The child and the curriculum

1902

THE CHILD

AND

CURRICULUM

by
John Dewey

"THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

The R. W.B.Jackson
I Library

OISE

LIBRARY

THE ONTARiO INSTITUTE
FOR STUD'E CATION

TORONTO C A DA

V / "

D5I1

AUG 9 1356

*•

THE CHILD

AND

THE CURRICULUM

by
John Dewey

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO & LONDON

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO & LONDON
The University of Toronto Press, Toronto 5, Canada

Copyright 1902 by The University of Chicago. All rights

reserved. Published 1902. Twenty-eighth Impression 1966

Printed in the United States of America

THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM

THE CHILD AND THE
CURRICULUM

The Child and the Curriculum

Profound differences in theory are never gratuitous or invented.
They grow out of conflicting elements in a genuine problem— a
problem which is genuine just because the elements, taken as
they stand, are conflicting.jAny significant problem involves con
ditions that for the moment contradict each other. Solution
comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that is
already fixed upon and coming to see the conditions from an-

The Child and the Curriculum

other point of view, and hence in a fresh light. But this recon
struction means travail of thought. Easier than thinking with sur
render of already formed ideas and detachment from facts already
learned is just to stick by what is already said, looking about for
something with which to buttress it against attack.

Thus sects arise: schools of opinion. Each selects that set of
conditions that appeals to it; and then erects them into a com
plete and independent truth, instead of treating them as a factor
in a problem, needing adjustment.

The fundamental factors in the educative process are an im
mature, undeveloped being; and certain social aims, meanings,
values incarnate in the matured experience of the adult. The
educative process is the due interaction of these forces. Such a
conception of each in relation to the other as facilitates com-
pletest and freest interaction is the essence of educational theory.
> But here comes the effort of thought. It is easier to see the
conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense
of the other, to make antagonists of them, than to discover a
reality to which each belongs. The easy thing is to seize upon
something in the nature of the child, or upon something in the
developed consciousness of the adult, and insist upon that as the
key to the whole problem. When this happens a really serious
practical problem— that of interaction— is transformed into an
unreal, and hence insoluble, theoretic problem. Instead of seeing

The Child and the Curriculum

the educative steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms.
We get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual
nature vs. social culture. Below all other divisions in pedagogic
opinion lies this opposition.

The child lives in a somewhat narrow world of personal con
tacts. Things hardly come within his experience unless they
touch, intimately and obviously, his own well-being, or that of
his family and friends. His world is a world of persons with their
personal interests, rather than a realm of facts and laws. Not
truth, in the sense of conformity to external fact, but affection and
sympathy, is its keynote. As against this, the course of study met
in the school presents material stretching back indefinitely in
time, and extending outward indefinitely into space. The child is
taken out of his familiar physical environment, hardly more than
a square mile or so in area, into the wide world— yes, and even to
the bounds of the solar system. His little span of personal
memory and tradition is overlaid with the long centuries of the
history of all peoples.

Again, the child's life is an integral, a total one. He passes
quickly and readily from one topic to another, as from one spot
to another, but is not conscious of transition or break. There is
no conscious isolation, hardly conscious distinction. The things
that occupy him are held together by the unity of the personal
and social interests which his life carries along. Whatever is

5

The Child and the Curriculum

uppermost in his mind constitutes to him, for the time being, the
whole universe. That universe is fluid and fluent; its contents
dissolve and re-form with amazing rapidity. But, after all, it is the
child's own world. It has the unity and completeness of his own
life. He goes to school, and various studies divide and fractionize
the world for him. Geography selects, it abstracts and analyzes
one set of facts, and from one particular point of view. Arith
metic is another division, grammar another department, and so
on indefinitely.

Again, in school each of these subjects is classified. Facts are
torn away from their original place in experience and rearranged
with reference to some general principle. Classification is not a
matter of child experience; things do not come to the individual
pigeonholed. The vital ties of affection, the connecting bonds of
activity, hold together the variety of his personal experiences.
The adult mind is so familiar with the notion of logically ordered
facts that it does not recognize— it cannot realize— the amount of
separating and reformulating which the facts of direct experience
have to undergo before they can appear as a "study," or branch
of learning. A principle, for the intellect, has had to be distin
guished and defined; facts have had to be interpreted in relation
to this principle, not as they are in themselves. They have had to
be regathered about a new center which is wholly abstract and
ideal. All this means a development of a special intellectual in-

The Child and the Curriculum

terest. It means ability to view facts impartially and objectively;
that is, without reference to their place and meaning in one's
own experience. It means capacity to analyze and to synthe
size. It means highly matured intellectual habits and the com
mand of a definite technique and apparatus of scientific inquiry.
The studies as classified are the product, in a word, of the science
of the ages, not of the experience of the child.

