Part 7 (2/2)

Moral philosophies which have started fro with the question (i) One method represents the survival of the older authoritative position, with such concessions and coress of events has made absolutely inevitable The deviations and departures characterizing an individual are still looked upon with suspicion; in principle they are evidences of the disturbances, revolts, and corruptions inhering in an individual apart frouidance In fact, as distinct from principle, intellectual individualisions-in subjects like mathematics and physics and astrono therefrom But the applicability of a sial, and political ma is still to be supreme; certain eternal truths made known by revelation, intuition, or the wisdom of our forefathers set unpassable limits to individual observation and speculation The evils frouided individuals to transgress these boundaries Between the physical and the moral sciences, lie interly yielded to freedoh past history has deood are widened andto a responsibility built up within the very process of inquiry, the ”authority” theory sets apart a sacred domain of truth which must be protected from the inroads of variation of beliefs Educationally, emphasis may not be put on eternal truth, but it is put on the authority of book and teacher, and individual variation is discouraged

(ii) Another method is sometimes terical faculty is set up in distinction from tradition and history and all concrete subject matter This faculty of reason is endoith power to influence conduct directly Since it deals wholly with general and iical findings, their activities will be externally consistent There is no doubt of the services rendered by this philosophy It was a powerful factor in the negative and dissolving criticis but tradition and class interest behind them; it accustomed men to freedom of discussion and to the notion that beliefs had to be submitted to criteria of reasonableness It undermined the power of prejudice, superstition, and brute force, by habituating ument, discussion, and persuasion It made for clarity and order of exposition But its influence was greater in destruction of old falsities than in the construction of new ties and associations a reason as so complete in itself apart from subject matter, its hostile attitude toward historical institutions, its disregard of the influence of habit, instinct, and emotion, as operative factors in life, left it iestion of specific ai and criticizing existing subject matter, cannot spin new subject matter out of itself In education, the correlative is trust in general ready-ree to it that the pupil's ideas really agree with one another

(iii) While this rationalistic philosophy was developing in France, English thought appealed to the intelligent self-interest of individuals in order to secure outer unity in the acts which issued froeulations, were to be such as to prevent the acts which proceeded fro with the feelings of others Education was to instill in individuals a sense that non-interference with others and soard for their welfare were necessary for security in the pursuit of one's own happiness Chief e the conduct of one into harmony with that of others In commerce, each aiain his own profit only by furnishi+ng so at the increase of his own private pleasurable states of consciousness, he contributes to the consciousness of others Again there is no doubt that this view expressed and furthered a heightened perception of the values of conscious life, and a recognition that institutional arrangeed by the contributions which theythe scope of conscious experience It also did much to rescue work, industry, and mechanical devices from the contempt in which they had been held in communities founded upon the control of a leisure class In both ways, this philosophy promoted a wider and more democratic social concern But it was tainted by the narrowness of its fundamental preard for his own pleasures and pains, and that so-called generous and sy and assuring one's own comfort In other words, itin any doctrine which , instead of an attempt to redirect and readapt co men a matter of calculation of externals It lent itself to the contemptuous assertions of Carlyle that it was a doctrine of anarchy plus a constable, and recognized only a ”cash nexus” a men The educational equivalents of this doctrine in the uses made of pleasurable rewards and painful penalties are only too obvious (iv) Typical German philosophy followed another path It started from as essentially the rationalistic philosophy of Descartes and his French successors But while French thought upon the whole developed the idea of reason in opposition to the religious conception of a divine el) made a synthesis of the two Reason is absolute Nature is incarnate reason History is reason in its progressive unfolding in man An individual becomes rational only as he absorbs into himself the content of rationality in nature and in social institutions For an absolute reason is not, like the reason of rationalism, purely formal and empty; as absolute it must include all content within itself Thus the real proble individual freedom so that some measure of social order and concord h developing individual convictions in accord with the universal law found in the organization of the state as objective Reason While this philosophy is usually terht better be termed, for educational purposes at least, institutional idealism (See ante, p 59) It idealized historical institutions by conceiving them as incarnations of an immanent absolute mind There can be no doubt that this philosophy was a powerful influence in rescuing philosophy in the beginning of the nineteenth century from the isolated individualisland It served also to anization of the state more constructively interested in matters of public concern It left less to chance, less to s of private self-interest It brought intelligence to bear upon the conduct of affairs; it accentuated the need of nationally organized education in the interests of the corporate state It sanctioned and promoted freedom of inquiry in all technical details of natural and historical phenomena But in all ultimate moral matters, it tended to reinstate the principle of authority It anization more than did any of the types of philosophy previously mentioned, but it made no provision for free experianization Political deht of individual desire and purpose to take part in readapting even the fundan to it

