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where further absorption is impossible. The more that is taken
in, the greater capacity there is for further assimilation. New
receptiveness follows upon new curiosity, and new curiosity upon
information gained.
The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature
and man. This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning
when translated into educational equivalents. So translated, it
signifies that geography and history supply subject matter which
gives background and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what
might otherwise be narrow personal actions or mere forms of
technical skill. With every increase of ability to place our own
doings in their time and space connections, our doings gain in
significant content. We realize that we are citizens of no mean
city in discovering the scene in space of which we are denizens,
and the continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which we
are heirs and continuers. Thus our ordinary daily experiences
cease to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance.
Of course if geography and history are taught as ready-made
studies which a person studies simply because he is sent to
school, it easily happens that a large number of statements about
things remote and alien to everyday experience are learned.
Activity is divided, and two separate worlds are built up,
occupying activity at divided periods. No transmutation takes
place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in meaning by getting
its connections; what is studied is not animated and made real by
entering into immediate activity. Ordinary experience is not
even left as it was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses
something of its mobility and sensitiveness to suggestions. It
is weighed down and pushed into a corner by a load of
unassimilated information. It parts with its flexible
responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning. Mere
amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life
makes mind wooden; elasticity disappears.
Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out
beyond its immediate self. It does not passively wait for
information to be bestowed which will increase its meaning; it
seeks it out. Curiosity is not an accidental isolated
possession; it is a necessary consequence of the fact that an
experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all kinds of
connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency to
make these conditions perceptible. It is the business of
educators to supply an environment so that this reaching out of
an experience may be fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously
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Democracy and Education
159
active. Within a certain kind of environment, an activity may be
checked so that the only meaning which accrues is of its direct
and tangible isolated outcome. One may cook, or hammer, or walk,
and the resulting consequences may not take the mind any farther
than the consequences of cooking, hammering, and walking in the
literal -- or physical -- sense. But nevertheless the
consequences of the act remain far-reaching. To walk involves a
displacement and reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is
felt wherever there is matter. It involves the structure of the
limbs and the nervous system; the principles of mechanics. To
cook is to utilize heat and moisture to change the chemical
relations of food materials; it has a bearing upon the
assimilation of food and the growth of the body. The utmost that
the most learned men of science know in physics, chemistry,
physiology is not enough to make all these consequences and
connections perceptible. The task of education, once more, is to
see to it that such activities are performed in such ways and
under such conditions as render these conditions as perceptible
as possible. To "learn geography" is to gain in power to
perceive the spatial, the natural, connections of an ordinary
act; to "learn history" is essentially to gain in power to
recognize its human connections. For what is called geography as
a formulated study is simply the body of facts and principles
which have been discovered in other men's experience about the
natural medium in which we live, and in connection with which the
particular acts of our life have an explanation. So history as a
formulated study is but the body of known facts about the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]