These apparent deviations and differences between child and
curriculum might be almost indefinitely widened. But we have
here sufficiently fundamental divergences: first, the narrow but >
personal world of the child against the impersonal but infinitely
extended world of space and time; second, the unity, the single
wholeheartedness of the child's life, and the specializations and
divisions of the curriculum; third, an abstract principle of logical
classification and arrangement, and the practical and emotional
bonds of child life.

From these elements of conflict grow up different educational
sects. One school fixes its attention upon the importance of the
subject-matter of the curriculum as compared with the contents
of the child's own experience. It is as if they said: Is life petty,
narrow, and crude? Then studies reveal the great, wide universe
with all its fulness and complexity of meaning. Is the life of the
child egoistic, self-centered, impulsive? Then in these studies is
found an objective universe of truth, law, and order. Is his ex-

The Child and the Curriculum

perience confused, vague, uncertain, at the mercy of the mo
ment's caprice and circumstance? Then studies introduce a world
arranged on the basis of eternal and general truth; a world where
all is measured and defined. Hence the moral: ignore and mini
mize the child's individual peculiarities, whims, and experiences.
They are what we need to get away from. They are to be obscured
or eliminated. As educators our work is precisely to substitute for
these superficial and casual affairs stable and well-ordered realities;
and these are found in studies and lessons.

Subdivide each topic into studies; each study into lessons; each
lesson into specific facts and formulae. Let the child proceed step
by step to master each one of these separate parts, and at last he
will have covered the entire ground. The road which looks so
long when viewed in its entirety is easily traveled, considered as
a series of particular steps. Thus emphasis is put upon the logical
subdivisions and consecutions of the subject-matter. Problems of
instruction are problems of procuring texts giving logical parts
and sequences, and of presenting these portions in class in a simi
lar definite and graded way. Subject-matter furnishes the end,
and it determines method. The child is simply the immature be
ing who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be
deepened; his is narrow experience which is to be widened. It is
his to receive, to accept. His part is fulfilled when he is ductile
and docile.

8

The Child and the Curriculum

J I Not so, says the other sect. The child is the starting-point, the
* center, and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. It
alone furnishes the standard. To the growth of the child all stud
ies are subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the
needs of growth. Personality, character, is more than subject-
matter. Not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the
goal. To possess all the world of knowledge and lose one's own
self is as awful a fate in education as in religion. Moreover, sub
ject-matter never can be got into the child from without. ^Learn
ing is active. It involves reaching out of the mind. It involves
organic assimilation starting from within. Literally, we must take
our stand with the child and our departure from him. It is he
and not the subject-matter which determines both quality and
quantity of learning.

The only significant method is the method of the mind as it
reaches out and assimilates. Subject-matter is but spiritual' food,
possible nutritive material. It cannot digest itself; it cannot of its

own accord turn into bone and muscle and blood. The source of

.j

whatever is dead, mechanical, and formal in schools is found pre
cisely in the subordination of the life and experience of the child
to the curriculum. It is because of this that "study" has become
a synonym for what is irksome, and a lesson identical with a taski.
This fundamental opposition of child and curriculum set up
by these two modes of doctrine can be duplicated in a series of

The Child and the Curriculum

other terms. "Discipline*' is the watchword of those who mag
nify the course of study; "interest" that of those who blazon
"The Child" upon their banner. The standpoint of the former is
logical; that of the latter psychological. The first emphasizes the
necessity of adequate training and scholarship on the part of the
teacher; the latter that of need of sympathy with the child, and
knowledge of his natural instincts. "Guidance and control" are
the catchwords of one school; "freedom and initiative" of the
other. Law is asserted here; spontaneity proclaimed there. The
old, the conservation of what has been achieved in the pain and
toil of the ages, is dear to the one; the new, change, progress, wins
the affection of the other. Inertness and routine, chaos and an
archism, are accusations bandied back and forth. Neglect of the
sacred authority of duty is charged by one side, only to be met by
counter-charges of suppression of individuality through tyranni
cal despotism.

