1. Nature as Supplying the Aim. We have just pointed out the futility
of trying to establish the aim of education--some one final aim which
subordinates all others to itself. We have indicated that since general
aims are but prospective points of view from which to survey the
existing conditions and estimate their possibilities, we might have any
number of them, all consistent with one another. As matter of fact, a
large number have been stated at different times, all having great local
value. For the statement of aim is a matter of emphasis at a given time.
And we do not emphasize things which do not require emphasis--that is,
such things as are taking care of themselves fairly well. We tend rather
to frame our statement on the basis of the defects and needs of the
contemporary situation; we take for granted, without explicit statement
which would be of no use, whatever is right or approximately so. We
frame our explicit aims in terms of some alteration to be brought about.
It is, then, DO paradox requiring explanation that a given epoch or
generation tends to emphasize in its conscious projections just the
things which it has least of in actual fact. A time of domination by
authority will call out as response the desirability of great individual
freedom; one of disorganized individual activities the need of social
control as an educational aim.
The actual and implicit practice and the conscious or stated aim thus
balance each other. At different times such aims as complete living,
better methods of language study, substitution of things for words,
social efficiency, personal culture, social service, complete
development of personality, encyclopedic knowledge, discipline, a
esthetic contemplation, utility, etc., have served. The following
discussion takes up three statements of recent influence; certain others
have been incidentally discussed in the previous chapters, and others
will be considered later in a discussion of knowledge and of the values
of studies. We begin with a consideration that education is a process
of development in accordance with nature, taking Rousseau's statement,
which opposed natural to social (See ante, p. 91); and then pass over
to the antithetical conception of social efficiency, which often opposes
social to natural.
(1) Educational reformers disgusted with the conventionality and
artificiality of the scholastic methods they find about them are prone
to resort to nature as a standard. Nature is supposed to furnish the
law and the end of development; ours it is to follow and conform to her
ways. The positive value of this conception lies in the forcible way
in which it calls attention to the wrongness of aims which do not have
regard to the natural endowment of those educated. Its weakness is the
ease with which natural in the sense of normal is confused with the
physical. The constructive use of intelligence in foresight, and
contriving, is then discounted; we are just to get out of the way and
allow nature to do the work. Since no one has stated in the doctrine
both its truth and falsity better than Rousseau, we shall turn to him.
"Education," he says, "we receive from three sources--Nature, men,
and things. The spontaneous development of our organs and capacities
constitutes the education of Nature. The use to which we are taught to
put this development constitutes that education given us by Men. The
acquirement of personal experience from surrounding objects constitutes
that of things. Only when these three kinds of education are consonant
and make for the same end, does a man tend towards his true goal. If we
are asked what is this end, the answer is that of Nature. For since
the concurrence of the three kinds of education is necessary to their
completeness, the kind which is entirely independent of our control must
necessarily regulate us in determining the other two." Then he defines
Nature to mean the capacities and dispositions which are inborn, "as
they exist prior to the modification due to constraining habits and the
influence of the opinion of others."
The wording of Rousseau will repay careful study. It contains as
fundamental truths as have been uttered about education in conjunction
with a curious twist. It would be impossible to say better what is said
in the first sentences. The three factors of educative development
are (a) the native structure of our bodily organs and their functional
activities; (b) the uses to which the activities of these organs are put
under the influence of other persons; (c) their direct interaction with
the environment. This statement certainly covers the ground. His other
two propositions are equally sound; namely, (a) that only when the
three factors of education are consonant and cooperative does adequate
development of the individual occur, and (b) that the native activities
of the organs, being original, are basic in conceiving consonance. But
it requires but little reading between the lines, supplemented by other
statements of Rousseau, to perceive that instead of regarding these
three things as factors which must work together to some extent in
order that any one of them may proceed educatively, he regards them as
separate and independent operations. Especially does he believe that
there is an independent and, as he says, "spontaneous" development of
the native organs and faculties. He thinks that this development can
go on irrespective of the use to which they are put. And it is to this
separate development that education coming from social contact is to be
subordinated. Now there is an immense difference between a use of native
activities in accord with those activities themselves--as distinct from
forcing them and perverting them--and supposing that they have a normal
development apart from any use, which development furnishes the standard
and norm of all learning by use. To recur to our previous illustration,
the process of acquiring language is a practically perfect model of
proper educative growth. The start is from native activities of the
vocal apparatus, organs of hearing, etc. But it is absurd to suppose
that these have an independent growth of their own, which left to itself
would evolve a perfect speech. Taken literally, Rousseau's principle
would mean that adults should accept and repeat the babblings and
noises of children not merely as the beginnings of the development
of articulate speech--which they are--but as furnishing language
itself--the standard for all teaching of language.
