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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
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Democracy and Education
207
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
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Democracy and Education
208
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
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