1. The Opposition of Experience and True Knowledge. As livelihood
and leisure are opposed, so are theory and practice, intelligence
and execution, knowledge and activity. The latter set of oppositions
doubtless springs from the same social conditions which produce the
former conflict; but certain definite problems of education connected
with them make it desirable to discuss explicitly the matter of the
relationship and alleged separation of knowing and doing.
The notion that knowledge is derived from a higher source than is
practical activity, and possesses a higher and more spiritual worth, has
a long history. The history so far as conscious statement is concerned
takes us back to the conceptions of experience and of reason formulated
by Plato and Aristotle. Much as these thinkers differed in many
respects, they agreed in identifying experience with purely practical
concerns; and hence with material interests as to its purpose and with
the body as to its organ. Knowledge, on the other hand, existed for its
own sake free from practical reference, and found its source and organ
in a purely immaterial mind; it had to do with spiritual or ideal
interests. Again, experience always involved lack, need, desire; it was
never self-sufficing. Rational knowing on the other hand, was complete
and comprehensive within itself. Hence the practical life was in a
condition of perpetual flux, while intellectual knowledge concerned
eternal truth.
This sharp antithesis is connected with the fact that Athenian
philosophy began as a criticism of custom and tradition as standards of
knowledge and conduct. In a search for something to replace them, it
hit upon reason as the only adequate guide of belief and activity. Since
custom and tradition were identified with experience, it followed at
once that reason was superior to experience. Moreover, experience, not
content with its proper position of subordination, was the great foe
to the acknowledgment of the authority of reason. Since custom and
traditionary beliefs held men in bondage, the struggle of reason for
its legitimate supremacy could be won only by showing the inherently
unstable and inadequate nature of experience. The statement of Plato
that philosophers should be kings may best be understood as a statement
that rational intelligence and not habit, appetite, impulse, and emotion
should regulate human affairs. The former secures unity, order, and law;
the latter signify multiplicity and discord, irrational fluctuations
from one estate to another.
The grounds for the identification of experience with the unsatisfactory
condition of things, the state of affairs represented by rule of mere
custom, are not far to seek. Increasing trade and travel, colonizations,
migrations and wars, had broadened the intellectual horizon. The customs
and beliefs of different communities were found to diverge sharply
from one another. Civil disturbance had become a custom in Athens;
the fortunes of the city seemed given over to strife of factions. The
increase of leisure coinciding with the broadening of the horizon had
brought into ken many new facts of nature and had stimulated curiosity
and speculation. The situation tended to raise the question as to the
existence of anything constant and universal in the realm of nature and
society. Reason was the faculty by which the universal principle and
essence is apprehended; while the senses were the organs of perceiving
change,--the unstable and the diverse as against the permanent and
uniform. The results of the work of the senses, preserved in memory
and imagination, and applied in the skill given by habit, constituted
experience.
Experience at its best is thus represented in the various
handicrafts--the arts of peace and war. The cobbler, the flute player,
the soldier, have undergone the discipline of experience to acquire the
skill they have. This means that the bodily organs, particularly the
senses, have had repeated contact with things and that the result of
these contacts has been preserved and consolidated till ability in
foresight and in practice had been secured. Such was the essential
meaning of the term "empirical." It suggested a knowledge and an ability
not based upon insight into principles, but expressing the result of a
large number of separate trials. It expressed the idea now conveyed by
"method of trial and error," with especial emphasis upon the more or
less accidental character of the trials. So far as ability of control,
of management, was concerned, it amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure,
to routine. If new circumstances resembled the past, it might work well
enough; in the degree in which they deviated, failure was likely. Even
to-day to speak of a physician as an empiricist is to imply that he
lacks scientific training, and that he is proceeding simply on the basis
of what he happens to have got out of the chance medley of his past
practice. Just because of the lack of science or reason in "experience"
it is hard to keep it at its poor best. The empiric easily degenerates
into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves
off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to
pretend--to make claims for which there is no justification, and
to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others--to "bluff."
Moreover, he assumes that because he has learned one thing, he knows
others--as the history of Athens showed that the common craftsmen
thought they could manage household affairs, education, and politics,
because they had learned to do the specific things of their trades.
