It
consists of the facts observed, recalled, read, and talked about,
and the ideas suggested, in course of a development of a
situation having a purpose. This statement needs to be rendered
more specific by connecting it with the materials of school
instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. What is
the significance of our definition in application to reading,
writing, mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing,
physics, chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on?
Let us recur to two of the points made earlier in our discussion.
The educator's part in the enterprise of education is to furnish
the environment which stimulates responses and directs the
learner's course. In last analysis, all that the educator can do
is modify stimuli so that response will as surely as is possible
result in the formation of desirable intellectual and emotional
dispositions. Obviously studies or the subject matter of the
curriculum have intimately to do with this business of supplying
an environment. The other point is the necessity of a social
environment to give meaning to habits formed. In what we have
termed informal education, subject matter is carried directly in
the matrix of social intercourse. It is what the persons with
whom an individual associates do and say. This fact gives a clew
to the understanding of the subject matter of formal or
deliberate instruction. A connecting link is found in the
stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which accompany the
doings and rites of a primitive social group.
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