1. Subject Matter of Educator and of Learner. So far as the nature of
subject matter in principle is concerned, there is nothing to add
to what has been said (See ante, p. 134). It consists of the facts
observed, recalled, read, and talked about, and the ideas suggested, in
course of a development of a situation having a purpose. This statement
needs to be rendered more specific by connecting it with the materials
of school instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. What is
the significance of our definition in application to reading, writing,
mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing, physics,
chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on? Let us recur to two
of the points made earlier in our discussion. The educator's part in the
enterprise of education is to furnish the environment which stimulates
responses and directs the learner's course. In last analysis, all that
the educator can do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely
as is possible result in the formation of desirable intellectual and
emotional dispositions. Obviously studies or the subject matter of the
curriculum have intimately to do with this business of supplying an
environment. The other point is the necessity of a social environment
to give meaning to habits formed. In what we have termed informal
education, subject matter is carried directly in the matrix of social
intercourse. It is what the persons with whom an individual associates
do and say. This fact gives a clew to the understanding of the subject
matter of formal or deliberate instruction. A connecting link is found
in the stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which accompany the
doings and rites of a primitive social group. They represent the stock
of meanings which have been precipitated out of previous experience,
which are so prized by the group as to be identified with their
conception of their own collective life. Not being obviously a part of
the skill exhibited in the daily occupations of eating, hunting, making
war and peace, constructing rugs, pottery, and baskets, etc., they
are consciously impressed upon the young; often, as in the initiation
ceremonies, with intense emotional fervor. Even more pains are
consciously taken to perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal
formulae of the group than to transmit the directly useful customs of
the group just because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in
the ordinary processes of association.
As the social group grows more complex, involving a greater number of
acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or in the belief
of the group, upon standard ideas deposited from past experience, the
content of social life gets more definitely formulated for purposes of
instruction. As we have previously noted, probably the chief motive for
consciously dwelling upon the group life, extracting the meanings which
are regarded as most important and systematizing them in a coherent
arrangement, is just the need of instructing the young so as to
perpetuate group life. Once started on this road of selection,
formulation, and organization, no definite limit exists. The invention
of writing and of printing gives the operation an immense impetus.
Finally, the bonds which connect the subject matter of school study with
the habits and ideals of the social group are disguised and covered up.
The ties are so loosened that it often appears as if there were none;
as if subject matter existed simply as knowledge on its own independent
behoof, and as if study were the mere act of mastering it for its own
sake, irrespective of any social values. Since it is highly important
for practical reasons to counter-act this tendency (See ante, p. 8)
the chief purposes of our theoretical discussion are to make clear the
connection which is so readily lost from sight, and to show in some
detail the social content and function of the chief constituents of the
course of study.
The points need to be considered from the standpoint of instructor and
of student. To the former, the significance of a knowledge of subject
matter, going far beyond the present knowledge of pupils, is to supply
definite standards and to reveal to him the possibilities of the
crude activities of the immature. (i) The material of school studies
translates into concrete and detailed terms the meanings of current
social life which it is desirable to transmit. It puts clearly
before the instructor the essential ingredients of the culture to
be perpetuated, in such an organized form as to protect him from the
haphazard efforts he would be likely to indulge in if the meanings had
not been standardized. (ii) A knowledge of the ideas which have been
achieved in the past as the outcome of activity places the educator in
a position to perceive the meaning of the seeming impulsive and aimless
reactions of the young, and to provide the stimuli needed to direct them
so that they will amount to something. The more the educator knows of
music the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate musical
impulses of a child. Organized subject matter represents the ripe
fruitage of experiences like theirs, experiences involving the same
world, and powers and needs similar to theirs. It does not represent
perfection or infallible wisdom; but it is the best at command to
further new experiences which may, in some respects at least, surpass
the achievements embodied in existing knowledge and works of art.
From the standpoint of the educator, in other words, the various studies
represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness from
the experience of the young is not, however, seeming; it is real. The
subject matter of the learner is not, therefore, it cannot be, identical
with the formulated, the crystallized, and systematized subject matter
of the adult; the material as found in books and in works of art, etc.
The latter represents the possibilities of the former; not its existing
state. It enters directly into the activities of the expert and the
educator, not into that of the beginner, the learner. Failure to bear in
mind the difference in subject matter from the respective standpoints of
teacher and student is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the
use of texts and other expressions of preexistent knowledge.