Such oppositions are rarely carried to their logical conclusion.
Common-sense recoils at the extreme character of these results.
They are left to theorists, while common-sense vibrates back and
forward in a maze of inconsistent compromise. The need of get
ting theory and practical common-sense into closer connection
suggests a return to our original thesis: that we have here condi
tions which are necessarily related to each other in the educative
process, since this is precisely one of interaction and adjustment.

10

The Child and the Curriculum

What, then, is the problem? It is just to get rid of the preju
dicial notion that there is some gap in kind (as distinct from
degree) between the child's experience and the various forms of
subject-matter that make up the course of study. From the side
of the child, it is a question of seeing how his experience already
contains within itself elements— facts and truths— of just the same
sort as those entering into the formulated study; and, what is of
more importance, of how it contains within itself the attitudes,
the motives, and the interests which have operated in developing
and organizing the subject-matter to the plane which it now oc
cupies. From the side of the studies, it is a question of interpret
ing them as outgrowths of forces operating in the child's life, and
of discovering the steps that intervene between the child's pres
ent experience and their richer maturity. ^

Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and
ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease think
ing of the child's experience as also something hard and fast; see
it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the
child and the_oirriculum_are simply two limits which define a
single process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the
present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of stud
ies define instruction. It is continuous reconstruction, moving/
from the child's present experience out into that represented by
the organized bodies of truth that we call studies.

11

The Child and the Curriculum

On the face of it, the various studies, arithmetic, geography,
language, botany, etc., are themselves experience— they are that
of the race. They embody the cumulative outcome of the efforts,
the strivings, and the successes of the human race generation after
generation. They present this, not as a mere accumulation, not as
a miscellaneous heap of separate bits of experience, but in some
organized and systematized way— that is, as reflectively formu
lated.

Hence, the facts and truths that enter into the child's present
experience, and those contained in the subject-matter of studies,
are the initial and final terms of one reality. To oppose one to the
other is to oppose the infancy and maturity of the same growing
life; it is to set the moving tendency and the final result of the
same process over against each other; it is to hold that the nature
and the destiny of the child war with each other.

If such be the case, the problem of the relation of the child
and the curriculum presents itself in this guise: Of _ what use, ed
ucationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the begin
ning? How does it assist us in dealing with the early stages of
growth to be able to anticipate its later phases? The studies, as
we have agreed, represent the possibilities of development inher
ent in the child's immediate crude experience. But, after all, they
are not parts of that present and immediate life. Why, then, or
how, make account of them?

12

The Child and the Curriculum

Asking such a question suggests its own answer. To see the
outcome is to know in what direction the present experience is
moving, provided it move normally and soundly. The far-away
point, which is of no significance to us simply as far away, be
comes of huge importance the moment we take it as defining a
present direction of movement. Taken in this way it is no remote
and distant result to be achieved, but a guiding method in deal
ing with the present. The systematized and defined experience of
the adult mind, in other words, is of value to us in interpreting
the child's life as it immediately shows itself, and in passing on
to guidance or direction.

Let us look for a moment at these two ideas: interpretation
and guidance. The childXpresent experience is in no way self-
explanatory. It is not final, but transitional. It is nothing com
plete in itself, but just a sign or index of certain growth-tenden
cies. As long as we confine our gaze to what the child here and
now puts forth, we are confused and misled. We cannot read its
meaning. Extreme depreciations of the child morally and intel
lectually, and sentimental idealizations of him, have their root in
a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or
movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see
the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by
themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to
see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but

13

The Child and the Curriculum

signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they are
treated as achievements.