3 Educational Equivalents It is not necessary to consider in detail the educational counterparts of the various defects found in these various types of philosophy It suffices to say that in general the school has been the institution which exhibited with greatest clearness the assumed antithesis between purely individualisticand social action, and between freedom and social control The antithesis is reflected in the absence of a social at, and the consequent separation, in the conduct of the school, between overnht opportunity afforded individual variations When learning is a phase of active undertakings which involve e, social control enters into the very process of learning When the social factor is absent, learning beco over of some presented material into a purely individual consciousness, and there is no inherent reason why it should give a more socialized direction to mental and emotional disposition There is tendency on the part of both the upholders and the opponents of freedom in school to identify it with absence of social direction, or, sometimes, with merely physical unconstraint of movement But the essence of the demand for freedom is the need of conditions which will enable an individual to roup interest, and to partake of its activities in such ways that social guidance shall be a matter of his own mental attitude, and not a mere authoritative dictation of his acts Because what is often called discipline and ”government” has to do with the external side of conduct alone, a si is attached, by reaction, to freedonifies the quality of mind expressed in action, the supposed opposition between them falls away Freedo-which is personal-in learning:-it means intellectual initiative, independence in observation, judicious invention, foresight of consequences, and ingenuity of adaptation to them

But because these are the mental phase of behavior, the needed play of individuality-or freedom-cannot be separated from opportunity for free play of physical movements Enforced physical quietudethe observations needed to define it, and to perforested Much has been said about the importance of ”self-activity” in education, but the conception has too frequently been restricted to so the free use of sensory andfro the implications of a probleht-out activity, may need little perceptible overt activity But the whole cycle of self-activity deation and experi what can be done with materials and appliances And this is incompatible with closely restricted physical activity Individual activity has so a pupil to work by hi to what any one else is doing is truly required to secure calrown persons, require a judicious a let alone But the time, place, and amount of such separate work is a matter of detail, not of principle There is no inherent opposition betorking with others and working as an individual On the contrary, certain capacities of an individual are not brought out except under the sti with others That a child roup activities in order to be free and let his individuality develop, is a notion which measures individuality by spatial distance andof it

Individuality as a factor to be respected in education has a doubleIn the first place, one is mentally an individual only as he has his own purpose and proble The phrase ”think for one's self” is a pleonas Only by a pupil's own observations, reflections, fraestions can what he already knows be a is as estion of food In the second place, there are variations of point of view, of appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from person to person When these variations are suppressed in the alleged interests of uniforle mold of method of study and recitation, inality is gradually destroyed, confidence in one's own quality of mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to the opinion of others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild The haroverned by custo in school and those relied upon outside the school is greater That systean when individuals were allowed, and then encouraged, to utilize their own peculiarities of response to subject matter, no one will deny If it is said in objection, that pupils in school are not capable of any such originality, and hence s already known by the better inforinality of attitude which is equivalent to the unforced response of one's own individuality, not with originality as inal discoveries of just the same facts and principles as are embodied in the sciences of nature andmay take place under such conditions that froenuine discovery While immature students will not make discoveries from the standpoint of advanced students, they enuine learning (ii) In the nor acquainted with subjectpupils react in unexpected ways There is so fully anticipated by even the o at the topic, and in the particular ways in which things strike them Too often all this is brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are deliberately held to rehearsing material in the exact form in which the older person conceives it The result is that what is instinctively original in individuality, that which oes unused and undirected Teaching then ceases to be an educative process for the teacher Attechnique; he does not get new points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual co tend to become conventional and mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides therein implied

As round of familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or less random physical experimentation is reduced Activity is defined or specialized in certain channels To the eyes of others, the student may be in a position of coies are confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes and vocal organs But because this attitude is evidence of intense mental concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not follow that it should be set up as a model for students who still have to find their intellectual way about And even with the adult, it does not cover the whole circuit of y It thened with increasedbetween an earlier period of anic action and a later ti to use what has been apprehended

When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of ed to insist upon the need of obvious, or external, freedoh to identify the freedo by which what a person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined If attention is centered upon the conditions which have to be met in order to secure a situation favorable to effective thinking, freedom will take care of itself The individual who has a question which being really a question to hierness for information that will help him cope with it, and who has at command an equipment which will permit these interests to take effect, is intellectually free Whatever initiative and iinative vision he possesses will be called into play and control his impulses and habits His own purposes will direct his actions Otherwise, his sees and reproductions, will partake of intellectual servility Such a condition of intellectual subjection is needed for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders from the few set in authority It is not adapted to a society which intends to be democratic

