No transmutation takes
place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in meaning by getting
its connections; what is studied is not animated and made real by
entering into immediate activity. Ordinary experience is not
even left as it was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses
something of its mobility and sensitiveness to suggestions. It
is weighed down and pushed into a corner by a load of
unassimilated information. It parts with its flexible
responsiveness and alert eagerness for additional meaning. Mere
amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life
makes mind wooden; elasticity disappears.
Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out
beyond its immediate self. It does not passively wait for
information to be bestowed which will increase its meaning; it
seeks it out. Curiosity is not an accidental isolated
possession; it is a necessary consequence of the fact that an
experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all kinds of
connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency to
make these conditions perceptible. It is the business of
educators to supply an environment so that this reaching out of
an experience may be fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously
active. Within a certain kind of environment, an activity may be
checked so that the only meaning which accrues is of its direct
and tangible isolated outcome. One may cook, or hammer, or walk,
and the resulting consequences may not take the mind any farther
than the consequences of cooking, hammering, and walking in the
literal -- or physical -- sense.
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