The need for a knowledge of the constitution and functions, in the
concrete, of human nature is great just because the teacher's attitude
to subject matter is so different from that of the pupil. The teacher
presents in actuality what the pupil represents only in posse. That is,
the teacher already knows the things which the student is only learning.
Hence the problem of the two is radically unlike. When engaged in the
direct act of teaching, the instructor needs to have subject matter
at his fingers' ends; his attention should be upon the attitude and
response of the pupil. To understand the latter in its interplay with
subject matter is his task, while the pupil's mind, naturally, should be
not on itself but on the topic in hand. Or to state the same point in
a somewhat different manner: the teacher should be occupied not with
subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils' present
needs and capacities. Hence simple scholarship is not enough. In
fact, there are certain features of scholarship or mastered subject
matter--taken by itself--which get in the way of effective teaching
unless the instructor's habitual attitude is one of concern with
its interplay in the pupil's own experience. In the first place,
his knowledge extends indefinitely beyond the range of the pupil's
acquaintance. It involves principles which are beyond the immature
pupil's understanding and interest. In and of itself, it may no
more represent the living world of the pupil's experience than the
astronomer's knowledge of Mars represents a baby's acquaintance with the
room in which he stays. In the second place, the method of organization
of the material of achieved scholarship differs from that of
the beginner. It is not true that the experience of the young is
unorganized--that it consists of isolated scraps. But it is organized in
connection with direct practical centers of interest. The child's home
is, for example, the organizing center of his geographical knowledge.
His own movements about the locality, his journeys abroad, the tales of
his friends, give the ties which hold his items of information together.
But the geography of the geographer, of the one who has already
developed the implications of these smaller experiences, is organized
on the basis of the relationship which the various facts bear to
one another--not the relations which they bear to his house, bodily
movements, and friends. To the one who is learned, subject matter is
extensive, accurately defined, and logically interrelated. To the
one who is learning, it is fluid, partial, and connected through
his personal occupations. 1 The problem of teaching is to keep the
experience of the student moving in the direction of what the expert
already knows. Hence the need that the teacher know both subject matter
and the characteristic needs and capacities of the student.
2. The Development of Subject Matter in the Learner. It is possible,
without doing violence to the facts, to mark off three fairly typical
stages in the growth of subject matter in the experience of the learner.
In its first estate, knowledge exists as the content of intelligent
ability--power to do. This kind of subject matter, or known material, is
expressed in familiarity or acquaintance with things. Then this material
gradually is surcharged and deepened through communicated knowledge or
information. Finally, it is enlarged and worked over into rationally or
logically organized material--that of the one who, relatively speaking,
is expert in the subject.
I. The knowledge which comes first to persons, and that remains most
deeply ingrained, is knowledge of how to do; how to walk, talk, read,
write, skate, ride a bicycle, manage a machine, calculate, drive a
horse, sell goods, manage people, and so on indefinitely. The popular
tendency to regard instinctive acts which are adapted to an end as a
sort of miraculous knowledge, while unjustifiable, is evidence of the
strong tendency to identify intelligent control of the means of action
with knowledge. When education, under the influence of a scholastic
conception of knowledge which ignores everything but scientifically
formulated facts and truths, fails to recognize that primary or initial
subject matter always exists as matter of an active doing, involving
the use of the body and the handling of material, the subject matter of
instruction is isolated from the needs and purposes of the learner, and
so becomes just a something to be memorized and reproduced upon demand.
Recognition of the natural course of development, on the contrary,
always sets out with situations which involve learning by doing. Arts
and occupations form the initial stage of the curriculum, corresponding
as they do to knowing how to go about the accomplishment of ends.
Popular terms denoting knowledge have always retained the connection
with ability in action lost by academic philosophies. Ken and can are
allied words. Attention means caring for a thing, in the sense of both
affection and of looking out for its welfare. Mind means carrying out
instructions in action--as a child minds his mother--and taking care
of something--as a nurse minds the baby. To be thoughtful, considerate,
means to heed the claims of others. Apprehension means dread of
undesirable consequences, as well as intellectual grasp. To have
good sense or judgment is to know the conduct a situation calls for;
discernment is not making distinctions for the sake of making them, an
exercise reprobated as hair splitting, but is insight into an affair
with reference to acting. Wisdom has never lost its association with
the proper direction of life. Only in education, never in the life of
farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does
knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
Having to do with things in an intelligent way issues in acquaintance
or familiarity. The things we are best acquainted with are the things we
put to frequent use--such things as chairs, tables, pen, paper, clothes,
food, knives and forks on the commonplace level, differentiating into
more special objects according to a person's occupations in life.