The point may be summarized by saying that Rousseau was right,
introducing a much-needed reform into education, in holding that the
structure and activities of the organs furnish the conditions of all
teaching of the use of the organs; but profoundly wrong in intimating
that they supply not only the conditions but also the ends of their
development. As matter of fact, the native activities develop, in
contrast with random and capricious exercise, through the uses to which
they are put. And the office of the social medium is, as we have seen,
to direct growth through putting powers to the best possible use. The
instinctive activities may be called, metaphorically, spontaneous,
in the sense that the organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of
operation,--a bias so strong that we cannot go contrary to it, though by
trying to go contrary we may pervert, stunt, and corrupt them. But the
notion of a spontaneous normal development of these activities is pure
mythology. The natural, or native, powers furnish the initiating and
limiting forces in all education; they do not furnish its ends or aims.
There is no learning except from a beginning in unlearned powers, but
learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the unlearned
powers. Rousseau's contrary opinion is doubtless due to the fact that he
identified God with Nature; to him the original powers are wholly good,
coming directly from a wise and good creator. To paraphrase the old
saying about the country and the town, God made the original human
organs and faculties, man makes the uses to which they are put.
Consequently the development of the former furnishes the standard to
which the latter must be subordinated. When men attempt to determine the
uses to which the original activities shall be put, they interfere with
a divine plan. The interference by social arrangements with Nature,
God's work, is the primary source of corruption in individuals.
Rousseau's passionate assertion of the intrinsic goodness of all natural
tendencies was a reaction against the prevalent notion of the total
depravity of innate human nature, and has had a powerful influence in
modifying the attitude towards children's interests. But it is hardly
necessary to say that primitive impulses are of themselves neither good
nor evil, but become one or the other according to the objects for which
they are employed. That neglect, suppression, and premature forcing
of some instincts at the expense of others, are responsible for many
avoidable ills, there can be no doubt. But the moral is not to leave
them alone to follow their own "spontaneous development," but to provide
an environment which shall organize them.
Returning to the elements of truth contained in Rousseau's statements,
we find that natural development, as an aim, enables him to point the
means of correcting many evils in current practices, and to indicate
a number of desirable specific aims. (1) Natural development as an aim
fixes attention upon the bodily organs and the need of health and vigor.
The aim of natural development says to parents and teachers: Make health
an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of
the body--an obvious enough fact and yet one whose due recognition
in practice would almost automatically revolutionize many of our
educational practices. "Nature" is indeed a vague and metaphorical
term, but one thing that "Nature" may be said to utter is that there are
conditions of educational efficiency, and that till we have learned what
these conditions are and have learned to make our practices accord with
them, the noblest and most ideal of our aims are doomed to suffer--are
verbal and sentimental rather than efficacious.
(2) The aim of natural development translates into the aim of respect
for physical mobility. In Rousseau's words: "Children are always in
motion; a sedentary life is injurious." When he says that "Nature's
intention is to strengthen the body before exercising the mind"
he hardly states the fact fairly. But if he had said that nature's
"intention" (to adopt his poetical form of speech) is to develop the
mind especially by exercise of the muscles of the body he would have
stated a positive fact. In other words, the aim of following nature
means, in the concrete, regard for the actual part played by use of the
bodily organs in explorations, in handling of materials, in plays
and games. (3) The general aim translates into the aim of regard for
individual differences among children. Nobody can take the principle of
consideration of native powers into account without being struck by the
fact that these powers differ in different individuals. The difference
applies not merely to their intensity, but even more to their quality
and arrangement. As Rouseau said: "Each individual is born with
a distinctive temperament. We indiscriminately employ children of
different bents on the same exercises; their education destroys the
special bent and leaves a dull uniformity. Therefore after we have
wasted our efforts in stunting the true gifts of nature we see the
short-lived and illusory brilliance we have substituted die away, while
the natural abilities we have crushed do not revive."
