2. The interest in results, in the successful carrying on of an
activity, should be gradually transferred to study of objects--their
properties, consequences, structures, causes, and effects. The adult
when at work in his life calling is rarely free to devote time or
energy--beyond the necessities of his immediate action--to the study of
what he deals with. (_Ante_, p. 43.) The educative activities of
childhood should be so arranged that direct interest in the activity and
its outcome create a demand for attention to matters that have a more
and more _indirect and remote_ connection with the original activity.
The direct interest in carpentering or shop work should yield
organically and gradually an interest in geometric and mechanical
problems. The interest in cooking should grow into an interest in
chemical experimentation and in the physiology and hygiene of bodily
growth. The making of pictures should pass to an interest in the
technique of representation and the æsthetics of appreciation, and so
on. This development is what the term _go_ signifies in the maxim "_go_
from the concrete to the abstract"; it represents the dynamic and truly
educative factor of the process.
[Sidenote: Development of delight in the activity of thinking]
3. The outcome, the _abstract_ to which education is to proceed, is an
interest in intellectual matters for their own sake, a delight in
thinking for the sake of thinking. It is an old story that acts and
processes which at the outset are incidental to something else develop
and maintain an absorbing value of their own. So it is with thinking and
with knowledge; at first incidental to results and adjustments beyond
themselves, they attract more and more attention to themselves till they
become ends, not means. Children engage, unconstrainedly and
continually, in reflective inspection and testing for the sake of what
they are interested in doing successfully. Habits of thinking thus
generated may increase in volume and extent till they become of
importance on their own account.
[Sidenote: Examples of the transition]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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