What we need is something which will enable us to interpret,
to appraise, the elements in the child's present puttings forth and
fallings away, his exhibitions of power and weakness, in the light
of some larger growth-process in which they have their place.
Only in this way can we discriminate. If we isolate the child's
present inclinations, purposes, and experiences from the place
they occupy and the part they have to perform in a developing
experience, all stand upon the same level; all alike are equally
good and equally bad. But in the movement of life different ele
ments stand upon different planes of value. Some of the child's
deeds are symptoms of a waning tendency; they are survivals in
functioning of an organ which has done its part and is passing
out of vital use. To give positive attention to such qualities is to
arrest development upon a lower level. It is systematically to
maintain a rudimentary phase of growth. Other activities are
signs of a culminating power and interest; to them applies the
maxim of striking while the iron is hot. As regards them, it is
perhaps a matter of now or never. Selected, utilized, emphasized,
they may mark a turning-point for good in the child's whole ca
reer; neglected, an opportunity goes, never to be recalled. Other
acts and feelings are prophetic; they represent the dawning of
flickering light that will shine steadily only in the far future. As

14

The Child and the Curriculum

regards them there is little at present to do but give them fair and
full chance, waiting for the future for definite direction.

Just as, upon the whole, it was the weakness of the "old educa
tion" that it made invidious comparisons between the immatu
rity of the child and the maturity of the adult, regarding the for
mer as something to be got away from as soon as possible and as
much as possible; so it is the danger of the "new education" that
it regard the child's present powers and interests as something
finally significant in themselves. In truth, his learnings and
achievements are fluid and moving. They change from day to day
and from hour to hour.

It will do harm if child-study leave in the popular mind the
impression that a child of a given age has a positive equipment
of purposes and interests to be cultivated just as they stand. In
terests in reality are but attitudes toward possible experiences; ^^
they are not achievements; their worth is in the leverage they af
ford, not in the accomplishment they represent. To take the phe-
.nomena presented at a given age as in any way self-explanatory
or self-contained is inevitably to result in indulgence and spoiling, j
Any power, whether of child or adult, is indulged when it is takea '
on its given and present level in consciousness. Its genuine mean- >,
ing is in the propulsion it affords toward a higher level. It is just
something to do with. Appealing to the interest upon the present
plane means excitation; it means playing with a power so as con-

15

The Child and the Curriculum

tinually to stir it up without directing it toward definite achieve
ment. Continuous initiation, continuous starting of activities that
do not arrive, is, for all practical purposes, as bad as the continual
repression of initiative in conformity with supposed interests of
some more perfect thought or will. It is as if the child were for
ever tasting and never eating; always having his palate tickled
upon the emotional side, but never getting the organic satisfac
tion that comes only with digestion of food and transformation
of it into working power.

As against such a view, the subject-matter of science and his
tory and art serves to reveal the real child to us. We do not know
the meaning either of his tendencies or of his performances ex
cepting as we take them as germinating seed, or opening bud, of
some fruit to be borne. The whole world of visual nature is all too
small an answer to the problem of the meaning of the child's in
stinct for light and form. The entire science of physics is none
too much to interpret adequately to us what is involved in some
simple demand of the child for explanation of some casual change
that has attracted his attention. The art of Raphael or of Corot is
none too much to enable us to value the impulses stirring in the
child when he draws and daubs.

So much for the use of the subject-matter in interpretation. Its
further employment in direction or guidance is but an expansion
of the same thought. To interpret the fact is to see it in its vital

16

The Child and the Curriculum

movement, to see it in its relation to growth. But to view it as a
part of a normal growth is to secure the basis for guiding it. Guid
ance is not external imposition. It is freeing the life-process for its
own most adequate fulfilment. ^What was said about disregard of
the child's present experience because of its remoteness from ma
ture experience; and of the sentimental idealization of the child's
naive caprices and performances, may be repeated here with
slightly altered phrase. There are those who see no alternative be
tween forcing the child from without, or leaving him entirely
alone. Seeing no alternative, some choose one mode, some an
other. Both fall into the same fundamental error. Both fail to see
that development is a definite process, having its own law which
can be fulfilled only when adequate and normal conditions are
provided. Really to interpret the child's present crude impulses
in counting, measuring, and arranging things in rhythmic series
involves mathematical scholarship— a knowledge of the mathe
matical formulae and relations which have, in the history of the
race, grown out of just such crude beginnings. To see the whole
history of development which intervenes between these two terms
is simply to see what step the child needs to take just here and
now; to what use he needs to put his blind impulse in order that
it may get clarity and gain force./

If, once more, the "old education" tended to ignore the dy
namic quality, the developing force inherent in the child's pres-

