On the biological side we have simply the fact
that any infant starts with precisely the assortment of impulsive
activities with which he does start, they being blind, and many
of them conflicting with one another, casual, sporadic, and
unadapted to their immediate environment. The other point is
that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products of past
history so far as they are of help for the future. Since they
represent the results of prior experience, their value for future
experience may, of course, be indefinitely great. Literatures
produced in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and
use of them, a part of the present environment of individuals;
but there is an enormous difference between availing ourselves of
them as present resources and taking them as standards and
patterns in their retrospective character.
(1) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through
misuse of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity
means that past life has somehow predetermined the main traits of
an individual, and that they are so fixed that little serious
change can be introduced into them. Thus taken, the influence of
heredity is opposed to that of the environment, and the efficacy
of the latter belittled. But for educational purposes heredity
means neither more nor less than the original endowment of an
individual. Education must take the being as he is; that a
particular individual has just such and such an equipment of
native activities is a basic fact.
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