Experience is always hovering, then, on the edge of pretense, of sham,
of seeming, and appearance, in distinction from the reality upon which
reason lays hold.
The philosophers soon reached certain generalizations from this state
of affairs. The senses are connected with the appetites, with wants and
desires. They lay hold not on the reality of things but on the relation
which things have to our pleasures and pains, to the satisfaction of
wants and the welfare of the body. They are important only for the
life of the body, which is but a fixed substratum for a higher life.
Experience thus has a definitely material character; it has to do
with physical things in relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or
science, lays hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is
something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as sensual,
carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure reason and
spirit connote something morally praiseworthy. Moreover, ineradicable
connection with the changing, the inexplicably shifting, and with the
manifold, the diverse, clings to experience. Its material is inherently
variable and untrustworthy. It is anarchic, because unstable. The man
who trusts to experience does not know what he depends upon, since it
changes from person to person, from day to day, to say nothing of
from country to country. Its connection with the "many," with various
particulars, has the same effect, and also carries conflict in its
train.
Only the single, the uniform, assures coherence and harmony. Out of
experience come warrings, the conflict of opinions and acts within
the individual and between individuals. From experience no standard
of belief can issue, because it is the very nature of experience to
instigate all kinds of contrary beliefs, as varieties of local custom
proved. Its logical outcome is that anything is good and true to the
particular individual which his experience leads him to believe true and
good at a particular time and place. Finally practice falls of necessity
within experience. Doing proceeds from needs and aims at change. To
produce or to make is to alter something; to consume is to alter. All
the obnoxious characters of change and diversity thus attach themselves
to doing while knowing is as permanent as its object. To know, to grasp
a thing intellectually or theoretically, is to be out of the region of
vicissitude, chance, and diversity. Truth has no lack; it is untouched
by the perturbations of the world of sense. It deals with the eternal
and the universal. And the world of experience can be brought under
control, can be steadied and ordered, only through subjection to its law
of reason.
It would not do, of course, to say that all these distinctions persisted
in full technical definiteness. But they all of them profoundly
influenced men's subsequent thinking and their ideas about education.
The contempt for physical as compared with mathematical and logical
science, for the senses and sense observation; the feeling that
knowledge is high and worthy in the degree in which it deals with ideal
symbols instead of with the concrete; the scorn of particulars except
as they are deductively brought under a universal; the disregard for
the body; the depreciation of arts and crafts as intellectual
instrumentalities, all sought shelter and found sanction under this
estimate of the respective values of experience and reason--or, what
came to the same thing, of the practical and the intellectual. Medieval
philosophy continued and reinforced the tradition. To know reality
meant to be in relation to the supreme reality, or God, and to enjoy the
eternal bliss of that relation. Contemplation of supreme reality was the
ultimate end of man to which action is subordinate. Experience had to
do with mundane, profane, and secular affairs, practically necessary
indeed, but of little import in comparison with supernatural objects
of knowledge. When we add to this motive the force derived from the
literary character of the Roman education and the Greek philosophic
tradition, and conjoin to them the preference for studies which
obviously demarcated the aristocratic class from the lower classes, we
can readily understand the tremendous power exercised by the persistent
preference of the "intellectual" over the "practical" not simply in
educational philosophies but in the higher schools. 2. The Modern Theory
of Experience and Knowledge. As we shall see later, the development of
experimentation as a method of knowledge makes possible and necessitates
a radical transformation of the view just set forth. But before
coming to that, we have to note the theory of experience and knowledge
developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In general, it
presents us with an almost complete reversal of the classic doctrine
of the relations of experience and reason. To Plato experience meant
habituation, or the conservation of the net product of a lot of past
chance trials. Reason meant the principle of reform, of progress, of
increase of control. Devotion to the cause of reason meant breaking
through the limitations of custom and getting at things as they really
were. To the modern reformers, the situation was the other way around.
