has in view
a correct ideal; one outcome of education should be the creation of
specific powers of accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do
the chief things which it is important for him to do better than he
could without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency,
economy, promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education was
indicated in what was said about habits as the product of educative
development. But the theory in question takes, as it were, a short
cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named) as the direct and
conscious aims of instruction, and not simply as the results of growth.
There is a definite number of powers to be trained, as one might
enumerate the kinds of strokes which a golfer has to master.
Consequently education should get directly at the business of training
them. But this implies that they are already there in some untrained
form; otherwise their creation would have to be an indirect product of
other activities and agencies. Being there already in some crude form,
all that remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions,
and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase "formal
discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline" refers both
to the outcome of trained power and to the method of training through
repeated exercise.
The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of
perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing,
feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise
upon material presented. In its classic form, this theory was expressed
by Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the material or
content of knowledge through passively received sensations. On the
other hand, the mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation,
retention, comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. Knowledge results
if the mind discriminates and combines things as they are united and
divided in nature itself. But the important thing for education is
the exercise or practice of the faculties of the mind till they become
thoroughly established habitudes. The analogy constantly employed is
that of a billiard player or gymnast, who by repeated use of certain
muscles in a uniform way at last secures automatic skill. Even the
faculty of thinking was to be formed into a trained habit by repeated
exercises in making and combining simple distinctions, for which, Locke
thought, mathematics affords unrivaled opportunity.
Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to
do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of
the two supplied the matter of knowledge and the object upon which mind
should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which were few
in number and which might be trained by specific exercises. The scheme
appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and
yet it insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception
and storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of
attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization. It
was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material whatever is
received from without; it was idealistic in that final stress fell upon
the formation of intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal
in its assertion that the individual cannot possess or generate any true
ideas on his own account; it was individualistic in placing the end of
education in the perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset
by the individual. This kind of distribution of values expressed with
nicety the state of opinion in the generations following upon Locke.
It became, without explicit reference to Locke, a common-place of
educational theory and of psychology. Practically, it seemed to provide
the educator with definite, instead of vague, tasks. It made the
elaboration of a technique of instruction relatively easy. All that was
necessary was to provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers.
This practice consists in repeated acts of attending, observing,
memorizing, etc. By grading the difficulty of the acts, making each set
of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set which preceded it,
a complete scheme of instruction is evolved. There are various ways,
equally conclusive, of criticizing this conception, in both its alleged
foundations and in its educational application. (1) Perhaps the most
direct mode of attack consists in pointing out that the supposed
original faculties of observation, recollection, willing, thinking,
etc., are purely mythological. There are no such ready-made powers
waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. There are, indeed, a great
number of original native tendencies, instinctive modes of action, based
on the original connections of neurones in the central nervous system.
There are impulsive tendencies of the eyes to follow and fixate light;
of the neck muscles to turn toward light and sound; of the hands to
reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to
make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unpleasant substances; to gag
and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number. But these
tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off from
one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with one another
in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent intellectual
powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they are
tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment
so as to bring about other changes. Something in the throat makes one
cough; the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus
modify the subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a hot thing; it is
impulsively, wholly unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal
alters the stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with
the needs of the organism. It is by such specific changes of organic
activities in response to specific changes in the medium that that
control of the environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is
effected. Now all of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and
smellings and tastings are of this kind. In any legitimate sense of the
words mental or intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these
qualities, and no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any
intellectual properties of observation, judgment, or intentional action
(volition) upon them.
(2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is
not a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one might
strengthen a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in selecting
from the diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which
are especially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to
say, among the reactions of the body in general occur upon stimulation
of the eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to
reaching, grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are
gradually eliminated--or else no training occurs. As we have already
noted, the primary reactions, with a very few exceptions are too
diffused and general to be practically of much use in the case of the
human infant. Hence the identity of training with selective response.
(Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important is the specific coordination of
different factors of response which takes place. There is not merely a
selection of the hand reactions which effect grasping, but of the
particular visual stimuli which call out just these reactions and no
others, and an establishment of connection between the two. But the
coordinating does not stop here. Characteristic temperature reactions
may take place when the object is grasped. These will also be brought
in; later, the temperature reaction may be connected directly with the
optical stimulus, the hand reaction being suppressed--as a bright flame,
independent of close contact, may steer one away. Or the child in
handling the object pounds with it, or crumples it, and a sound issues.
