Representing both the necessities of life and the adornments with
which the necessities have been clothed, they tap instincts at a
deep level; they are saturated with facts and principles having a
social quality.
To charge that the various activities of gardening, weaving,
construction in wood, manipulation of metals, cooking, etc.,
which carry over these fundamental human concerns into school
resources, have a merely bread and butter value is to miss their
point. If the mass of mankind has usually found in its
industrial occupations nothing but evils which had to be endured
for the sake of maintaining existence, the fault is not in the
occupations, but in the conditions under which they are carried
on. The continually increasing importance of economic factors in
contemporary life makes it the more needed that education should
reveal their scientific content and their social value. For in
schools, occupations are not carried on for pecuniary gain but
for their own content. Freed from extraneous associations and
from the pressure of wage-earning, they supply modes of
experience which are intrinsically valuable; they are truly
liberalizing in quality.
Gardening, for example, need not be taught either for the sake of
preparing future gardeners, or as an agreeable way of passing
time. It affords an avenue of approach to knowledge of the place
farming and horticulture have had in the history of the race and
which they occupy in present social organization.
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