Reason, universal principles, a priori notions, meant either blank forms
which had to be filled in by experience, by sense observations, in
order to get significance and validity; or else were mere indurated
prejudices, dogmas imposed by authority, which masqueraded and found
protection under august names. The great need was to break way from
captivity to conceptions which, as Bacon put it, "anticipated nature"
and imposed merely human opinions upon her, and to resort to experience
to find out what nature was like. Appeal to experience marked the breach
with authority. It meant openness to new impressions; eagerness
in discovery and invention instead of absorption in tabulating and
systematizing received ideas and "proving" them by means of the
relations they sustained to one another. It was the irruption into the
mind of the things as they really were, free from the veil cast over
them by preconceived ideas.
The change was twofold. Experience lost the practical meaning which it
had borne from the time of Plato. It ceased to mean ways of doing
and being done to, and became a name for something intellectual and
cognitive. It meant the apprehension of material which should ballast
and check the exercise of reasoning. By the modern philosophic
empiricist and by his opponent, experience has been looked upon just as
a way of knowing. The only question was how good a way it is. The
result was an even greater "intellectualism" than is found in ancient
philosophy, if that word be used to designate an emphatic and almost
exclusive interest in knowledge in its isolation. Practice was not
so much subordinated to knowledge as treated as a kind of tag-end or
aftermath of knowledge. The educational result was only to confirm the
exclusion of active pursuits from the school, save as they might be
brought in for purely utilitarian ends--the acquisition by drill of
certain habits. In the second place, the interest in experience as a
means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the
mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the more truly
objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a hand, so
to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate
true knowledge--to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a maximum of
receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by objects were
generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a doctrine of
sensationalism--that is to say, a doctrine which identified knowledge
with the reception and association of sensory impressions. In
John Locke, the most influential of the empiricists, we find this
sensationalism mitigated by a recognition of certain mental faculties,
like discernment or discrimination, comparison, abstraction, and
generalization which work up the material of sense into definite and
organized forms and which even evolve new ideas on their own account,
such as the fundamental conceptions of morals and mathematics. (See
ante, p. 61.) But some of his successors, especially in France in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, carried his doctrine to the
limit; they regarded discernment and judgment as peculiar sensations
made in us by the conjoint presence of other sensations. Locke had held
that the mind is a blank piece of paper, or a wax tablet with nothing
engraved on it at birth (a tabula rasa) so far as any contents of ideas
were concerned, but had endowed it with activities to be exercised upon
the material received. His French successors razed away the powers and
derived them also from impressions received.
As we have earlier noted, this notion was fostered by the new interest
in education as method of social reform. (See ante, p. 93.) The emptier
the mind to begin with, the more it may be made anything we wish by
bringing the right influences to bear upon it. Thus Helvetius, perhaps
the most extreme and consistent sensationalist, proclaimed that
education could do anything--that it was omnipotent. Within the sphere
of school instruction, empiricism found its directly beneficial office
in protesting against mere book learning. If knowledge comes from the
impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure
knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind. Words,
all kinds of linguistic symbols, in the lack of prior presentations of
objects with which they may be associated, convey nothing but sensations
of their own shape and color--certainly not a very instructive kind of
knowledge. Sensationalism was an extremely handy weapon with which
to combat doctrines and opinions resting wholly upon tradition and
authority. With respect to all of them, it set up a test: Where are the
real objects from which these ideas and beliefs are received? If such
objects could not be produced, ideas were explained as the result of
false associations and combinations. Empiricism also insisted upon a
first-hand element. The impression must be made upon me, upon my
mind. The further we get away from this direct, first-hand source of
knowledge, the more numerous the sources of error, and the vaguer the
resulting idea.
As might be expected, however, the philosophy was weak upon the positive
side. Of course, the value of natural objects and firsthand acquaintance
was not dependent upon the truth of the theory. Introduced into the
schools they would do their work, even if the sensational theory about
the way in which they did it was quite wrong. So far, there is nothing
to complain of. But the emphasis upon sensationalism also operated to
influence the way in which natural objects were employed, and to prevent
full good being got from them. "Object lessons" tended to isolate the
mere sense-activity and make it an end in itself. The more isolated the
object, the more isolated the sensory quality, the more distinct the
sense-impression as a unit of knowledge. The theory worked not only
in the direction of this mechanical isolation, which tended to reduce
instruction to a kind of physical gymnastic of the sense-organs (good
like any gymnastic of bodily organs, but not more so), but also to
the neglect of thinking. According to the theory there was no need of
thinking in connection with sense-observation; in fact, in strict
theory such thinking would be impossible till afterwards, for thinking
consisted simply in combining and separating sensory units which had
been received without any participation of judgment.
