The past is a great resource for the
imagination; it adds a new dimension to life, but OD condition
that it be seen as the past of the present, and not as another
and disconnected world. The principle which makes little of the
present act of living and operation of growing, the only thing
always present, naturally looks to the past because the future
goal which it sets up is remote and empty. But having turned its
back upon the present, it has no way of returning to it laden
with the spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive
to the needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the
liveliest of motives for interest in the background of the
present, and will never have to hunt for a way back because it
will never have lost connection.
3. Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas
both of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the
formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the
cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the
conception that education is a constant reorganizing or
reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an immediate
end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that
end -- the direct transformation of the quality of experience.
Infancy, youth, adult life, -- all stand on the same educative
level in the sense that what is really learned at any and every
stage of experience constitutes the value of that experience, and
in the sense that it is the chief business of life at every point
to make living thus contribute to an enrichment of its own
perceptible meaning.
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