Summary True individualisrip

of the authority of custom and traditions as standards of belief Aside froht, it is a comparatively modern manifestation Not but that there have always been individual diversities, but that a society dominated by conservative custom represses them or at least does not utilize them and promote them For various reasons, however, the new individualis develop previously accepted beliefs, but as an assertion that each individual'selse In the theoretical phase of philosophy, this produced the episteical problenitive relationshi+p of the individual to the world In its practical phase, it generated the problem of the possibility of a purely individual consciousness acting on behalf of general or social interests,-the problem of social direction While the philosophies which have been elaborated to deal with these questions have not affected education directly, the assu them have found expression in the separation frequently overnment and between freedo freedonates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc A society based on custom will utilize individual variations only up to a lie; uniforressive society counts individual variations as precious since it finds in therowth Hence a democratic society must, in consistency with its ideal, allow for intellectual freedoifts and interests in its educational measures

Chapter Twenty-Three: Vocational Aspects of Education

1 The Meaning of Vocation At the present time the conflict of philosophic theories focuses in discussion of the proper place and function of vocational factors in education The bald statenificant differences in fundamental philosophical conceptions find their chief issue in connection with this point ap between the reeneral terms in which philosophic ideas are formulated and the practical and concrete details of vocational education But athe oppositions in education of labor and leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the world, will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and cultural education Traditionally, liberal culture has been linked to the notions of leisure, purely conte the active use of bodily organs Culture has also tended, latterly, to be associated with a purely private refinement, a cultivation of certain states and attitudes of consciousness, separate from either social direction or service It has been an escape from the former, and a solace for the necessity of the latter

So deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole subject of vocational education, that it is necessary to define theof vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the impression that an education which centers about it is narrowly practical, if notbut such a direction of life activities as renders thenificant to a person, because of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates The opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture, but aimlessness, capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in experience, on the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence upon the others, on the social side Occupation is a concrete term for continuity It includes the development of artistic capacity of any kind, of special scientific ability, of effective citizenshi+p, as well as professional and business occupations, to say nothing of ainful pursuits

We must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to the occupations where iible commodities are produced, but also the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one and only one to each person Such restricted specialis could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an eye to only one line of activity In the first place, each individual has of necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be intelligently effective; and in the second place any one occupation loses itsin the degree in which it is isolated fro else, and in so far as one approximates that condition, he is so ; he is a kind of monstrosity He must, at some period of his life, be a member of a family; he must have friends and companions; he must either support himself or be supported by others, and thus he has a business career He is a anized political unit, and so on We naturally nauishes him, rather than from those which he has in common with all others But we should not allow ourselves to be so subject to words as to ignore and virtually deny his other callings when it comes to a consideration of the vocational phases of education

(ii) As a man's vocation as artist is but the eated vocational activities, so his efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is deters A person must have experience, he must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical accomplishment He cannot find the subject matter of his artistic activity within his art; this must be an expression of what he suffers and enjoys in other relationshi+ps-a thing which depends in turn upon the alertness and sympathy of his interests What is true of an artist is true of any other special calling There is doubtless-in general accord with the principle of habit-a tendency for every distinctive vocation to beco in its specialized aspect This means emphasis upon skill or technicalHence it is not the business of education to foster this tendency, but rather to safeguard against it, so that the scientific inquirer shall not be ue, the clergyman merely one ears the cloth, and so on

2 The Place of Vocational Ai in mind the varied and connected content of the vocation, and the broad background upon which a particular calling is projected, we shall now consider education for the more distinctive activity of an individual

1 An occupation is the only thing which balances the distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness Nothing is ic than failure to discover one's true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circuht occupation means simply that the aptitudes of a person are in adequate play, working with the minimum of friction and the maximum of satisfaction With reference to other nifies, of course, that they are getting the best service the person can render It is generally believed, for example, that slave labor was ultimately wasteful even from the purely economic point of view-that there was not sufficient stiies of slaves, and that there was consequent wastage Moreover, since slaves were confined to certain prescribed callings, much talent must have remained unavailable to the community, and hence there was a dead loss Slavery only illustrates on an obvious scale what happens in soree whenever an individual does not find himself in his work And he cannot completely find himself when vocations are looked upon with contempt, and a conventional ideal of a culture which is essentially the same for all is maintained Plato (ante, p 88) laid down the fundamental principle of a philosophy of education when he asserted that it was the business of education to discover what each person is good for, and to train him to mastery of that mode of excellence, because such development would also secure the fulfillment of social needs in the most harmonious way His error was not in qualitative principle, but in his limited conception of the scope of vocations socially needed; a limitation of vision which reacted to obscure his perception of the infinite variety of capacities found in different individuals