As a matter of fact, accordingly, practically no scheme of education
upon a purely sensory basis has ever been systematically tried, at least
after the early years of infancy. Its obvious deficiencies have caused
it to be resorted to simply for filling in "rationalistic" knowledge
(that is to say, knowledge of definitions, rules, classifications, and
modes of application conveyed through symbols), and as a device for
lending greater "interest" to barren symbols. There are at least
three serious defects of sensationalistic empiricism as an educational
philosophy of knowledge. (a) the historical value of the theory was
critical; it was a dissolvent of current beliefs about the world and
political institutions. It was a destructive organ of criticism of
hard and fast dogmas. But the work of education is constructive, not
critical. It assumes not old beliefs to be eliminated and revised, but
the need of building up new experience into intellectual habitudes as
correct as possible from the start. Sensationalism is highly unfitted
for this constructive task. Mind, understanding, denotes responsiveness
to meanings (ante, p. 29), not response to direct physical stimuli. And
meaning exists only with reference to a context, which is excluded
by any scheme which identifies knowledge with a combination of
sense-impressions. The theory, so far as educationally applied, led
either to a magnification of mere physical excitations or else to a mere
heaping up of isolated objects and qualities.
(b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it
also has the disadvantage of being limited in range. Direct acquaintance
with the natural surroundings of the home environment so as to give
reality to ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of the
senses, and as a means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one
thing. As an end-all and be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally
restricted. In precisely analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and
counters may be helpful aids to a realization of numerical relations,
but when employed except as aids to thought--the apprehension of
meaning--they become an obstacle to the growth of arithmetical
understanding. They arrest growth on a low plane, the plane of specific
physical symbols. Just as the race developed especial symbols as tools
of calculation and mathematical reasonings, because the use of the
fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the individual must
progress from concrete to abstract symbols--that is, symbols whose
meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. And undue
absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers this
growth. (c) A thoroughly false psychology of mental development
underlay sensationalistic empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter
of activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with
things. What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received
quality impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of
handling, throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the
consequent effect of the object upon the direction of activities. (See
ante, p. 140.) Fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the
ancient notion of experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that
the modern notion of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The
neglect of the deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a
fatal defect of the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more
uninteresting and mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which
ignores and as far as may be excludes the natural tendency to learn
about the qualities of objects by the uses to which they are put through
trying to do something with them.
It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience
represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical
assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished
a satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. Its educational
influence was confined to injecting a new factor into the older
curriculum, with incidental modifications of the older studies and
methods. It introduced greater regard for observation of things directly
and through pictures and graphic descriptions, and it reduced the
importance attached to verbal symbolization. But its own scope was
so meager that it required supplementation by information concerning
matters outside of sense-perception and by matters which appealed
more directly to thought. Consequently it left unimpaired the scope of
informational and abstract, or "rationalistic" studies.
