It
emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment upon the
mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves a
personal sharing in common experiences. It exaggerates beyond
reason the possibilities of consciously formulated and used
methods, and underestimates the role of vital, unconscious,
attitudes. It insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly
over the operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It
takes, in brief, everything educational into account save its
essence, -- vital energy seeking opportunity for effective
exercise. All education forms character, mental and moral, but
formation consists in the selection and coordination of native
activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the
social environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a
formation of native activities, but it takes place through them.
It is a process of reconstruction, reorganization.
2. Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar
combination of the ideas of development and formation from
without has given rise to the recapitulation theory of education,
biological and cultural. The individual develops, but his proper
development consists in repeating in orderly stages the past
evolution of animal life and human history. The former
recapitulation occurs physiologically; the latter should be made
to occur by means of education. The alleged biological truth
that the individual in his growth from the simple embryo to
maturity repeats the history of the evolution of animal life in
the progress of forms from the simplest to the most complex (or
expressed technically, that ontogenesis parallels phylogenesis)
does not concern us, save as it is supposed to afford scientific
foundation for cultural recapitulation of the past.
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