The ear response is then brought into the system of response. If a
certain sound (the conventional name) is made by others and accompanies
the activity, response of both ear and the vocal apparatus connected
with auditory stimulation will also become an associated factor in the
complex response.
(3) The more specialized the adjustment of response and stimulus to each
other (for, taking the sequence of activities into account, the stimuli
are adapted to reactions as well as reactions to stimuli) the more rigid
and the less generally available is the training secured. In equivalent
language, less intellectual or educative quality attaches to the
training. The usual way of stating this fact is that the more
specialized the reaction, the less is the skill acquired in practicing
and perfecting it transferable to other modes of behavior. According
to the orthodox theory of formal discipline, a pupil in studying his
spelling lesson acquires, besides ability to spell those particular
words, an increase of power of observation, attention, and recollection
which may be employed whenever these powers are needed. As matter of
fact, the more he confines himself to noticing and fixating the forms of
words, irrespective of connection with other things (such as the
meaning of the words, the context in which they are habitually used, the
derivation and classification of the verbal form, etc.) the less likely
is he to acquire an ability which can be used for anything except the
mere noting of verbal visual forms. He may not even be increasing his
ability to make accurate distinctions among geometrical forms, to say
nothing of ability to observe in general. He is merely selecting the
stimuli supplied by the forms of the letters and the motor reactions
of oral or written reproduction. The scope of coordination (to use
our prior terminology) is extremely limited. The connections which are
employed in other observations and recollections (or reproductions) are
deliberately eliminated when the pupil is exercised merely upon forms
of letters and words. Having been excluded, they cannot be restored when
needed. The ability secured to observe and to recall verbal forms is
not available for perceiving and recalling other things. In the ordinary
phraseology, it is not transferable. But the wider the context--that is
to say, the more varied the stimuli and responses coordinated--the more
the ability acquired is available for the effective performance of
other acts; not, strictly speaking, because there is any "transfer,"
but because the wide range of factors employed in the specific act is
equivalent to a broad range of activity, to a flexible, instead of to a
narrow and rigid, coordination. (4) Going to the root of the matter, the
fundamental fallacy of the theory is its dualism; that is to say, its
separation of activities and capacities from subject matter. There is no
such thing as an ability to see or hear or remember in general; there
is only the ability to see or hear or remember something. To talk about
training a power, mental or physical, in general, apart from the subject
matter involved in its exercise, is nonsense. Exercise may react
upon circulation, breathing, and nutrition so as to develop vigor or
strength, but this reservoir is available for specific ends only by use
in connection with the material means which accomplish them. Vigor will
enable a man to play tennis or golf or to sail a boat better than he
would if he were weak. But only by employing ball and racket, ball and
club, sail and tiller, in definite ways does he become expert in any one
of them; and expertness in one secures expertness in another only so far
as it is either a sign of aptitude for fine muscular coordinations or as
the same kind of coordination is involved in all of them. Moreover, the
difference between the training of ability to spell which comes from
taking visual forms in a narrow context and one which takes them in
connection with the activities required to grasp meaning, such
as context, affiliations of descent, etc., may be compared to the
difference between exercises in the gymnasium with pulley weights to
"develop" certain muscles, and a game or sport. The former is uniform
and mechanical; it is rigidly specialized. The latter is varied from
moment to moment; no two acts are quite alike; novel emergencies have to
be met; the coordinations forming have to be kept flexible and elastic.
Consequently, the training is much more "general"; that is to say, it
covers a wider territory and includes more factors. Exactly the same
thing holds of special and general education of the mind.
A monotonously uniform exercise may by practice give great skill in one
special act; but the skill is limited to that act, be it bookkeeping or
calculations in logarithms or experiments in hydrocarbons. One may be
an authority in a particular field and yet of more than usually poor
judgment in matters not closely allied, unless the training in the
special field has been of a kind to ramify into the subject matter
of the other fields. (5) Consequently, such powers as observation,
recollection, judgment, esthetic taste, represent organized results of
the occupation of native active tendencies with certain subject matters.
A man does not observe closely and fully by pressing a button for
the observing faculty to get to work (in other words by "willing"
to observe); but if he has something to do which can be accomplished
successfully only through intensive and extensive use of eye and hand,
he naturally observes. Observation is an outcome, a consequence, of
the interaction of sense organ and subject matter. It will vary,
accordingly, with the subject matter employed.