Knowledge of things in that intimate and emotional sense suggested by
the word acquaintance is a precipitate from our employing them with a
purpose. We have acted with or upon the thing so frequently that we can
anticipate how it will act and react--such is the meaning of familiar
acquaintance. We are ready for a familiar thing; it does not catch us
napping, or play unexpected tricks with us. This attitude carries with
it a sense of congeniality or friendliness, of ease and illumination;
while the things with which we are not accustomed to deal are strange,
foreign, cold, remote, "abstract."
II. But it is likely that elaborate statements regarding this primary
stage of knowledge will darken understanding. It includes practically
all of our knowledge which is not the result of deliberate technical
study. Modes of purposeful doing include dealings with persons as well
as things. Impulses of communication and habits of intercourse have to
be adapted to maintaining successful connections with others; a large
fund of social knowledge accrues. As a part of this intercommunication
one learns much from others. They tell of their experiences and of the
experiences which, in turn, have been told them. In so far as one is
interested or concerned in these communications, their matter becomes a
part of one's own experience. Active connections with others are such
an intimate and vital part of our own concerns that it is impossible to
draw sharp lines, such as would enable us to say, "Here my experience
ends; there yours begins." In so far as we are partners in common
undertakings, the things which others communicate to us as the
consequences of their particular share in the enterprise blend at once
into the experience resulting from our own special doings. The ear is as
much an organ of experience as the eye or hand; the eye is available
for reading reports of what happens beyond its horizon. Things remote in
space and time affect the issue of our actions quite as much as
things which we can smell and handle. They really concern us, and,
consequently, any account of them which assists us in dealing with
things at hand falls within personal experience.
Information is the name usually given to this kind of subject matter.
The place of communication in personal doing supplies us with a
criterion for estimating the value of informational material in school.
Does it grow naturally out of some question with which the student
is concerned? Does it fit into his more direct acquaintance so as to
increase its efficacy and deepen its meaning? If it meets these two
requirements, it is educative. The amount heard or read is of no
importance--the more the better, provided the student has a need for it
and can apply it in some situation of his own.
But it is not so easy to fulfill these requirements in actual practice
as it is to lay them down in theory. The extension in modern times of
the area of intercommunication; the invention of appliances for securing
acquaintance with remote parts of the heavens and bygone events of
history; the cheapening of devices, like printing, for recording and
distributing information--genuine and alleged--have created an immense
bulk of communicated subject matter. It is much easier to swamp a
pupil with this than to work it into his direct experiences. All too
frequently it forms another strange world which just overlies the world
of personal acquaintance. The sole problem of the student is to learn,
for school purposes, for purposes of recitations and promotions, the
constituent parts of this strange world. Probably the most conspicuous
connotation of the word knowledge for most persons to-day is just the
body of facts and truths ascertained by others; the material found in
the rows and rows of atlases, cyclopedias, histories, biographies, books
of travel, scientific treatises, on the shelves of libraries.
The imposing stupendous bulk of this material has unconsciously
influenced men's notions of the nature of knowledge itself. The
statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active
concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves
knowledge. The record of knowledge, independent of its place as an
outcome of inquiry and a resource in further inquiry, is taken to be
knowledge. The mind of man is taken captive by the spoils of its prior
victories; the spoils, not the weapons and the acts of waging the battle
against the unknown, are used to fix the meaning of knowledge, of fact,
and truth.
If this identification of knowledge with propositions stating
information has fastened itself upon logicians and philosophers, it is
not surprising that the same ideal has almost dominated instruction.
The "course of study" consists largely of information distributed into
various branches of study, each study being subdivided into lessons
presenting in serial cutoff portions of the total store. In the
seventeenth century, the store was still small enough so that men set up
the ideal of a complete encyclopedic mastery of it. It is now so bulky
that the impossibility of any one man's coming into possession of it
all is obvious. But the educational ideal has not been much affected.