Lastly, the aim of following nature means to note the origin, the
waxing, and waning, of preferences and interests. Capacities bud and
bloom irregularly; there is no even four-abreast development. We must
strike while the iron is hot. Especially precious are the first dawnings
of power. More than we imagine, the ways in which the tendencies of
early childhood are treated fix fundamental dispositions and condition
the turn taken by powers that show themselves later. Educational concern
with the early years of life--as distinct from inculcation of useful
arts--dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi
and Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth.
The irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in the
following passage of a student of the growth of the nervous system.
"While growth continues, things bodily and mental are lopsided, for
growth is never general, but is accentuated now at one spot, now at
another. The methods which shall recognize in the presence of these
enormous differences of endowment the dynamic values of natural
inequalities of growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity to the
rounding out gained by pruning will most closely follow that which
takes place in the body and thus prove most effective." 1 Observation of
natural tendencies is difficult under conditions of restraint. They
show themselves most readily in a child's spontaneous sayings and
doings,--that is, in those he engages in when not put at set tasks and
when not aware of being under observation. It does not follow that
these tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but it does
follow that since they are there, they are operative and must be
taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable ones have an
environment which keeps them active, and that their activity shall
control the direction the others take and thereby induce the disuse of
the latter because they lead to nothing. Many tendencies that trouble
parents when they appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too
much direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon them.
At all events, adults too easily assume their own habits and wishes as
standards, and regard all deviations of children's impulses as evils
to be eliminated. That artificiality against which the conception of
following nature is so largely a protest, is the outcome of attempts to
force children directly into the mold of grown-up standards.
In conclusion, we note that the early history of the idea of following
nature combined two factors which had no inherent connection with one
another. Before the time of Rousseau educational reformers had been
inclined to urge the importance of education by ascribing practically
unlimited power to it. All the differences between peoples and between
classes and persons among the same people were said to be due to
differences of training, of exercise, and practice. Originally, mind,
reason, understanding is, for all practical purposes, the same in all.
This essential identity of mind means the essential equality of all and
the possibility of bringing them all to the same level. As a protest
against this view, the doctrine of accord with nature meant a much less
formal and abstract view of mind and its powers. It substituted specific
instincts and impulses and physiological capacities, differing from
individual to individual (just as they differ, as Rousseau pointed out,
even in dogs of the same litter), for abstract faculties of discernment,
memory, and generalization. Upon this side, the doctrine of educative
accord with nature has been reinforced by the development of modern
biology, physiology, and psychology. It means, in effect, that great
as is the significance of nurture, of modification, and transformation
through direct educational effort, nature, or unlearned capacities,
affords the foundation and ultimate resources for such nurture. On the
other hand, the doctrine of following nature was a political dogma. It
meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs, and
ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau's statement that everything is good
as it comes from the hands of the Creator has its signification only in
its contrast with the concluding part of the same sentence: "Everything
degenerates in the hands of man." And again he says: "Natural man has
an absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a complete integer and has no
relation save to himself and to his fellow man. Civilized man is only a
relative unit, the numerator of a fraction whose value depends upon its
dominator, its relation to the integral body of society. Good political
institutions are those which make a man unnatural." It is upon this
conception of the artificial and harmful character of organized social
life as it now exists 2 that he rested the notion that nature not merely
furnishes prime forces which initiate growth but also its plan and goal.
That evil institutions and customs work almost automatically to give a
wrong education which the most careful schooling cannot offset is
true enough; but the conclusion is not to education apart from the
environment, but to provide an environment in which native powers will
be put to better uses.