It is consequently futile to set up even the ulterior development of
faculties of observation, memory, etc., unless we have first determined
what sort of subject matter we wish the pupil to become expert in
observing and recalling and for what purpose. And it is only repeating
in another form what has already been said, to declare that the
criterion here must be social. We want the person to note and recall and
judge those things which make him an effective competent member of the
group in which he is associated with others. Otherwise we might as well
set the pupil to observing carefully cracks on the wall and set him to
memorizing meaningless lists of words in an unknown tongue--which is
about what we do in fact when we give way to the doctrine of formal
discipline. If the observing habits of a botanist or chemist or engineer
are better habits than those which are thus formed, it is because
they deal with subject matter which is more significant in life. In
concluding this portion of the discussion, we note that the distinction
between special and general education has nothing to do with the
transferability of function or power. In the literal sense, any transfer
is miraculous and impossible. But some activities are broad; they
involve a coordination of many factors. Their development demands
continuous alternation and readjustment. As conditions change, certain
factors are subordinated, and others which had been of minor importance
come to the front. There is constant redistribution of the focus of the
action, as is seen in the illustration of a game as over against pulling
a fixed weight by a series of uniform motions. Thus there is practice in
prompt making of new combinations with the focus of activity shifted to
meet change in subject matter. Wherever an activity is broad in
scope (that is, involves the coordinating of a large variety of
sub-activities), and is constantly and unexpectedly obliged to change
direction in its progressive development, general education is bound
to result. For this is what "general" means; broad and flexible. In
practice, education meets these conditions, and hence is general, in the
degree in which it takes account of social relationships. A person may
become expert in technical philosophy, or philology, or mathematics or
engineering or financiering, and be inept and ill-advised in his action
and judgment outside of his specialty. If however his concern with
these technical subject matters has been connected with human activities
having social breadth, the range of active responses called into play
and flexibly integrated is much wider. Isolation of subject matter
from a social context is the chief obstruction in current practice to
securing a general training of mind. Literature, art, religion, when
thus dissociated, are just as narrowing as the technical things which
the professional upholders of general education strenuously oppose.
Summary. The conception that the result of the educative process is
capacity for further education stands in contrast with some other
ideas which have profoundly influenced practice. The first contrasting
conception considered is that of preparing or getting ready for some
future duty or privilege. Specific evil effects were pointed out which
result from the fact that this aim diverts attention of both teacher
and taught from the only point to which it may be fruitfully
directed--namely, taking advantage of the needs and possibilities of the
immediate present. Consequently it defeats its own professed purpose.
The notion that education is an unfolding from within appears to have
more likeness to the conception of growth which has been set forth. But
as worked out in the theories of Froebel and Hegel, it involves
ignoring the interaction of present organic tendencies with the present
environment, just as much as the notion of preparation. Some implicit
whole is regarded as given ready-made and the significance of growth
is merely transitory; it is not an end in itself, but simply a means
of making explicit what is already implicit. Since that which is not
explicit cannot be made definite use of, something has to be found to
represent it. According to Froebel, the mystic symbolic value of certain
objects and acts (largely mathematical) stand for the Absolute
Whole which is in process of unfolding. According to Hegel, existing
institutions are its effective actual representatives. Emphasis upon
symbols and institutions tends to divert perception from the direct
growth of experience in richness of meaning. Another influential but
defective theory is that which conceives that mind has, at birth,
certain mental faculties or powers, such as perceiving, remembering,
willing, judging, generalizing, attending, etc., and that education is
the training of these faculties through repeated exercise. This theory
treats subject matter as comparatively external and indifferent, its
value residing simply in the fact that it may occasion exercise of
the general powers. Criticism was directed upon this separation of the
alleged powers from one another and from the material upon which they
act. The outcome of the theory in practice was shown to be an undue
emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized modes of skill at the
expense of initiative, inventiveness, and readaptability--qualities
which depend upon the broad and consecutive interaction of specific
activities with one another. 1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is
so great, there are so many paths of construction, that every stimulus
brings about some change in all of the organs of response. We are
accustomed however to ignore most of these modifications of the total
organic activity, concentrating upon that one which is most specifically
adapted to the most urgent stimulus of the moment. 2 This statement
should be compared with what was said earlier about the sequential
ordering of responses (p. 25). It is merely a more explicit statement of
the way in which that consecutive arrangement occurs.