While training for the profession of learning is regarded as the type
of culture, or a liberal education, the training of a mechanic, a
musician, a lawyer, a doctor, a farmer, a merchant, or a railroad manager
is regarded as purely technical and professional. The result is that
which we see about us everywhere—the division into “cultured” people
and “workers,” the separation of theory and practice. Hardly 1 per cent
of the entire school population ever attains to what we call higher
education; only 5 per cent to the grade of our high school; while much
more than half leave on or before the completion of the fifth year of the
elementary grade. The simple facts of the case are that in the great
majority of human beings the distinctively intellectual interest is not
dominant. They have the so-called practical impulse and disposition.
In many of those in whom by nature intellectual interest is strong,
social conditions prevent its adequate realization. Consequently by far
the larger number of pupils leave school as soon as they have acquired
the rudiments of learning, as soon as they have enough of the symbols
of reading, writing, and calculating to be of practical use to them in
getting a living. While our educational leaders are talking of culture,
the development of personality, etc., as the end and aim of education,
the great majority of those who pass under the tuition of the school
regard it only as a narrowly practical tool with which to get bread and
butter enough to eke out a restricted life. If we were to conceive our
educational end and aim in a less exclusive way, if we were to introduce
into educational processes the activities which appeal to those whose
dominant interest is to do and to make, we should find the hold of the
school upon its members to be more vital, more prolonged, containing more
of culture.
[Illustration: CHILD’S DRAWING OF A FOREST]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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