The third evil is that even the most scientific matter, arranged in
most logical fashion, loses this quality, when presented in external,
ready-made fashion, by the time it gets to the child. It has to undergo
some modification in order to shut out some phases too hard to grasp,
and to reduce some of the attendant difficulties. What happens? Those
things which are most significant to the scientific man, and most
valuable in the logic of actual inquiry and classification, drop out.
The really thought-provoking character is obscured, and the organizing
function disappears. Or, as we commonly say, the child's reasoning
powers, the faculty of abstraction and generalization, are not
adequately developed. So the subject-matter is evacuated of its logical
value, and, though it is what it is only from the logical standpoint, is
presented as stuff only for "memory." This is the contradiction: the
child gets the advantage neither of the adult logical formulation, nor
of his own native competencies of apprehension and response. Hence
the logic of the child is hampered and mortified, and we are almost
fortunate if he does not get actual non-science, flat and common-place
residua of what was gaining scientific vitality a generation or two
ago--degenerate reminiscence of what someone else once formulated on the
basis of the experience that some further person had, once upon a time,
experienced.
The train of evils does not cease. It is all too common for opposed
erroneous theories to play straight into each other's hands.
Psychological considerations may be slurred or shoved one side; they
cannot be crowded out. Put out of the door, they come back through the
window. Somehow and somewhere motive must be appealed to, connection
must be established between the mind and its material. There is no
question of getting along without this bond of connection; the only
question is whether it be such as grows out of the material itself in
relation to the mind, or be imported and hitched on from some outside
source. If the subject-matter of the lessons be such as to have an
appropriate place within the expanding consciousness of the child, if it
grows out of his own past doings, thinkings, and sufferings, and grows
into application in further achievements and receptivities, then no
device or trick of method has to be resorted to in order to enlist
"interest." The psychologized _is_ of interest--that is, it is placed in
the whole of conscious life so that it shares the worth of that life.
But the externally presented material, conceived and generated in
standpoints and attitudes remote from the child, and developed in
motives alien to him, has no such place of its own. Hence the recourse
to adventitious leverage to push it in, to factitious drill to drive it
in, to artificial bribe to lure it in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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