17

The Child and the Curriculum

ent experience, and therefore to assume that direction and con
trol were just matters of arbitrarily putting the child in a given
path and compelling him to walk there, the "new education" is
in danger of taking the idea of development in altogether too
/ formal and empty a way. The child is expected to "develop" this
or that fact or truth out of his own mind. He is told to think
things out, or work things out for himself, without being supplied
any of the environing conditions which are requisite to start and
guide thought. Nothing caji be developed from nothing; nothing
but the crude can be developed out of the crude— and this is what
surely happens when we throw the child back upon his achieved
self as a finality, and invite him to spin new truths of nature or of
conduct out of that. It is certainly as futile to expect a child to
evolve a universe out of his own mere mind as it is for a philoso
pher to attempt that task. Development does notmean just get
ting something out of the mind. It is a development or experience
and into experience that is really wanted. And this is impossible
save as just that educative medium is provided which will enable
the powers and interests that have been selected as valuable to
function. They must operate, and how they operate will depend
almost entirely upon the stimuli which surround them and the
material upon which they exercise themselvesT^The problem of
direction is thus the problem of selecting appropriate stimuli for
instincts and impulses which it is desired to employ in the gain-

18

The Child and the Curriculum

ing of new experience. What new experiences are desirable, and
thus what stimuli are needed, it is impossible to tell except as
there is some comprehension of the development which is aimed
at; except, in a word, as the adult knowledge is drawn upon as
revealing the possible career open to the child, f

It may be of use to distinguish and to relate to each other the
/logical and the psychological aspects of experience— the former
standing for subject-matter in itself, the latter for it in relation to
the child. A psychological statement of experience follows its ac
tual growth; it is historic; it notes steps actually taken, the un
certain and tortuous, as well as the efficient and successful. The
logical point of view, on the other hand, assumes that the devel
opment has reached a certain positive stage of fulfilment. It neg
lects the process and considers the outcome. It summarizes and'
arranges, and thus separates the achieved results from the actual
steps by which they were forthcoming in the first instance. We
may compare the difference between the logical and the psycho
logical to the difference between the notes which an explorer
makes in a new country, blazing a trail and finding his way along
as best he may, and the finished map that is constructed after the
country has been thoroughly explored. The two are mutually de-
pendent.. Without the more or less accidental and devious paths
traced by the explorer there would be no facts which could be
utilized in the making of the complete and related chart. But no

19

The Child and the Curriculum

one would get the benefit of the explorer's trip if it was not com
pared and checked up with similar wanderings undertaken by
others; unless the new geographical facts learned, the streams
crossed, the mountains climbed, etc., were viewed, not as mere
incidents in the journey of the particular traveler, but (quite
apart from the individual explorer's life) in relation to other sim
ilar facts already known. The map orders individual experiences,
connecting them with one another irrespective of the local and
temporal circumstances and accidents of their original discovery.

Of what use is this formulated statement of experience? Of
what use is the map?

Well, we may first tell what the map is not. The map is not a
substitute for a personal experience. The map does not take the
place of an actual journey. The logically formulated material of a
science or branch of learning, of a study, is no substitute for the
having of individual experiences. The mathematical formula for
a falling body does not take the place of personal contact and
immediate individual experience with the falling thing. But the
map, a summary, an arranged and orderly view of previous experi
ences, serves as a guide to future experience; it gives direction; it
facilitates control; it economizes effort, preventing useless wan
dering, and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and
most certainly to a desired result. Through the map every new
traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the results of

20

The Child and the Curriculum

others' explorations without the waste of energy and loss of time
involved in their wanderings— wanderings which he himself
would be obliged to repeat were it not for just the assistance of
the objective and generalized record of their performances. That
which we call a science or study puts the net product of past ex
perience in the form which makes it most available for the future.
It represents a capitalization which may at once be turned to in
terest. It economizes the workings of the mind in every way.
Memory is less taxed because the facts are grouped together about
some common principle, instead of being connected solely with
the varying incidents of their original discovery. Observation is
assisted; we know what to look for and where to look. It is the
difference between looking for a needle in a haystack, and search
ing for a given paper in a well-arranged cabinet. Reasoning is
directed, because there is a certain general path or line laid out
along which ideas naturally march, instead of moving from one
chance association to another.