3. Experience as Experimentation. It has already been intimated that
sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience
justified by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by
modern scientific procedure. With respect to the former, it omits the
primary position of active response which puts things to use and which
learns about them through discovering the consequences that result from
use. It would seem as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of
the way an infant gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the
notion that he is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated
ready-made qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it would
be seen that the infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling,
reaching, etc., in order to see what results follow upon motor response
to a sensory stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not
isolated qualities, but the behavior which may be expected from a thing,
and the changes in things and persons which an activity may be expected
to produce. In other words, what he learns are connections. Even such
qualities as red color, sound of a high pitch, have to be discriminated
and identified on the basis of the activities they call forth and the
consequences these activities effect. We learn what things are hard and
what are soft by finding out through active experimentation what they
respectively will do and what can be done and what cannot be done with
them. In like fashion, children learn about persons by finding out what
responsive activities these persons exact and what these persons will
do in reply to the children's activities. And the combination of what
things do to us (not in impressing qualities on a passive mind) in
modifying our actions, furthering some of them and resisting and
checking others, and what we can do to them in producing new changes
constitutes experience. The methods of science by which the revolution
in our knowledge of the world dating from the seventeenth century, was
brought about, teach the same lesson. For these methods are nothing but
experimentation carried out under conditions of deliberate control. To
the Greek, it seemed absurd that such an activity as, say, the cobbler
punching holes in leather, or using wax and needle and thread, could
give an adequate knowledge of the world. It seemed almost axiomatic
that for true knowledge we must have recourse to concepts coming from a
reason above experience. But the introduction of the experimental method
signified precisely that such operations, carried on under conditions
of control, are just the ways in which fruitful ideas about nature are
obtained and tested. In other words, it is only needed to conduct such
an operation as the pouring of an acid on a metal for the purpose of
getting knowledge instead of for the purpose of getting a trade result,
in order to lay hold of the principle upon which the science of nature
was henceforth to depend. Sense perceptions were indeed indispensable,
but there was less reliance upon sense perceptions in their natural or
customary form than in the older science. They were no longer regarded
as containing within themselves some "form" or "species" of universal
kind in a disguised mask of sense which could be stripped off by
rational thought. On the contrary, the first thing was to alter and
extend the data of sense perception: to act upon the given objects of
sense by the lens of the telescope and microscope, and by all sorts of
experimental devices. To accomplish this in a way which would arouse
new ideas (hypotheses, theories) required even more general ideas (like
those of mathematics) than were at the command of ancient science. But
these general conceptions were no longer taken to give knowledge
in themselves. They were implements for instituting, conducting,
interpreting experimental inquiries and formulating their results.
The logical outcome is a new philosophy of experience and knowledge,
a philosophy which no longer puts experience in opposition to rational
knowledge and explanation. Experience is no longer a mere summarizing
of what has been done in a more or less chance way in the past; it is a
deliberate control of what is done with reference to making what happens
to us and what we do to things as fertile as possible of suggestions
(of suggested meanings) and a means for trying out the validity of the
suggestions. When trying, or experimenting, ceases to be blinded by
impulse or custom, when it is guided by an aim and conducted by measure
and method, it becomes reasonable--rational. When what we suffer from
things, what we undergo at their hands, ceases to be a matter of chance
circumstance, when it is transformed into a consequence of our own prior
purposive endeavors, it becomes rationally significant--enlightening
and instructive. The antithesis of empiricism and rationalism loses the
support of the human situation which once gave it meaning and relative
justification.
The bearing of this change upon the opposition of purely practical and
purely intellectual studies is self-evident. The distinction is not
intrinsic but is dependent upon conditions, and upon conditions which
can be regulated. Practical activities may be intellectually narrow and
trivial; they will be so in so far as they are routine, carried on
under the dictates of authority, and having in view merely some external
result. But childhood and youth, the period of schooling, is just the
time when it is possible to carry them on in a different spirit. It
is inexpedient to repeat the discussions of our previous chapters on
thinking and on the evolution of educative subject matter from childlike
work and play to logically organized subject matter. The discussions of
this chapter and the prior one should, however, give an added meaning to
those results.
(i) Experience itself primarily consists of the active relations
subsisting between a human being and his natural and social
surroundings. In some cases, the initiative in activity is on the
side of the environment; the human being undergoes or suffers certain
checkings and deflections of endeavors. In other cases, the behavior of
surrounding things and persons carries to a successful issue the active
tendencies of the individual, so that in the end what the individual
undergoes are consequences which he has himself tried to produce.
In just the degree in which connections are established between what
happens to a person and what he does in response, and between what he
does to his environment and what it does in response to him, his acts
and the things about him acquire meaning. He learns to understand
both himself and the world of men and things. Purposive education or
schooling should present such an environment that this interaction will
effect acquisition of those meanings which are so important that they
become, in turn, instruments of further learnings. (ante, Ch. XI.) As
has been repeatedly pointed out, activity out of school is carried on
under conditions which have not been deliberately adapted to promoting
the function of understanding and formation of effective intellectual
dispositions. The results are vital and genuine as far as they go, but
they are limited by all kinds of circumstances. Some powers are left
quite undeveloped and undirected; others get only occasional and
whimsical stimulations; others are formed into habits of a routine skill
at the expense of aims and resourceful initiative and inventiveness. It
is not the business of the school to transport youth from an environment
of activity into one of cramped study of the records of other men's
learning; but to transport them from an environment of relatively chance
activities (accidental in the relation they bear to insight and thought)
into one of activities selected with reference to guidance of learning.
