To keep the process alive, to
keep it alive in ways which make it easier to keep it alive in
the future, is the function of educational subject matter. But
an individual can live only in the present. The present is not
just something which comes after the past; much less something
produced by it. It is what life is in leaving the past behind
it. The study of past products will not help us understand the
present, because the present is not due to the products, but to
the life of which they were the products. A knowledge of the
past and its heritage is of great significance when it enters
into the present, but not otherwise. And the mistake of making
the records and remains of the past the main material of
education is that it cuts the vital connection of present and
past, and tends to make the past a rival of the present and the
present a more or less futile imitation of the past. Under such
circumstances, culture becomes an ornament and solace; a refuge
and an asylum. Men escape from the crudities of the present to
live in its imagined refinements, instead of using what the past
offers as an agency for ripening these crudities. The present,
in short, generates the problems which lead us to search the past
for suggestion, and which supplies meaning to what we find when
we search. The past is the past precisely because it does not
include what is characteristic in the present. The moving
present includes the past on condition that it uses the past to
direct its own movement.
Pages:
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136