2 An occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose Education through occupations consequently co than any other method It calls instincts and habits into play; it is a foe to passive receptivity It has an end in view; results are to be accoht; it demands that an idea of an end be steadily maintained, so that activity cannot be either routine or capricious Since thefroenuity are required at each stage to overcome obstacles and to discover and readapt means of execution In short, an occupation, pursued under conditions where the realization of the activity rather than merely the external product is the aim, fulfills the requirements which were laid down earlier in connection with the discussion of ai (See Chapters VIII, X, XII) A calling is also of necessity an organizing principle for inforrowth It provides an axis which runs through an immense diversity of detail; it causes different experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with one another The lawyer, the physician, the laboratory investigator in some branch of chemistry, the parent, the citizen interested in his own locality, has a constant working stimulus to note and relate whatever has to do with his concern He unconsciously, from the motivation of his occupation, reaches out for all relevant infornet to attract and as glue to hold Such organization of knowledge is vital, because it has reference to needs; it is so expressed and readjusted in action that it never becoement of facts, which is consciously worked out for purely abstract ends, can ever compare in solidity or effectiveness with that knit under the stress of an occupation; in comparison the former sort is formal, superficial, and cold

3 The only adequate training for occupations is training through occupations The principle stated early in this book (see Chapter VI) that the educative process is its own end, and that the only sufficient preparation for later responsibilities co the most of immediately present life, applies in full force to the vocational phases of education The do-intellectual and rowth In childhood and youth, with their relative freedom from economic stress, this fact is naked and unconcealed To predetermine some future occupation for which education is to be a strict preparation is to injure the possibilities of present development and thereby to reduce the adequacy of preparation for a future right employment To repeat the principle we have had occasion to appeal to so often, such training may develop asure to do so, since it may develop distaste, aversion, and carelessness), but it will be at the expense of those qualities of alert observation and coherent and ingenious planning whichIn an autocratically ed society, it is often a conscious object to prevent the develop and ordering, the others follow directions and are deliberately confined to narrow and prescribed channels of endeavor However e and profit of a class, it is evident that it limits the development of the subject class; hardens and confines the opportunities for learning through experience of the master class, and in both ways hampers the life of the society as a whole (See ante, p 260) The only alternative is that all the earlier preparation for vocations be indirect rather than direct; na in those active occupations which are indicated by the needs and interests of the pupil at the time Only in this way can there be on the part of the educator and of the one educated a genuine discovery of personal aptitudes so that the proper choice of a specialized pursuit in later life may be indicated Moreover, the discovery of capacity and aptitude will be a constant process as long as growth continues It is a conventional and arbitrary viehich assumes that discovery of the work to be chosen for adult life is made once for all at some particular date One has discovered in his which have to do with engineering and has decided toAt most, this only blocks out in outline the field in which further growth is to be directed It is a sort of rough sketch for use in direction of further activities It is the discovery of a profession in the sense in which Columbus discovered America when he touched its shores Future explorations of an indefinitely more detailed and extensive sort reuidance as so which leads up to a definitive, irretrievable, and complete choice, both education and the chosen vocation are likely to be rigid, ha chosen will be such as to leave the person concerned in a perence of others who have a calling which permits es of languagea flexible attitude of readjust, it is such in effect If even adults have to be on the lookout to see that their calling does not shut down on them and fossilize them, educators must certainly be careful that the vocational preparation of youth is such as to engage theanization of aiers In the past, education has been much more vocational in fact than in name (i) The education of the masses was distinctly utilitarian It was called apprenticeshi+p rather than education, or else just learning from experience The schools devoted theo through the for were co part in some special line of work, under the direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education The two supplemented each other; the school work in its narrow and formal character was asas that explicitly so termed

(ii) To a considerable extent, the education of the dominant classes was essentially vocational-it only happened that their pursuits of ruling and of enjoying were not called professions For only those things were named vocations or e for a reward in keep, or its co of personal services to specific persons For a long tieon and physician ranked almost with that of the valet or barber-partly because it had so much to do with the body, and partly because it involved rendering direct service for pay to soo behind words, the business of directing social concerns, whether politically or econo as anything else; and where education has not been coher schools in the past have been upon the whole calculated to give preparation for this business Moreover, display, the adornment of person, the kind of social comp