A slight inspection of the improved methods which have already shown
themselves effective in education will reveal that they have laid hold,
more or less consciously, upon the fact that "intellectual"
studies instead of being opposed to active pursuits represent an
intellectualizing of practical pursuits. It remains to grasp the
principle with greater firmness.
(ii) The changes which are taking place in the content of social life
tremendously facilitate selection of the sort of activities which will
intellectualize the play and work of the school. When one bears in mind
the social environment of the Greeks and the people of the Middle Ages,
where such practical activities as could be successfully carried on were
mostly of a routine and external sort and even servile in nature, one is
not surprised that educators turned their backs upon them as unfitted
to cultivate intelligence. But now that even the occupations of the
household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as transportation
and intercourse are instinct with applied science, the case stands
otherwise. It is true that many of those who now engage in them are
not aware of the intellectual content upon which their personal actions
depend. But this fact only gives an added reason why schooling should
use these pursuits so as to enable the coming generation to acquire
a comprehension now too generally lacking, and thus enable persons to
carry on their pursuits intelligently instead of blindly. (iii) The most
direct blow at the traditional separation of doing and knowing and at
the traditional prestige of purely "intellectual" studies, however, has
been given by the progress of experimental science. If this progress
has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no such thing as genuine
knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing.
The analysis and rearrangement of facts which is indispensable to the
growth of knowledge and power of explanation and right classification
cannot be attained purely mentally--just inside the head. Men have to do
something to the things when they wish to find out something; they have
to alter conditions. This is the lesson of the laboratory method,
and the lesson which all education has to learn. The laboratory is a
discovery of the condition under which labor may become intellectually
fruitful and not merely externally productive. If, in too many cases
at present, it results only in the acquisition of an additional mode
of technical skill, that is because it still remains too largely but an
isolated resource, not resorted to until pupils are mostly too old
to get the full advantage of it, and even then is surrounded by other
studies where traditional methods isolate intellect from activity.
Summary. The Greeks were induced to philosophize by the increasing
failure of their traditional customs and beliefs to regulate life. Thus
they were led to criticize custom adversely and to look for some other
source of authority in life and belief. Since they desired a rational
standard for the latter, and had identified with experience the customs
which had proved unsatisfactory supports, they were led to a flat
opposition of reason and experience. The more the former was exalted,
the more the latter was depreciated. Since experience was identified
with what men do and suffer in particular and changing situations of
life, doing shared in the philosophic depreciation. This influence fell
in with many others to magnify, in higher education, all the methods
and topics which involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily
activity. The modern age began with a revolt against this point of
view, with an appeal to experience, and an attack upon so-called purely
rational concepts on the ground that they either needed to be ballasted
by the results of concrete experiences, or else were mere expressions
of prejudice and institutionalized class interest, calling themselves
rational for protection. But various circumstances led to considering
experience as pure cognition, leaving out of account its intrinsic
active and emotional phases, and to identifying it with a passive
reception of isolated "sensations." Hence the education reform effected
by the new theory was confined mainly to doing away with some of
the bookishness of prior methods; it did not accomplish a consistent
reorganization.
Meantime, the advance of psychology, of industrial methods, and of the
experimental method in science makes another conception of experience
explicitly desirable and possible. This theory reinstates the idea of
the ancients that experience is primarily practical, not cognitive--a
matter of doing and undergoing the consequences of doing. But the
ancient theory is transformed by realizing that doing may be directed so
as to take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as
to result in securely tested knowledge. "Experience" then ceases to be
empirical and becomes experimental. Reason ceases to be a remote and
ideal faculty, and signifies all the resources by which activity is made
fruitful in meaning. Educationally, this change denotes such a plan
for the studies and method of instruction as has been developed in the
previous chapters.