There is, then, nothing final about a logical rendering of ex
perience. Its value is not contained in itself; its significance is that
of standpoint, outlook, method. It intervenes between the more
casual, tentative, and roundabout experiences of the past, and
more controlled and orderly experiences of the future. It gives
past experience in that net form which renders it most available
and most significant, most fecund for future experience. The ab-

21

The Child and the Curriculum

stractions, generalizations, and classifications which it introduces
all have prospective meaning.

The formulated result is then not to be opposed to the process
of growth. The logical is not set over against the psychological.
The surveyed and arranged result occupies a critical position in
the process of growth. It marks a turning-point. 4t shows how we
I may get the benefit of past effort in controlling future endeavor.
/ In the largest sense the logical standpoint is itself psychological;
it has its meaning as a point in the development of experience,
and its justification is in its functioning in the future growth
which it insures.

Hence the need of reinstating into experience the subject-
matter of the studies, or branches of learning. It must be restored
to the experience from which it has been abstracted. It needs
to be psychologized; turned over, translated into the immediate
and individual experiencing within which it has its origin and
significance.

Every study or subject thus has two aspects: one for the scien
tist as a scientist; the other for the teacher as a teacher. These
two aspects are in no sense opposed or conflicting. But neither
are they immediately identical. For the scientist, the subject-
matter represents simply a given body of truth to be employed
in locating new problems, instituting new researches, and carry
ing them through to a verified outcome. To him the subject-

22

The Child and the Curriculum

matter of the science is self-contained. He refers various portions
of it to each other; he connects new facts with it. He is not, as a
scientist, called upon to travel outside its particular bounds; if he
does, it is only to get more facts of the same general sort. The
problem of the teacher is a different one. As a teacher he is not
concerned with adding new facts to the science he teaches; in
propounding new hypotheses or in verifying them. He is con
cerned with the subject-matter of the science as representing a
given stage and phase of the development of experience. His
problem is that of inducing a vital and personal experiencing.
Hence, what concerns him, as teacher, is the ways in which that
subject may become a part of experience; what there is in the
child's present that is usable with reference to it; how such ele
ments are to be used; how his own knowledge of the subject-
matter may assist in interpreting the child's needs and doings,
and determine the medium in which the child should be placed
in order that his growth may be properly directed. He is con
cerned, not with the subject-matter as such, but with the subject-
matter as a related factor in a total and growing experience. Thus
to see it is to psychologize it.

It is the failure to keep in mind the double aspect of subject-
matter which causes the curriculum and child to be set over
against each other as described in our early pages. The subject-
matter, just as it is for the scientist, has no direct relationship to

23

The Child and the Curriculum

the child's present experience. It stands outside of it. The danger
here is not a merely theoretical one. We are practically threatened
on all sides. Textbook and teacher vie with each other in present
ing to the child the subject-matter as it stands to the specialist.
Such modification and revision as it undergoes are a mere elimi
nation of certain scientific difficulties, and the general reduction
to a lower intellectual level. The material is not translated into
life-terms, but is directly offered as a substitute for, or an external
annex to, the child's present life.

Three typical evils result: In the first place, the lack of any
orgamc connection with what the child has already seen and felt
and loved makes the material purely formal and symbolic. There
is a sense in which it is impossible to value too highly the formal
and the symbolic. The genuine form, the real symbol, serve as
methods in the holding and discovery of truth. They are tools by
which the individual pushes out most surely and widely into un
explored areas. They are means by which he brings to bear what
ever of reality he has succeeded in gaining in past searchings. But
this happens only when the symbol really symbolizes— when it
stands for and sums up in shorthand actual experiences which the
individual has already gone through. A symbol which is induced
from without, which has not been led up to in preliminary activi
ties, is, as we say, a bare or mere symbol; it is dead and barren.
Now, any fact, whether of arithmetic, or geography, or grammar,

24

The Child and the Curriculum

which is not led up to and into out of something which has previ
ously occupied a significant position in the child's life for its own
sake, is forced into this position. It is not a reality, but just the
sign of a reality which might be experienced if certain conditions
were fulfilled. But the abrupt presentation of the fact as some-T
thing known by others, and requiring only to be studied and '
learned by the child, rules out such conditions of fulfilment. It
condemns the fact to be a hieroglyph: it would mean something
if one only had the key. The clue being lacking, it remains an
idle curiosity, to fret and obstruct the mind, a dead weight to
burden it.