2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature supply the
end of a true education and society the end of an evil one, could hardly
fail to call out a protest. The opposing emphasis took the form of a
doctrine that the business of education is to supply precisely what
nature fails to secure; namely, habituation of an individual to social
control; subordination of natural powers to social rules. It is not
surprising to find that the value in the idea of social efficiency
resides largely in its protest against the points at which the doctrine
of natural development went astray; while its misuse comes when it is
employed to slur over the truth in that conception. It is a fact that we
must look to the activities and achievements of associated life to find
what the development of power--that is to say, efficiency--means. The
error is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather
than of utilization to secure efficiency. The doctrine is rendered
adequate when we recognize that social efficiency is attained not by
negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities
in occupations having a social meaning. (1) Translated into specific
aims, social efficiency indicates the importance of industrial
competency. Persons cannot live without means of subsistence; the ways
in which these means are employed and consumed have a profound influence
upon all the relationships of persons to one another. If an individual
is not able to earn his own living and that of the children dependent
upon him, he is a drag or parasite upon the activities of others. He
misses for himself one of the most educative experiences of life. If he
is not trained in the right use of the products of industry, there
is grave danger that he may deprave himself and injure others in his
possession of wealth. No scheme of education can afford to neglect
such basic considerations. Yet in the name of higher and more spiritual
ideals, the arrangements for higher education have often not only
neglected them, but looked at them with scorn as beneath the level of
educative concern. With the change from an oligarchical to a democratic
society, it is natural that the significance of an education which
should have as a result ability to make one's way economically in the
world, and to manage economic resources usefully instead of for mere
display and luxury, should receive emphasis.
There is, however, grave danger that in insisting upon this end,
existing economic conditions and standards will be accepted as final.
A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of
competency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated
when the attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite
industrial callings, selected not on the basis of trained original
capacities, but on that of the wealth or social status of parents. As a
matter of fact, industry at the present time undergoes rapid and abrupt
changes through the evolution of new inventions. New industries spring
up, and old ones are revolutionized. Consequently an attempt to train
for too specific a mode of efficiency defeats its own purpose. When the
occupation changes its methods, such individuals are left behind
with even less ability to readjust themselves than if they had a less
definite training. But, most of all, the present industrial constitution
of society is, like every society which has ever existed, full of
inequities. It is the aim of progressive education to take part in
correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate
them. Wherever social control means subordination of individual
activities to class authority, there is danger that industrial education
will be dominated by acceptance of the status quo. Differences
of economic opportunity then dictate what the future callings of
individuals are to be. We have an unconscious revival of the defects
of the Platonic scheme (ante, p. 89) without its enlightened method of
selection.
(2) Civic efficiency, or good citizenship. It is, of course, arbitrary
to separate industrial competency from capacity in good citizenship. But
the latter term may be used to indicate a number of qualifications which
are vaguer than vocational ability. These traits run from whatever make
an individual a more agreeable companion to citizenship in the political
sense: it denotes ability to judge men and measures wisely and to take
a determining part in making as well as obeying laws. The aim of civic
efficiency has at least the merit of protecting us from the notion of a
training of mental power at large. It calls attention to the fact that
power must be relative to doing something, and to the fact that the
things which most need to be done are things which involve one's
relationships with others.
Here again we have to be on guard against understanding the aim too
narrowly. An over-definite interpretation would at certain periods have
excluded scientific discoveries, in spite of the fact that in the last
analysis security of social progress depends upon them. For scientific
men would have been thought to be mere theoretical dreamers, totally
lacking in social efficiency. It must be borne in mind that ultimately
social efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share
in a give and take of experience. It covers all that makes one's own
experience more worth while to others, and all that enables one to
participate more richly in the worthwhile experiences of others. Ability
to produce and to enjoy art, capacity for recreation, the significant
utilization of leisure, are more important elements in it than elements
conventionally associated oftentimes with citizenship. In the broadest
sense, social efficiency is nothing less than that socialization of mind
which is actively concerned in making experiences more communicable;
in breaking down the barriers of social stratification which make
individuals impervious to the interests of others. When social
efficiency is confined to the service rendered by overt acts, its
chief constituent (because its only guarantee) is omitted,--intelligent
sympathy or good will. For sympathy as a desirable quality is something
more than mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have
in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.
What is sometimes called a benevolent interest in others may be but an
unwitting mask for an attempt to dictate to them what their good shall
be, instead of an endeavor to free them so that they may seek and find
the good of their own choice. Social efficiency, even social service,
are hard and metallic things when severed from an active acknowledgment
of the diversity of goods which life may afford to different persons,
and from faith in the social utility of encouraging every individual to
make his own choice intelligent.
