This state of affairs explains many things in our historic
educational traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims
manifested in different portions of the school system; the
narrowly utilitarian character of most elementary education, and
the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character of most higher
education. It accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual
matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and
professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that
liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an education
which shall count in the vocations of life. But it also helps
define the peculiar problem of present education. The school
cannot immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social
conditions. But it should contribute through the type of
intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the
improvement of those conditions. And just here the true
conceptions of interest and discipline are full of significance.
Persons whose interests have been enlarged and intelligence
trained by dealing with things and facts in active occupations
having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those most
likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof
knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice.
To organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be
fully enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the
doing requires observation, the acquisition of information, and
the use of a constructive imagination, is what most needs to be
done to improve social conditions.
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