The second evil in this external presentation is lack of motiya-
tion. There are not only no facts or truths which have been
previously felt as such with which to appropriate and assimilate
the new, but there is no craving, no need, no demand. When the
subject-matter has been psychologized, that is, viewed as an out
growth of present tendencies and activities, it is easy to locate in
the present some obstacle, intellectual, practical, or ethical, which
can be handled more adequately if the truth in question be
mastered. This need supplies motive for the learning. An end
which is the child's own carries him on to possess the means of
its accomplishmentjfBut when material is directly supplied in the
form of a lesson to be learned as a lesson, the connecting links of
need and aim are conspicuous for their absence!^ What we mean

25

The Child and the Curriculum

by the mechanical and dead in instruction is a result of this lack
of motivation. The organic and vital mean interaction— they
mean play of mental demand and material supply.

The third evil is that even the most scientific matter, Arranged
in most logical fashion, loses this quality, when jxresen ted in ex
ternal, ready-made fashion, by the time it gets to the child. It has
to undergo some modification in order to shut out some phases
too hard to grasp, and to reduce some of the attendant difficulties.
What happens? Those things which are most significant to the
scientific man, and most valuable in the logic of actual inquiry
and classification, drop out. The really thought-provoking charac
ter is obscured, and the organizing function disappears. Or, as we
commonly say, the child's reasoning powers, the faculty of ab
straction and generalization, are not adequately developed. So the
subject-matter is evacuated of its logical value, and, though it is
what it is only from the logical standpoint, is presented as stuff
only for "memory." This is the contradiction: the child gets the
advantage neither of the adult logical formulation, nor of his own
native competencies of apprehension and response. Hence the
logic of the child is hampered and mortified, and we are almost
fortunate if he does not get actual non-science, flat and common
place residua of what was gaining scientific vitality a generation
or two ago— degenerate reminiscence of what someone else once
formulated on the basis of the experience that some further per
son had, once upon a time, experienced.

26

The Child and the Curriculum

The train of evils does not cease. It is all too common for op
posed erroneous theories to play straight into each other's hands.
Psychological considerations may be slurred or shoved one side;
they cannot be crowded out. Put out of the door, they come back
through the window. Somehow and somewhere motive must be
appealed to, connection must be established between the mind
and its material. There is no question of getting along without
this bond of connection; the only question is whether it be such
as grows out of the material itself in relation to the mind, or be
imported and hitched on from some outside source/If the sub
ject-matter of the lessons be such as to have an appropriate place
within the expanding consciousness of the child, if it grows out
of his own past doings, thinkings, and sufferings, and grows into
application in further achievements and receptivities, then no
device or trick of method has to be resorted to in order to enlist
"interest." The psychologized is of interest— that is, it is placed in
the whole of conscious life so that it shares the worth of that life.
But the externally presented material, conceived and generated
in standpoints and attitudes remote from the child, and de
veloped in motives alien to him, has no such place of its own.
Hence the recourse to adventitious leverage to push it in, to facti
tious drill to drive it in, to artificial bribe to lure it in.

Three aspects of this recourse to outside ways for giving the
subject-matter some psychological meaning may be worth men
tioning. Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds some-

27

The Child and the Curriculum

thing like affection. We get used to the chains we wear, and we
miss them when removed. Tis an old story that through custom
we finally embrace what at first wore a hideous mien. Unpleasant,
because meaningless, activities may get agreeable if long enough
persisted in. It is possible for the mind to develop interest in a
routine or mechanical procedure if conditions are continually
supplied which demand that mode of operation and preclude any
other sort. I frequently hear dulling devices and empty exercises
defended and extolled because "the children take such an 'inter
est' in them/' Yes, that is the worst of it; the mind, shut out from
worthy employ and missing the taste of adequate performance,
comes down to the level of that which is left to it to know and
do, and perforce takes an interest in a cabined and cramped ex
perience. To find satisfaction in its own exercise is the normal
law of mind, and if large and meaningful business for the mind
be denied, it tries to content itself with the formal movements
that remain to it— and too often succeeds, save in those cases of
more intense activity which cannot accommodate themselves,
and that make up the unruly and declasse of our school product.
An interest in the formal apprehension of symbols and in their
memorized reproduction becomes in many pupils a substitute for
the original and vital interest in reality; and all because, the sub
ject-matter of the course of study being out of relation to the con
crete mind of the individual, some substitute bond to hold it in

28

The Child and the Curriculum

some kind of working relation to the mind must be discovered
and elaborated.