Acquisition of a modicum of information in each branch of learning,
or at least in a selected group, remains the principle by which the
curriculum, from elementary school through college, is formed; the
easier portions being assigned to the earlier years, the more difficult
to the later. The complaints of educators that learning does not enter
into character and affect conduct; the protests against memoriter work,
against cramming, against gradgrind preoccupation with "facts," against
devotion to wire-drawn distinctions and ill-understood rules and
principles, all follow from this state of affairs. Knowledge which
is mainly second-hand, other men's knowledge, tends to become merely
verbal. It is no objection to information that it is clothed in words;
communication necessarily takes place through words. But in the degree
in which what is communicated cannot be organized into the existing
experience of the learner, it becomes mere words: that is, pure
sense-stimuli, lacking in meaning. Then it operates to call out
mechanical reactions, ability to use the vocal organs to repeat
statements, or the hand to write or to do "sums."
To be informed is to be posted; it is to have at command the subject
matter needed for an effective dealing with a problem, and for giving
added significance to the search for solution and to the solution
itself. Informational knowledge is the material which can be fallen back
upon as given, settled, established, assured in a doubtful situation. It
is a kind of bridge for mind in its passage from doubt to discovery. It
has the office of an intellectual middleman. It condenses and records in
available form the net results of the prior experiences of mankind, as
an agency of enhancing the meaning of new experiences. When one is told
that Brutus assassinated Caesar, or that the length of the year is
three hundred sixty-five and one fourth days, or that the ratio of the
diameter of the circle to its circumference is 3.1415. . . one receives
what is indeed knowledge for others, but for him it is a stimulus to
knowing. His acquisition of knowledge depends upon his response to what
is communicated.
3. Science or Rationalized Knowledge. Science is a name for knowledge in
its most characteristic form. It represents in its degree, the perfected
outcome of learning,--its consummation. What is known, in a given case,
is what is sure, certain, settled, disposed of; that which we think with
rather than that which we think about. In its honorable sense, knowledge
is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere
tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and
not dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is
difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our
certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is
natural. The undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual
hesitation; it is prone to assertion. It likes things undisturbed,
settled, and treats them as such without due warrant. Familiarity,
common repute, and congeniality to desire are readily made measuring
rods of truth. Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error,--a
greater foe to learning than ignorance itself. A Socrates is thus led
to declare that consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of effective
love of wisdom, and a Descartes to say that science is born of doubting.
We have already dwelt upon the fact that subject matter, or data, and
ideas have to have their worth tested experimentally: that in themselves
they are tentative and provisional. Our predilection for premature
acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs
that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are
satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. If
these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose
that our assumptions have been confirmed. Even in the case of failure,
we are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness
of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of
circumstance. We charge the evil consequence not to the error of our
schemes and our incomplete inquiry into conditions (thereby getting
material for revising the former and stimulus for extending the latter)
but to untoward fate. We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in
clinging to our conceptions in spite of the way in which they work out.
Science represents the safeguard of the race against these natural
propensities and the evils which flow from them. It consists of the
special appliances and methods which the race has slowly worked out in
order to conduct reflection under conditions whereby its procedures and
results are tested. It is artificial (an acquired art), not spontaneous;
learned, not native. To this fact is due the unique, the invaluable
place of science in education, and also the dangers which threaten its
right use. Without initiation into the scientific spirit one is not
in possession of the best tools which humanity has so far devised for
effectively directed reflection. One in that case not merely conducts
inquiry and learning without the use of the best instruments, but fails
to understand the full meaning of knowledge. For he does not become
acquainted with the traits that mark off opinion and assent from
authorized conviction. On the other hand, the fact that science marks
the perfecting of knowing in highly specialized conditions of technique
renders its results, taken by themselves, remote from ordinary
experience--a quality of aloofness that is popularly designated by the
term abstract. When this isolation appears in instruction, scientific
information is even more exposed to the dangers attendant upon
presenting ready-made subject matter than are other forms of
information.
