Assimilation of new presentations, their character is all important.

The effect of new

presentations is to reinforce groupings previously formed. The business of the educator is,
first, to select the proper material in order to fix the nature of the original reactions, and,
secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations on the basis of the store of
ideas secured by prior transactions. The control is from behind, from the past, instead of,
as in the unfolding conception, in the ultimate goal.

(3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid down. Presentation of new
subject matter is obviously the central thing, but since knowing consists in the way in
which this interacts with the contents already submerged below consciousness, the first
thing is the step of “preparation,”—that is, calling into special activity and getting above
the floor of consciousness those older presentations which are to assimilate the new one.
Then after the presentation, follow the processes of interaction of new and old; then
comes the application of the newly formed content to the performance of some task.
Everything must go through this course; consequently, there is a perfectly uniform method
in instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages.

Herbart’s great service lay in taking the work of teaching out of the region of routine and
accident.

Control. To say that one knows what he is about, or can intend certain consequences, is to
say, of course, that he can better anticipate what is going to happen; that he can,
therefore, get ready or prepare in advance so as to secure beneficial consequences and
avert undesirable ones. A genuinely educative experience, then, one in which instruction is
conveyed and ability increased, is contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand,
and a capricious activity on the other. (a) In the latter one “does not care what happens”;
one just lets himself go and avoids connecting the consequences of one’s act (the
evidences of its connections whit other things) whit the act. It is customary to frown upon
such aimless random activity, treating it as willful mischief or carelessness or lawlessness.
But there is a tendency to seek the cause of such aimless activities in the youth’s own
disposition, isolated from everything else. But in fact, such activity is explosive, and due to
maladjustment with surroundings. Individuals act capriciously whenever they act under
external dictation, or from being told, without having a purpose of their own or perceiving
the bearing of the deed upon other acts. One may learn by doing something which he
does nor understand; even in the most intelligent action, we do much which we do not
mean, because the largest portion of the connections of the act we consciously intend are
not perceived or anticipated. But we learn only
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Ground that life and instinct are a kind of miraculous thing anyway. Thus, we fail to note
what the essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the significance of the temporal
place and order of each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while
the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage, until we
arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the process. Since aims
relate always to results, the first thing to look to when it is a question of aims, is whether
the work assigned possesses intrinsic continuity. Or is it a mere serial aggregate of acts,
first doing one thing and then another? To talk about an educational aim when
approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the only order in the
sequence of his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of
directions by another, is to talk nonsense. It is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious
or discontinuous action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim implies an
orderly consists in the progressive completing of a process. Given an activity having a time
span and cumulative growth within the time succession, an aim means foresight in
advance of the end or possible termination. If bees anticipated the consequences of their
activity, if they perceived their end in imaginative foresight, they would have the primary
element in an aim. Hence it is nonsense

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thoroughgoing “disciplinary” subordination to existing institutions. The extent of the

transformation of educational philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation
occupied by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence, may be gathered
from Kant, who well expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on
Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth century, he
defines education as the process by which man becomes man. Mankind begins its history
submerged in nature—not as Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only
instinct and appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which education is to develop and
perfect. The peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create himself by his own
voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational, and free being. This
creative effort is carried on by the educational activities of slow generations. Its
acceleration depends upon men consciously striving to educate their successors not for
the existing state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity. But there
is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in
the present world instead of whit a view to the proper end of education; the promotion of
the best possible realization of humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may
get on; princes educate
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Indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail. IT is centered upon whatever has
a bearing upon the effective pursuit of your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are
concerned to note the existing facts because and in so far as they are factors in the
achievement of the result intended. You have to find out what your resources are, what
conditions are at command, and what the difficulties and obstacles are. This foresing and
this survey with reference to what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not
involve such a forecast of results and such an examination of means and hindrances is
either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither case is it intelligent. To be vague and
uncertain as to what is intended and careless in observation of conditions of its realization
is to be, in that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.

If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical manipulation of the
instruments but with what one intends to write, the case is the same. There is an activity
in process; one is taken up with the development of a theme. Unless one writes as a
phonograph talks, this mean intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various
conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending, together with
continually renewed observation and recollection to get hold of the subject matter which
bears upon the conclusions to be reaches.

