The educative value of manual
activities and of laboratory exercises, as well as of play,
depends upon the extent in which they aid in bringing about a
sensing of the meaning of what is going on. In effect, if not in
name, they are dramatizations. Their utilitarian value in
forming habits of skill to be used for tangible results is
important, but not when isolated from the appreciative side.
Were it not for the accompanying play of imagination, there would
be no road from a direct activity to representative knowledge;
for it is by imagination that symbols are translated over into a
direct meaning and integrated with a narrower activity so as to
expand and enrich it. When the representative creative
imagination is made merely literary and mythological, symbols are
rendered mere means of directing physical reactions of the organs
of speech.
3. In the account previously given nothing was explicitly said
about the place of literature and the fine arts in the course of
study. The omission at that point was intentional. At the
outset, there is no sharp demarcation of useful, or industrial,
arts and fine arts. The activities mentioned in Chapter XV
contain within themselves the factors later discriminated into
fine and useful arts. As engaging the emotions and the
imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts
their quality. As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of
tools to materials with constantly increasing perfection, they
involve the element of technique indispensable to artistic
production.
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