The second substitute for living motivation in the subject-
matter is that of contrast-effects; the material of the lesson is ren
dered interesting, if not in itself, at least in contrast with some
alternative experience. To learn the lesson is more interesting
than to take a scolding, be held up to general ridicule, stay after
school, receive degradingly low marks, or fail to be promoted.
And very much of what goes by the name of "discipline," and
prides itself upon opposing the doctrines of a soft pedagogy and
upon upholding the banner of effort and duty, is nothing more
or less than just this appeal to ''interest" in its obverse aspect—
to fear, to dislike of various kinds of physical, social, and personal
pain. The subject-matter does not appeal; it cannot appeal; it
lacks origin and bearing in a growing experience. So the appeal is
to the thousand and one outside and irrelevant agencies which
may serve to throw, by sheer rebuff and rebound, the mind back
upon the material from which it is constantly wandering.

Human nature being what it is, however, it tends to seek its
motivation in the agreeable rather than in the disagreeable, in
direct pleasure rather than in alternative pain. And so has come
up the modern theory and practice of the "interesting," in the
false sense of that term. The material is still left; so far as its own
characteristics are concerned, just material externally selected and

29

The Child and the Curriculum

formulated. It is still just so much geography and arithmetic and
grammar study; not so much potentiality of child-experience with
regard to language, earth, and numbered and measured reality.
Hence the difficulty of bringing the mind to bear upon it; hence
its repulsiveness; the tendency for attention to wander; for other
acts and images to crowd in and expel the lesson /The legitimate
way out is to transform the material; to psychologize it— that is,
once more, to take it and to develop it within the range and
scope of the child's life. But it is easier and simpler to leave it as
it is, and then by trick of method to arouse interest, to make it
interesting; to cover it with sugar-coating; to conceal its barren
ness by intermediate and unrelated material; and finally, as it
were, to get the child to swallow and digest the unpalatable mor
sel while he is enjoying tasting something quite different. But
alas for the analogy! Mental assimilation is a matter of conscious
ness; and if the attention has not been playing upon the actual
material, that has not been apprehended, nor worked into faculty.
How, then, stands the case of Child vs. Curriculum? What
shall the verdict be? The radical fallacy in the original pleadings
with which we set out is the supposition that we have no choice
save either to leave the child to his own unguided spontaneity or
to inspire direction upon him from without. Action is response;
it is adaptation, adjustment. There is no such thing as sheer self-
activity possible— because all activity takes place in a medium, in

30

The Child and the Curriculum

a situation, and with reference to its conditions. But, again, no
such thing as imposition of truth from without, as insertion of
truth from without, is possible. All depends upon the activity
which the mind itself undergoes in responding to what is pre
sented from without. Now, the value of the formulated wealth of
knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may
enable the educator to determine the environment of the child,
and thus by indirection to direct. Its primary value, its primary
indication, is for the teacher, not for the child. It says to the
teacher: Such and such are the capacities, the fulfilments, in
truth and beauty and behavior, open to these children. Now see
to it that day by day the conditions are such that their own
activities move inevitably in this direction, toward such culmina
tion of themselves. Let the child's nature fulfil its own destiny,
revealed to you in whatever of science and art and industry the
world now holds as its own.

The case is of Child. It is his present powers which are to
assert themselves; his present capacities which are to be exercised;
his present attitudes which are to be realized. But save as the
teacher knows, knows wisely and thoroughly, the race-expression
which is embodied in that thing we call the Curriculum, the
teacher knows neither what the present power, capacity, or atti
tude is, nor yet how it is to be asserted, exercised, and realized.

31

375 D519C 1902 cl

Dewey / The child and the
curriculum

3 0005 00025985 6

375

D519C

1902

Dewey

The child and the curriculum

DUE DAlb

1

ffiys iJL^

M

FES 7

QCT 2 3 994

Wm 1 a

.

AUG 2 6 J99«

TheR

Library
OISE

Printed
in USA