3. Culture as Aim. Whether or not social efficiency is an aim which is
consistent with culture turns upon these considerations. Culture means
at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to
the raw and crude. When the "natural" is identified with this rawness,
culture is opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is
also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation
of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is
identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and
meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency. Whether called
culture or complete development of personality, the outcome is identical
with the true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given
to what is unique in an individual--and he would not be an individual if
there were not something incommensurable about him. Its opposite is
the mediocre, the average. Whenever distinctive quality is developed,
distinction of personality results, and with it greater promise for
a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material
commodities. For how can there be a society really worth serving unless
it is constituted of individuals of significant personal qualities?
The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to social
efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society with its rigid
division of inferior and superior. The latter are supposed to have time
and opportunity to develop themselves as human beings; the former are
confined to providing external products. When social efficiency as
measured by product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be
democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of the
masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is accepted and
carried over. But if democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is
that a social return be demanded from all and that opportunity for
development of distinctive capacities be afforded all. The separation
of the two aims in education is fatal to democracy; the adoption of
the narrower meaning of efficiency deprives it of its essential
justification.
The aim of efficiency (like any educational aim) must be included within
the process of experience. When it is measured by tangible external
products, and not by the achieving of a distinctively valuable
experience, it becomes materialistic. Results in the way of commodities
which may be the outgrowth of an efficient personality are, in the
strictest sense, by-products of education: by-products which are
inevitable and important, but nevertheless by-products. To set up an
external aim strengthens by reaction the false conception of culture
which identifies it with something purely "inner." And the idea of
perfecting an "inner" personality is a sure sign of social divisions.
What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with
others--which is not capable of free and full communication. What is
termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten
about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man
might have internally--and therefore exclusively. What one is as a
person is what one is as associated with others, in a free give and take
of intercourse. This transcends both the efficiency which consists
in supplying products to others and the culture which is an exclusive
refinement and polish.
Any individual has missed his calling, farmer, physician, teacher,
student, who does not find that the accomplishments of results of value
to others is an accompaniment of a process of experience inherently
worth while. Why then should it be thought that one must take his
choice between sacrificing himself to doing useful things for others,
or sacrificing them to pursuit of his own exclusive ends, whether the
saving of his own soul or the building of an inner spiritual life and
personality? What happens is that since neither of these things is
persistently possible, we get a compromise and an alternation. One tries
each course by turns. There is no greater tragedy than that so much
of the professedly spiritual and religious thought of the world
has emphasized the two ideals of self-sacrifice and spiritual
self-perfecting instead of throwing its weight against this dualism of
life. The dualism is too deeply established to be easily overthrown; for
that reason, it is the particular task of education at the present time
to struggle in behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal
culture are synonyms instead of antagonists.
Summary. General or comprehensive aims are points of view for surveying
the specific problems of education. Consequently it is a test of the
value of the manner in which any large end is stated to see if it
will translate readily and consistently into the procedures which are
suggested by another. We have applied this test to three general aims:
Development according to nature, social efficiency, and culture or
personal mental enrichment. In each case we have seen that the aims
when partially stated come into conflict with each other. The partial
statement of natural development takes the primitive powers in an
alleged spontaneous development as the end-all. From this point of view
training which renders them useful to others is an abnormal constraint;
one which profoundly modifies them through deliberate nurture is
corrupting. But when we recognize that natural activities mean native
activities which develop only through the uses in which they are
nurtured, the conflict disappears. Similarly a social efficiency which
is defined in terms of rendering external service to others is of
necessity opposed to the aim of enriching the meaning of experience,
while a culture which is taken to consist in an internal refinement of a
mind is opposed to a socialized disposition. But social efficiency as an
educational purpose should mean cultivation of power to join freely
and fully in shared or common activities. This is impossible without
culture, while it brings a reward in culture, because one cannot share
in intercourse with others without learning--without getting a broader
point of view and perceiving things of which one would otherwise be
ignorant. And there is perhaps no better definition of culture than that
it is the capacity for constantly expanding the range and accuracy of
one's perception of meanings.