Science has been defined in terms of method of inquiry and testing. At
first sight, this definition may seem opposed to the current conception
that science is organized or systematized knowledge. The opposition,
however, is only seeming, and disappears when the ordinary definition
is completed. Not organization but the kind of organization effected by
adequate methods of tested discovery marks off science. The knowledge of
a farmer is systematized in the degree in which he is competent. It
is organized on the basis of relation of means to ends--practically
organized. Its organization as knowledge (that is, in the eulogistic
sense of adequately tested and confirmed) is incidental to its
organization with reference to securing crops, live-stock, etc. But
scientific subject matter is organized with specific reference to the
successful conduct of the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a
specialized undertaking. Reference to the kind of assurance
attending science will shed light upon this statement. It is rational
assurance,--logical warranty. The ideal of scientific organization is,
therefore, that every conception and statement shall be of such a
kind as to follow from others and to lead to others. Conceptions
and propositions mutually imply and support one another. This double
relation of "leading to and confirming" is what is meant by the terms
logical and rational. The everyday conception of water is more available
for ordinary uses of drinking, washing, irrigation, etc., than the
chemist's notion of it. The latter's description of it as H20 is
superior from the standpoint of place and use in inquiry. It states
the nature of water in a way which connects it with knowledge of other
things, indicating to one who understands it how the knowledge is
arrived at and its bearings upon other portions of knowledge of the
structure of things. Strictly speaking, it does not indicate the
objective relations of water any more than does a statement that water
is transparent, fluid, without taste or odor, satisfying to thirst,
etc. It is just as true that water has these relations as that it is
constituted by two molecules of hydrogen in combination with one of
oxygen. But for the particular purpose of conducting discovery with a
view to ascertainment of fact, the latter relations are fundamental. The
more one emphasizes organization as a mark of science, then, the more he
is committed to a recognition of the primacy of method in the definition
of science. For method defines the kind of organization in virtue of
which science is science.
4. Subject Matter as Social. Our next chapters will take up various
school activities and studies and discuss them as successive stages
in that evolution of knowledge which we have just been discussing. It
remains to say a few words upon subject matter as social, since our
prior remarks have been mainly concerned with its intellectual aspect. A
difference in breadth and depth exists even in vital knowledge; even
in the data and ideas which are relevant to real problems and which are
motivated by purposes. For there is a difference in the social scope of
purposes and the social importance of problems. With the wide range
of possible material to select from, it is important that education
(especially in all its phases short of the most specialized) should use
a criterion of social worth. All information and systematized scientific
subject matter have been worked out under the conditions of social life
and have been transmitted by social means. But this does not prove that
all is of equal value for the purposes of forming the disposition and
supplying the equipment of members of present society. The scheme of a
curriculum must take account of the adaptation of studies to the needs
of the existing community life; it must select with the intention of
improving the life we live in common so that the future shall be better
than the past. Moreover, the curriculum must be planned with reference
to placing essentials first, and refinements second. The things which
are socially most fundamental, that is, which have to do with the
experiences in which the widest groups share, are the essentials. The
things which represent the needs of specialized groups and technical
pursuits are secondary. There is truth in the saying that education must
first be human and only after that professional. But those who utter
the saying frequently have in mind in the term human only a highly
specialized class: the class of learned men who preserve the classic
traditions of the past. They forget that material is humanized in the
degree in which it connects with the common interests of men as men.
Democratic society is peculiarly dependent for its maintenance upon the
use in forming a course of study of criteria which are broadly human.
Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting
subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived
for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions
of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the "essentials" of
elementary education are the three R's mechanically treated, is based
upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic
ideals. Unconsciously it assumes that these ideals are unrealizable;
it assumes that in the future, as in the past, getting a livelihood,
"making a living," must signify for most men and women doing things
which are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those who
do them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged in
them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of pecuniary
reward. For preparation of large numbers for a life of this sort, and
only for this purpose, are mechanical efficiency in reading, writing,
spelling and figuring, together with attainment of a certain amount
of muscular dexterity, "essentials." Such conditions also infect the
education called liberal, with illiberality. They imply a somewhat
parasitic cultivation bought at the expense of not having the
enlightenment and discipline which come from concern with the deepest
problems of common humanity. A curriculum which acknowledges the social
responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are
relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and
information are calculated to develop social insight and interest.
Summary. The subject matter of education consists primarily of the
meanings which supply content to existing social life. The continuity of
social life means that many of these meanings are contributed to present
activity by past collective experience. As social life grows more
complex, these factors increase in number and import. There is need of
special selection, formulation, and organization in order that they may
be adequately transmitted to the new generation. But this very process
tends to set up subject matter as something of value just by itself,
apart from its function in promoting the realization of the meanings
implied in the present experience of the immature. Especially is the
educator exposed to the temptation to conceive his task in terms of the
pupil's ability to appropriate and reproduce the subject matter in set
statements, irrespective of its organization into his activities as a
developing social member. The positive principle is maintained when the
young begin with active occupations having a social origin and use,
and proceed to a scientific insight in the materials and laws involved,
through assimilating into their more direct experience the ideas and
facts communicated by others who have had a larger experience. 1 Since
the learned man should also still be a learner, it will be understood
that these contrasts are relative, not absolute. But in the earlier
stages of learning at least they are practically all-important.