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The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually anticipated the results
reached in a discussion of the purport of education in a democratic community. For it
assumed that the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education—or
that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea
cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with
man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of
social habits and institutions by means of wide simulation arising from equitably
distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our search for aims in
education, we are not concerned, therefore, with finding an end outside of the educative
process to which education is subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are rather
concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which
they operate and when they are set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must
obtain when social relationships are not equitably balanced. For in that case, some
portions of the whole social group will find their aims determined by an external dictation;
their aims will not arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal
aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly their own.
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There is a disposition to take considerations which are dear to the hearts of adults and set
them up as ends irrespective of the capacities of those educated. There is also an
inclination to propound aims which are so uniform as to neglect the specific powers and
requirements of an individual, forgetting that all learning is something which happens to
an individual at a given time and place. The larger range of perception of the adult is of
great value in observing the abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they
may amount to. Thus, the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit what certain tendencies of
the child are capable of; if we did not have the adult achievements we should be without
assurance as to the significance of the drawing, reproducing, modeling, coloring activities
of childhood. So, if it were not for adult language, we should not be able to see the import
of the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use adult accomplishments as a
context in which to place and survey the doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another
to set them up as a fixed aim without regard to the concrete activities of those educated.

(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of cooperating with the activities
of those undergoing instruction. It must suggest the kind of environment needed to
liberate and to organize their capacities. Unless it lends itself to the

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And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims. Only persons,
parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract idea like education. And
consequently, their purpose is indefinitely varied, differing with different children,
changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on the part of the one who
teaches. Even the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more harm
than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to
educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to choose in liberating and
directing the energies of the concrete situations in which they find themselves. As a recent
writer has said: “To lead this boy to read Scott’s novels instead of old Sleuth’s stories; to
teach this girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying from John’s make-up; to prepare this
class to study medicine, —these are samples of the millions of aims we have actually
before us in the concrete work of education.” Bearing these qualifications in mind, we shall
proceed to state some of the characteristics found in all good educational aims. (1) An
educational aim must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs (including original
instincts and acquired habits) of the given individual to be educated. The tendency of such
an aim as preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers, and find the aim in
some remote accomplishment or responsibility. In general,
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to it laden with the spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive to the needs and
occasions of the present actuality will have the liveliest of motives for interest in the
background of the present, and will never have to hunt for a way back because it will
never have lost connection.

3. Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of latent
powers from within, and of the formation from without, whether by physical nature or by
the cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the conception that
education is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an
immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end —the direct
transformation of the quality of experience. Infancy, youth, adult life, —all stand on the
same educative level in the sense that what is really learned at any and every stage of
experience constitutes the value of that experience, and in the sense that it is the chief
business of life at every point to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of its own
perceptible meaning.

We thus reach a technical definition of education: it is that reconstruction or

reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which
increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience. (1) The increment of
meaning corresponds to the increased perception of the

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Much which has been said so fair is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the
world. But conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict these
ideas in their application. He never got any conception of the indefinite plurality of
activities which may characterize an individual and a social group, and consequently
limited his view to a limited number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements.
Plato’s starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon
knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of
accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion for
rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social
arrangements are to be ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and
distribution of activities—what he called justice—as a trait of both individual and social
organization. But how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved?
In dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such
Knowledge is not possible save in a just and harmonious social order. Everywhere else the
mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false perspectives. A disorganized
and factional society sets up a number of different models and standards. Under such
conditions it is impossible for the individual to attain consistency

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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
democracy has a moral and ideal meaning, it is that a social return be demanded from all
and

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Intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed by some authority external
to intelligence, leaving to the latter nothing but a mechanical choice of means.

(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed prior to the attempt to realize
them. This impression must now be qualified. The aim as it first emerges is a mere
tentative sketch. The act of striving to realize it tests its worth. If it suffices to direct activity
successfully, nothing more is required, since its whole function is to set a mark in advance;
and at times a mere hint may suffice. But usually—at least in complicated situations—
acting upon it brings to light conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision
of the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from. An aim must, then, be
flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established
externally to the process of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from without,
it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the
situation. What happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor alters it.
Such an end can only be insisted upon. The failure that results from its lack of adaptation is
attributed simply to the perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the end is not
reasonable under the circumstances. The value of a legitimate aim, on the contrary, lies